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The Kabyle myth is a colonial trope that was propagated by French colonists in French Algeria based on a supposed binary between the Arabs and Kabyle people peoples, consisting of a set of stereotypes of supposed differences between them.
The myth emerged in the 19th century with French colonialism in Algeria, positing that the Kabyle people were more predisposed than Arabs to assimilate into "French civilization".
The French colony came to consider the Kabyle people population more prepared to assimilate into French civilization "by virtue of the supposed democratic nature of their society, their superficial Islamicization, and the higher status of Kabyle women,"Edmund III Burke9780520957992 ISBN 9780520957992 as well as the belief that they were ancient Christians, of Celtic origin, who could easily be re-Christianized.
Among the proponents of this myth was the French officer , who claimed: "In one hundred years, the Kabyles will be French!" , a colonist theorist of "Berber separatism" and racist, claimed that the qanuns (customary laws) of the Kabyles came from someone who was "not of the family of Muhammad and Moses but of that of Montesquieu and Condorcet."
Eugène Daumas and Paul-Dieudonné Fabar published in 1847: "Beneath the Muslim peel, one finds a Christian seed. We recognize now that the Kabyle people, partly autochthonous, partly Vandals, previously entirely Christian, did not completely transform itself with its new religion ... The re-dressed himself in a burnous, but he kept underneath his anterior social form, and it is not only with his facial tattoos that he displays before us, unbeknownst to him, the symbol of the Cross" (Daumas and Fabar 1847: I, 77).
Alfred Rosenberg's 1930 book The Myth of the Twentieth Century, a touchstone of Nazi philosophy, includes the Berbers in with the Nordic Aryans and the upper classes of ancient Egypt as advanced superior races.
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