Welcome to Part Eight of the project “Interviewing Religion,” where I interview scholars of Middle Eastern religions about their research, discuss how their work connects to broader public issues, and ask for suggestions for further reading. [You can read the other interviews here!] A huge thank you to the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Luce Foundation, who supported my work with one of their Advancing Public Scholarship Grants. I couldn’t have launched this project without their assistance.
For my eighth interview, I’d like to introduce Dr. Christopher Silver. Silver is the Segal Family Assistant Professor in Jewish History and Culture in the Department of Jewish Studies at McGill University. His scholarship and writing focus on Jews, Muslims, and popular culture in North Africa, and his book Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa won the 2023 L. Carl Brown Book Prize from the American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS). Silver 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. I love Silver’s research and his public scholarship and am delighted to have him as part of these interviews.
I recently spoke to Silver, who graciously answered a few questions about his research, publications, and upcoming projects. I encourage you to pick up his book Recording History and check out the wonderful resources he mentions here.
1) How did you first get interested in studying the history of music in North Africa?
Silver: I became interested in North Africa as an undergraduate at Berkeley and then, in 2005, I first made my way to Morocco. There I was exposed to an entire world of music that I didn’t know before. I wasn’t just exposed, it grabbed me. I was entranced by it and that is what some of the music is meant to do in the first place.
On a follow-up trip to Morocco, a few years later, I found myself at a record store. I asked the proprietor for a sonic tour of his wares, with the promise to buy what delighted my ears. And so, I bought quite a bit. The proprietor also said some things to me as we were listening together. One of the things he did was point out which artists we were listening to were Jewish, and that was quite a few of the artists.
That piqued my interest – one, why was this person recalling this detail, and what was its significance to him? Then I started to ask myself how wide-ranging this phenomenon was, and how far back it went. And what else might such a phenomenon tell us about Morocco and the entirety of the Maghrib?
I often think that the writing of history begins with a whisper. Someone makes an offhanded comment that’s of meaning to them and then it assumes that much more meaning on the part of the listener because something clicks. Some dots are connected, and you start moving in a certain direction. Now, it doesn’t always pan out into a book project but sometimes it does. It starts with that simple, very human process of having a conversation and then suddenly your mind is alight.
2) You’ve been asked to present your work at a local community center. How would you describe your research on Jews, Muslims, and popular culture across North Africa?
Silver: The way I explain what’s happening is through a series of questions. Does music remember what history forgets? Is it possible to know a place if you don’t know what it once sounded like? In my book Recording History, I tease out not just a music industry but also a recording industry that emerged coterminous to its analogs in Europe, North America, and elsewhere. At the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, the phenomenon of global recording was everywhere. It spread quite quickly in all directions.
And, as I remind audiences, the advent of recording was no insignificant feat. It was one of the major technological innovations of the last 150 years. Once you start thinking about what recorded music allows for, it’s really remarkable. It allows for not just nationalism but also nation-building itself, constructing the sounds of the nation or the nation around the sounds. And because recording as an industry is set up as it is and the impetus is to sell records, there’s an emphasis on recording as widely as possible. In North Africa, a diverse set of sounds starts to be constituted as either Maghribi broadly or Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian. And these sounds are really diverse, not just Andalusian music but also the trance-healing traditions (Gnawa in Morocco or stambeli in Tunisia), shaabi music (popular music), and lots of other genres and repertoires.
The other layer here is this rethinking of Jews, Muslims, and their relationship in a really vexed context. French colonialism prevails across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia (Italian colonialism in Libya). The colonial administrators, bureaucrats, and those with power want to define, divide, and rule.
The stories we tell about how Jews and Muslims were set on diametrically opposed paths–at the very moment at the turn of the twentieth century that the recording industry takes off–is challenged by that turn to music. This is because Jews and Muslims are competing musically in a productive way, but also collaborating and pushing the bounds of what a set of national sounds looks and sounds like. Individual Jews and Jewish orchestras sing, produce, create, and innovate in Arabic. They also provide the soundtrack to these moments they’re often left out of: nation-building and nationalism across North Africa, anti-colonialism, the question of the role of women in society, and the eventual march to independence. If you’re looking at just paper documents, a certain story rises to the surface, but if you’re listening for that history, it starts to sound quite different.
3) Tell me about your recent projects and publications. Which works are your favorites and why?
Silver: My book Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa is obviously a favorite. There’s something special about a monograph and the amount of space you have to work through ideas, to develop a narrative that you can tease out through individual chapters and also in the introduction and conclusion. You can say something on a grander scale than can sometimes be done in an article.
There is one article I would point to as well, which I published this year in Jewish Social Studies. It’s focused on radio, specifically Radio Tunis, and what was the longest-running Jewish program on North African radio. This was a broadcast that was called the Hebrew Hour that started in 1939 and was taken off the air in 1956.
What I found so compelling about that article is the ability to think through the multiplicity of radio, beyond a certain paradigm that sets in at the mid-20th century, the idea of there being many voices on radio. There’s the model of radio at a particular moment in time being the voice of resistance, but radio has longer legs than that and resistance takes many shapes and forms. So what I attempted to do in this article is to think through the program of a minority which was navigating all sorts of issues including which language to broadcast in. Despite it being called the Hebrew Hour, for example, it was not broadcast in Hebrew, but rather French and Arabic, and other languages work their way in as well.
