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From whence will salvation come?
André Ghouraqui

 

Six years ago, from April 24 to 27, an international congress on "The Bible and Black Africa" was held in Jerusalem at the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. Speakers and scholars made it possible for us to study, under this aspect, the problems raised by Jewish-Christian relations aand by that section of the Third World whose importance for the future of civilization is continually growing.

An important newspaper advertized our meetings under the title "Africans seek their identity in the Bible". Indeed, thirty-five African intellectuals —priests, professors and pastors — had come to Jerusalem from seventeen African countries to exchange ideas and experiences on the subject of this dramatic quest for our common identity.

Common search for identity

A determined search for authenticity characterized each of our interventions: African authenticity, Christian authenticity, Israeli authenticity. Our enterprise was the more dangerous in that we were each seeking our own identity, ow original authenticity.

Let us start with Israel, then twenty-five years old. The State consisted of Jews from 102 countries, half of which were from the Third World, the other half from industrialized societies. Where then was the real identity of the New Israel? Was it in the East, the land from which it originated, or in the West whence came the leaders, ideas and techniques which made possible the birth and evolution of the State?

Christianity also was experiencing the same crisis of identity: in the West it was undergoing the effects of the great technical revolutions of our time and in the East it was once again becoming aware of itshistorical roots. The Catholic Church was taking cognizance of the consequences of the Second Vatican Council, notably the declaration Nostra Aetate. Church representatives confronted by the Africans in search of their own particular values were unanimous in recognizing the fact that the Christianity which had been brought to Africa was western and even colonialist in character. Too often Africans on becoming Christians had been automatically obliged to renounce their ancestral heritage. One of the Catholic speakers stressed the fact that to become a Christian meant to become westernized, to accept oneself as a "black white". Even before the advent of the era of independence for African countries there could be discerned on the African continent (where it is well-known that Islam, faithful to its eastern origins, is making progress) the emergence of schismatic churches, syncretist sects, messianic movements, all symptoms that reveal the crisis of this changing world, its need to rediscover its authentic values, to find its true identity.

Political decolonization was entering on its second decade: the Jerusalem congress was characterized by a passionate search on the part of all its participants, Africans, Christians and Jews from the East and from the West, for new means of attaining spiritual and cultural decolonization.

Turning to biblical sources

At the source of the biblical world, the place from which Judaism, Christianity, and — less directly —Islam had sprung, the representatives of these religions were assembled on the threshold of the atomic age to make an examination of conscience that could, without exaggeration, condition the future of humanity. The idea of the Jerusalem meeting had come from Father Englebert Mueng of the Cameroons, then secretary general of the movement of African Christian Intellectuals (M.I.CA.); it was sponsored by the African Cultural Society. President Senghor of Senegal wished to be personally represented at the meetings, which were held on the campus of the University of Jerusalem under the aegis of the Israel Interfaith Committee.

What then could be Jerusalem's answer to the crisis of identity common today to all religions and forms of spirituality, to all nations, all civilizations, perhaps also to each individual person?

His Eminence Cardinal Zoungrana who closed the congress strongly underlined "the extent to which Negritude, inasmuch as it is the common substratum of the Blacks, ... makes it possible to approach the Bible with new eyes and to look upon it as a leaven of unity rather than one of division.

It was clear that all the Africans, Europeans and Israelis gathered together in Jerusalem shared a common desire for a fresh look on the Bible. k was a desire for real "die-logue", for a journey together towards the logos, the word of truth which inspired us and invited us to advance together. This word became a source of light and life for us, the living bread offered to our hunger and our thirst. It enabled us to go beyond our limitations, religious, confessional, racial and national, to find ourselves in our state of original nakedness, as human beings who had come together to question the Book of Books, asking it to unveil the secret of our deepest identity.

We found the link binding us all together from different horizons was, paradoxically, a series of books written two or three thousand years ago. Its message, starting from Jerusalem, re-echoed in the place where we were assembled to remind us of its highest exigencies: justice and love.

Roots of African!, Jewish affinity

What were the historical and spiritual foundations that made this very deep contact between Africa and Israel possible? What are the perspectives opened by the resurgence of the State of Israel at the crossroads where Africa and Asia meet the West? What can the meeting contribute to the well-being and perhaps the salvation of humanity?

