In his highly influential 2015 book, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution, Michael Denning charts the transnational flows of music recordings and audio technologies that began in the 1920s. Denning's historical sonic landscape is broad and multi-sited and includes a number of locations surrounding the Mediterranean and Aegean seas: Istanbul, Algiers, Lisbon, Cairo, Athens, and Tunis. In the latter, Denning notes that in 1926 “the French recording company Pathé brought together a number of major figures of the Arab-Andalusian music of the North African Maghreb for a historic session, including the celebrated singer and actress Habiba Messika” (p. 19). Messika was a Tunisian Jew, born in 1903, and would become one of North African's first musical stars, due, in a large part, to her extensive recording career.
Hers is one of the stories that is explored in Christopher Silver's new monograph, Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa. The book does an important job of uncovering the hidden histories of musicians and music industry moguls whose stories have often been at the periphery of scholarship on North Africa. It does so through a mixture of individual biographical history and analysis of a rich body of audio recordings from the early- and mid-20th century, many of which were unknown or presumed lost. One of the aspects that makes the book so compelling is the author's own position within this research, as a keen collector of gramophone and LP vinyl, and a leading figure in the rediscovery of the body of music around which the text is constructed. The musicians, and their own stories, are also fascinating, and in focusing upon the role of both Jews and Muslims in the story of North African music recording, Silver addresses the complicated entanglements of politics, culture, and religious identities throughout the 20th century.
Much of the book is centered around prominent figures within the various music scenes of North Africa—primarily the “celebrity” musicians of the day who recorded for major record labels, as well as some of the more peripheral figures whose names and lives have been obscured by the passage of time. We meet individuals such as Messika and the Tunisian women who followed in her footsteps, including Ratiba Chambia and Louisa Saadoun (Chapter 2); Salim Halali, the openly gay, Algerian-born Jew who was hidden in the Parisian Grande Mosquée during the Second World War before spending most of his career in Morocco (Chapter 4); and Samy Elmaghribi, the Jewish Moroccan singer whom Silver describes as “a superstar, without affiliation to any one political party, who performed a widely disseminated and capricious form of patriotism in concert, on the radio, and by way of disc to great effect throughout the 1950s” (p. 142).
Alongside musicians, Silver also narrates the lives of those involved in the emergence of North African broadcasting and record industries, highlighting the importance of new technologies to music-making and listening practices in the region throughout the 20th century. As such, the author builds upon the work of scholars such as Rebecca P. Scales (2010), exploring the relationship between musical recordings, technologies, performances, and censorship under colonial rule, while unpacking the complexities at play. In Chapter 1 we meet Edmond Nathan Yafil, a Jewish Algerian musician, ensemble leader, and early gramophone pioneer who, as Silver suggests, played a leading role in the emergence of recording industries in the colonial nations of North Africa in the early decades of the 20th century. Chapter 4 interrogates the ways in which the Second World War shaped music and radio broadcasts in the region, beginning with the emergence of Radio Tunis in 1938, and the role played by the journalist Félix Allouche in the programming of “une heure hébraïque” (A Hebrew Hour). The emergence of the Vichy regime in 1940 unsurprisingly led to widespread censorship of radio broadcasts, with Jewish music and musicians purged from the airwaves.
One of the potential drawbacks of an approach centered around commercially released recordings is that the histories being told here are, predominantly, those of widely celebrated musicians who managed to carve out a successful career for themselves. Figures such as Halali, Messika, and Yafil have certainly been discussed in depth elsewhere, and are commonly recognized as pioneering figures within the history of North African music. While the author does an impressive job of sketching out their biographies, it is in the nuanced details that the book is most illuminating. Silver points us toward the many complexities and contradictions at play for these musicians: Halali was courted by the Germans during the Second World War and pressured to broadcast on their behalf, with his refusal leading to arrest at the hands of the Gestapo and the murder of members of his family; Lili Labassi, another Algerian Jew, was celebrated by Columbia Records for incorporating French into his music, while his apolitical song “Lillah ya-l-Ghadi li-l-Sahra” (By God, O you who are going to the Sahara) was simultaneously censored by the French authorities for its supposedly nationalist message; and Mahieddine Bachtarzi, the singer and director of the Algerian national theater, had worked with numerous Jewish musicians and been under French state surveillance in the 1930s for his purportedly Algerian nationalist politics, but sang in praise of Maréchal Pétain's anti-Semitic Vichy government after 1940.
The book's title hints at the role that music played in Judeo-Muslim relations throughout North Africa, and there is a sense in which Silver is building upon the recent work of scholars such as Jonathan Glasser (2016), Jonathan H. Shannon (2015), and Malcolm Théoleyre (2016). However, while their work investigates interreligious musicalities and begins to unpack the ways in which notions of “Convivencia” have been retroactively applied to North African musical histories, Recording History focuses primarily upon Jewish artists and listeners. Muslims are certainly present throughout the book, but the central story here is of the contribution that Jews made to North Africa's musical past and present. As such, it contributes primarily to the often-overlooked history of Jewish musicianship throughout the region, drawing close links to the work of researchers such as Ruth F. Davis (2020) and Vanessa Paloma Elbaz (2023).
A wonderful addition to the book is Silver's website Gharamphone, an ever-evolving online archive featuring the author's own collection of recordings from this period. The website includes many of the recordings referenced in Recording History and, as such, provides a fantastic addendum for the reader.
Throughout the book, Silver provides rich detail about the social, political, and cultural conditions from which these musicians and their music emerged and within which they circulated. Recording History ends with the murder of Algerian singer Raymond Leyris in 1961 and the declaration of Algerian independence a year later, and thus is effectively focused upon the four decades between 1920 and the early 1960s. During this period we see the radical changes occurring within North African societies as nations declare independence, relations between different religions (particularly Islam and Judaism) shift significantly, and music industries emerge (at least in part) through the introduction of recording, broadcast, and listening technologies. Recording History makes an invaluable contribution to scholarship on the complex musical histories of North Africa in the 20th century. It will be of great benefit to anyone interested in not only the music of the region but also histories of colonialism, technology, and religion within North Africa.