What is also fascinating about radio archives, if they’re good and robust, is that you not only get the perspective of the broadcaster or the programming itself, but also letters of praise and complaint. And so, you can suddenly really get a sense of the audiences and what they’re after. In the article, such letters come from both Jews and Muslims who are listening to the Hebrew Hour on Radio Tunis and offering praise and complaints, or requesting songs, or asking why the broadcast moved from this hour to that hour. This gives you a sense of how people listen in the first place.
I’m now moving into the post-shellac era, shifting to vinyl as well as cassettes. My new book project considers Arab Jewishness in a few places around the world at a moment when it was supposed to have faded out. Here, I’m referring to the second half of the 20th century, in places where Arabness and Jewishness were counterposed — Jaffa and Jerusalem, but also Paris and Marseille, and North America as well, including Montreal and New York. I think about how and by what mechanisms Jews continued to create in Arabic in the second half of the 20th century, and of course what that meant as they started to bring in different audiences, other languages, and new subject matter. That’s the direction I’m moving in.
4) Your neighbor wants to know more about your field. What books, websites, videos, or other resources would you recommend to them? (why?)
Silver: I’ll say in general if one wants to understand North African music, we can look no further than the figure of Salim Halali. He is one of the greats of the 20th century and you need not even know Arabic to understand that there’s something quite compelling and captivating about him, his voice, and his charisma.
He’s a good starting point because what he’s doing for the most part is the popular music of his era. The height of his career is the 1930s through the 1960s and he’s not only performing Algerian music, but also Tunisian and Moroccan as well. Through his work, you get a sense of the daring quality of the music of an era that we might have not assumed was so daring, out there, or provocative.
There’s also a documentary called El Gusto by Safinez Bousbia which is essentially a Buena Vista Social Club for Algerian Jews and Muslims. It provides for this question I keep returning to, “what does music remember that history does not?”
In addition, Cléo Cohen has a film called Que Dieu te protège in which she as a young French Jew of North African heritage is asking questions of her elders about their lives. This includes her Algerian side, which if I remember correctly, includes participation in the FLN in Algeria, the National Liberation Party. And on her Tunisian side, as you see in the film, it captures a Jewishness that’s very much imbricated with the Arabic language. Going back to that earlier point of populations set on two very different paths, here is continued engagement with Arabness. I find the film very provocative, and it raises questions which is what good art is supposed to do.
5) How does your research connect to broader public issues? What overlap do you see between the topics you study and contemporary issues around the world today?
Silver: What I keep coming back to at this impossible time is that there is much work that needs to be done in order to understand the past. And I believe that in order to understand the past, we need to know what it sounded like.
What I take comfort in and what is helping me move forward is that not too long ago, Jews and Muslims were coming together to create something very powerful. There was real power in that music, it shook the air around them. That such sounds were fashioned at their own moments of despair is all the more remarkable. I believe that it is up to us to create a new set of songs moving forward, and that’s how I see this as applicable right now.
6) What other scholars/writers do you think are doing the most interesting work on religion in the Middle East?
Silver: I came upon Julia Clancy Smith’s Mediterraneans at a used bookstore in Berkeley many years ago. It was heavy, and the price was heavy…even though it was second-hand. But it really opened my eyes and ears to this world beyond binaries, a world very much in flux. The process of migration in the 19th and early 20thcenturies moving from Europe across the Mediterranean to North Africa, the question of liminality in Tunisia, all of this continues to inform my thinking.
Ziad Fahmy’s Ordinary Egyptians and Street Sounds are pioneering in terms of thinking through music and sound in Egypt. His sources are really compelling, especially in listening for events like the 1919 Revolution. The inclusion of Sayyed Darwish’s song “Um ya masri!” in Ordinary Egyptians is something I’ve never been able to shake in terms of the visceral quality of that source. That sonic moment is something that I use in the classroom, and it’s something I’ve encountered Egyptians singing — albeit later and in a different version, which is also a very intriguing footnote in Fahmy’s book.
When doing history focused on North Africa or the Middle East, I also think it’s good to move well beyond the region to get a new perspective. So, Jonathan Sterne’s corpus is incredible. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, which is 20 years old now, set many of us on our path to think with sound and with music. And his more recent book on the history of the MP3 is very good to think and work with. For me, it also shatters this idea of streaming services as these great democratizers of sound and music, which they’re obviously not, but he does a great job of showing exactly how they’re not and why they’re not. So, for people who are interested in thinking about music and sound in the context of media, I think that book is very necessary.
7) How can people find out more about you and follow your work?
Silver: My website Gharamophone.com is a great resource if you want to hear what our historical actors once heard. This is a site that returns these historical sounds and records to the soundscape and provides one way to listen along. But you can also find me and my work on Facebook, Twitter, Blue Sky, Instagram, and other social media.
Thanks so much to Dr. Christopher Silver for speaking with me and sharing these details about his studies of Jews, Muslims, and music in North Africa. I urge you to check out his book Recording History (you won’t be disappointed!), as well as his other work and the many great resources he mentioned here. For a complete list of the books, websites, and articles listed in this interview, you can visit Interviewing Religion’s Books and Resources page.
And look for more interviews like this to come soon! You can subscribe to my blog here to get new posts directly by email.
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