These questions asked by the majority of the speakers at the Jerusalem congress have, without doubt, become still more acute during the last six years. Meanwhile the war of October 1973 has accelerated the deterioration of peace both in the Middle East and in the world.

Since President Sadat's dramatic visit to Jerusalem, men of good will throughout the world have been seeking reasons for hope. I think that the strong links between Israel and the Third World, Africa in particular, are not foreign to our search for the ultimate aims of humanity and to our hope of witnessing the birth of a new man, or a new earth under the skies.

It was the task of Father Englebert Mueng to stress the important place held by Black Africa in the Bible. He did this by analyzing the texts that allude to Cush and to the Cushim, "inventors of civilization'. He evoked some of the great black personalities of the Bible; Nimrod, son of Cush, king of Babel, builder of Nineveh, the mighty hunter; the black wife of Moses; Ebed-melech, the black servant of King Zedekiah who saved the prophet Jeremiah; the Shulamite of the Song of Songs who exclaims "I am very dark but comely, 0 daughter of Jerusalem'; the queen of Sheba who came to visit King Solomon.

Evidence of Jewish insertion in Africa

The establishment of Phoenician banks in North Africa in the ninth century B.C.E. is certainly an important event in the history of African civilization. For seven centuries, from 813 (year of the foundation of Carthage) to 143 B.C.E., North Africa and — as is proved by its canal — many districts of Black Africa were in direct contact with the Semitic world. These contacts were facilitated by the Punic language which as we know has much in common with Hebrew; they were facilitated also by religion, culture and technology. The Semitization of a significant part of ancient Africa was deep and lasting. During the seven centuries of Carthaginian domination the Punic language was current in North Africa to such an extent that in the fourth century, six centuries after the fall of Carthage, St. Augustine, when preaching the gospel to the Berbers, was obliged to have a Punic-speaking interpreter.

It is certain that the Phoenicians drew their cousins the Hebrews into their colonial enterprises and that together they contributed to the propagation of the use of iron and to the employment of the camel as a means of transport. These two technical revolutions renewed the structures of African civilization and opened it up to the great currents of thought of the Mediterranean world.

It is noteworthy that almost all the Jewish settlements in Africa are situated on the great caravan routes which cross the continent from east to west, from north to south. In Africa the Jewish communities found a safe refuge against persecution by the Roman Empire. After having utterly destroyed the Kingdom of Judah, the Romans believed they had succeeded in erasing from the map Israel, the Jewish people, and every trace of Hebrew culture, the Bible included. Cities such as Carthage, Kairouan, Paert, Tlemcen, Fez, Sijilmassa, Timbuktu were furrows in which the religions and trends of thought inspired by the Bible took root and flowered. North Africa was very largely Judaized before it was Christianized, then Islamized.' From the eighth century to the sixteenth, Sijilmassa, supported by the strong Jewish communities of Tuat, took an important economic and cultural part in the penetration and deepening of biblical thought in Africa.

The regions of the Sous, Draa, Tafilalet and Tuat with their Jewish communities of high biblical culture were, for the Semitic East, doors leading onto western Sudan. Here it was not only merchandise and techniques that crossed the area but also ideas. The Arab historian Idrisi has left interesting documents on the penetration of Judaism into Black Africa during the time of the Almoravides. This penetration followed the commercial routes which went from the Maghreb to the "golden land-, that is to say, across Sudanese Mauritania probably as far as Mali. Idrisi's Description of Africa and Spain dates from the twelfth century.' The Muslim author says that in Mali, in the land of Kamnuria, he heard men say that they were Jews. This fact is particularly important because the towns of which he speaks here, Kadnuri and Madira, are in western Sudan near the great gold-mining region of Mali, -the great golden mountains of Quartass d'Enonr.

The chief area of Jewish expansion in Black Africa was in Taillan or Gangarra. The presence of Jews would have entailed a religious expansion probably through a strong political power. This thesis put forward by some historians would give coherence to isolated facts and consistently popular traditions such as: the existence of a Jewish kingdom in Africa; the narratives of Eldad the Danite; the Hebrew remains in Mauritanian Adrar; the traces in the Gourara of Jews who had formed themselves into bands of nomadic warriors; the existence of blacks Judaized in the wake of General Abu Baker ben Omar charged by the Almoravides to quell a revolt in the Sudan in the eleventh century; and the Baffors, Judaized blacks of Mauritania afterwards dispersed on both banks of the Lower Senegal where according to Idrisi they took up agriculture and fishing.

