Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music Across Twentieth-Century North Africa

If twentieth-century stories of Jews and Muslims in North Africa are usually told separately, Recording History demonstrates that we have not been listening to what brought these communities together: Arabic music. For decades, thousands of phonograph records flowed across North African borders. The sounds embedded in their grooves were shaped in large part by Jewish musicians, who gave voice to a changing world around them. Their popular songs broadcast on radio, performed in concert, and circulated on disc carried with them the power to send Jewish-Muslim audiences into a frenzy--or French colonial officials into a fury.

With this book, Christopher Silver provides the first history of the music scene and recording industry across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and offers striking insights into Jewish-Muslim relations through the sounds that animated them. In asking what North Africa once sounded like, Silver recovers a world of many voices--of daring female stars, cantors turned composers, and national and nationalist icons--whose music still resonates well into the present.