"Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa," with Christopher Silver, McGill University

The sixth talk of the series titled "Intertwined Worlds: Judaism and Islam in Historical Perspectives:"

"Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa," with Christopher Silver, McGill University

In Recording History, Christopher Silver provides the first history of the music scene and recording industry across twentieth century Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. In doing so, he offers striking insights into Jewish-Muslim relations through the rhythms that animated them. For more than six decades, thousands of phonograph records constructed from shellac flowed across North African borders. The sounds embedded in their grooves were shaped in significant 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 delight audiences, stir national sentiments, and frustrate French colonial authorities. In asking what North Africa once sounded like, Silver introduces the music of a pivotal era––one which still resonates into our present.

Christopher Silver is the Segal Family Associate Professor in Jewish History and Culture in the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University. His book Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music Across Twentieth Century North Africa was published in 2022 with Stanford University Press. Winner of the 2023 L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize in North African Studies, it has since been translated into Arabic. Recipient of grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the American Academy of Jewish Research (AAJR), the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS), and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), Silver is the author of numerous articles on Middle Eastern and North African history and music and the Jewish-Muslim relationship, including in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Jewish Social Studies, and Hespéris-Tamuda. He is also the founder and curator of the website Gharamophone.com, a digital archive of North African records from the first half of the twentieth century.

This series is cosponsored by The Middle East North African Studies Program, The Comparative Literary Studies, The Northwestern Library, and The Alumnae of Northwestern University

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