To the problems raised by the Jewish influence on the Baffors it would be fitting to add the more hypothetical and complex questions relating to the Scbebaores mentioned by Charles Monteil. Jews were also assimilated into the Arab, Berber and Tuareg populations. Among these were the Dagoutoun, Jewish nomads whose existence in the Sahara at the end of the last century is mentioned by Mardochee Seror.

In the eighteenth century Mongopark mentions the existence of Hebrew books in the heart of the Mande region. This fact is less significant than are the problems raised by the situation of the ironworkers of western Sudan. The Qur'an had already stressed the part played by the Hebrews in the discovery and promotion of forging techniques:

It was We Who taught him [David] The making of coats of mail
For your benefit, to guard
You from each other's violence:
Will ye then be grateful? (Surah XX.80).

And again:
We bestowed Grace aforetime On David ...
...We made
The iron soft for him;
(Commanding), "Make thou Coats of mail, balancing well The rings of chain armour ... (Surah XXXIV.10-11).4

Note that in North Africa iron crafts were in the hands of Jewish smiths. According to Sudanese tradition these artisans were descended from the patriarch Abraham: Nabu Nabihama. These Jewish smiths were thought to have crossed Egypt to the Sudan where they made farm implements and arms. The Chronicle of the Senegalese Futa, according to the traditions of the Futa 'anon, states that the men of the Diagode, Semites, introduced iron mining (and probably copper mining) techniques into Senegal. It is noteworthy that the smith's trade is despised by the Berbers and by the Tuaregs. The Oliminden Tuaregs even today avoid pronouncing the word "smith" for fear of the evil eye. When they speak of a smith they say "the other".5

Here again it is possible to presume a foreign origin, probably Jewish, for these imported techniques, thus confirming both the verses of the Qur'an and recent archeological discoveries associating King David and his people, the Jews, with the diffusion of ironwork techniques. It is less surprising to observe that other African traditions attribute Jewish origins to singers.

One last fact: the Taarikh el Fatah mentions a Jewish colony of the sixteenth century founded at Fassi on the Niger where it had established a market-garden business to supply the caravans with fresh vegetables. The tradition of technical cooperation between Black Africa and Israel (whose fruits have been many since the creation of the State of Israel) go back, as we see, to a far distant past which should guarantee a great future.

Looking to the future

The sources at present available allow us to conclude that the biblical and Jewish penetration of Africa is of ancient origin, as is the presence of Negritude in the Bible itself.` Before Islam, and probably even before the birth of Christianity, Hebrew and biblical thought transmitted by the Judeans had penetrated into vast regions of Africa, into Egypt, Lyhia (visited by Rabbi Akiba during the first part of the second century), the Maghreb, western Sudan, Mali, Ethiopia, Asia, Arabia and different regions of the Middle East.

Scientific research should be directed before all else to the publication of the abundant oral and written sources, so far unpublished. They would make it possible to determine those regions of Africa to which the monotheistic religions had spread, as also the sources — biblical, Hebrew, Jewish or evangelical, New Testament, Christian, qur'anic and hadithic —of the faith, culture and traditions with which they have inspired the African in his approach to the mystery of the sacred.

Cardinal Zoungrana has suggested the foundation in Jerusalem of a Biblical Institute for Africa. This project should be realized because it would be beneficial for Africa, for Christianity, for the Third World in general and for Israel itself. Dr. Doudou Gueye strongly affirmed in Jerusalem that "the intermediary body that constitutes western religious thought is a real obstacle to the encounter between Negritude and the Bible"?

This idea could be pursued and applied in a general way to the peoples of Asia and of Africa who have been deprived of the living streams of biblical revelation by the rigid framework of Greco-Latin thought and culture. The same could be said of the great masses of people in the western world, in Europe, Soviet Russia and America, who are at present totally de-Christianized. Their neo-paganism, founded on a materialism bereft of all transcendental elements is a danger that could very well sound the death-knell for the entire civilization of this planet.

Materialistic neo-paganism fosters the arms race, in particular that of the big powers, who are in danger of drawing our planet into an atomic suicide of which we shall all be the victims. Specialists foresee that a world-wide atomic war would obliterate all trace of life on the earth. Certain types of fish alone would perhaps have a chance of survival in the ocean depths. The Apocalypse has alas become a reality which could swoop down upon us at any moment: only a miracle could avert the coming dissolution.

Everybody knows that the arsenals of all the countries of the world contain enough atomic, biological and conventional weapons to blow up the planet Earth several times and to divest it of every trace of life. In addition, the insane arms race continues and every year the fabulous sum of four hundred billion dollars is invested in it. It would be folly to imagine that such investments are for nothing and that the arms thus made will never be used. An atomic war seems sooner or later to be inevitable in consequence of either a conflict situation or an accident, such as we have been on the brink of witnessing several times during the last two decades. Such a war could be sparked off by a lunatic; these are not rare among the immense family of heads of state who possess the formidable power of unleashing the thunderbolts of the Apocalypse.

From whence will salvation come?

Indeed I see only one effective possibility, only one escape from these threats: reconciliation between the children of Abraham — Jews, Christians and Muslims — and the establishment among them of an alliance directed towards the rediscovery of their common sources and the realization of the final aims for which they all hope: peace, justice, love, the birth of a new man living in freedom on a new earth under new skies.

This vision, which would be the realization of the promise made to Abraham (Gen. 18:18), is not utopian, or rather, it constitutes a utopia whose realization in terms of political history no longer depends on anything other than the courage of our wills.

We do not need to be endowed with a vivid imagination to envisage the new situation which would result from the reconciliation of the Arab states with the State of Israel. The Middle East would quickly become what it was in biblical times, a center of advanced civilization. In the Semitic block thus formed around the human, financial, economic and petroleum resources of the states associated with the Middle East, there would very rapidly arise a new power comprising almost all the countries of Africa and Asia. The Third World would then become aware of its identity and of its power, all the greater because it could rely on the great spiritual force of the Christian world, particularly the Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Churches, with no arms to sell or petroleum to buy.

Only the constitution of this moral force, irresistible because endowed with demographic, economic, political and all-powerful spiritual means, could convince and if needs be force the other countries to accept progressive disarmament which would release the resources necessary to the development of the Third World.

The dilemma proposed by Moses on Sinai has today become a political option open to each one of us:

I have set before you life and death,
blessing and curse;
choose life,
that you ... may live (Deut. 30:19).

Today these words correspond to a concrete political situation: on one side the curse of planetary suicide, on the other the blessings of choosing a life that assures man of a future as great as the whole cosmos and an epic that our minds cannot even conceive. Our choice, and our will to make that choice incarnate in the history of our time, lie between life and death. Arabs and Israelis, Jews, Christians and Muslims of the whole world hold concretely in their hands the possibility — perhaps the last chance — of saving humanity from the cataclysms that threaten it.

It would be sufficient to will this salvation for it to cease to be utopian. Let us then repeat with Theodore Herzl: "If you want it, it will not be a dream."

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Andre Chouraqui was born in Algeria in 1917 and studied in Paris at the Sorbonne and the Institut de France. He emigrated to Israel and took an active part in the political life of the country. The author of many political, social and cultural works on the Jews, he recently completed a translation of the entire Bible into French.

1. Marcel Simon, Le judaisme berbere dans l'Alrique ancienne, Paris, 1946.
2. Idrisi, Description de PAIrique et de l'Espagne (French translation by R. Dozy and de Geeje), Leyde, 1866, pp. 35-36. Charles Monteil, Problemes du Soudan Occidental: lulls et judaises, Hespe'ris, 1951.
3. Mongopark, Voyages a l'interieur de l'Afrique en 1795 (translated by Castereau), 2 vol., Paris, An VIII, cf. p. 83.
4. Abdullah Yusuf Ali, The Holy Qur-an: Text, Translation and Commentary, Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1938.
5. Charles Monteil, op. cit., p. 288. Nicolas, Notes sur la Societe et l'Etat des Touaregs du Dinnik, I.F.A.N., 1939, pp. 580-586.
6. Dr. Doudou Gueye, director of the African Cultural Center in Senegal and personal representative of President Senghor at the Jerusalem congress, stressed the creative force of the biblical language at the heart of Negritude.
7. Israel-Aetualitis, Jerusalem, May 15, 1972.