Christopher Silver, Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. ISBN 9781503631687 (paperback), 300 pp.

Reviewed by Lhoussain Simour
University of Gibraltar

Christopher Silver’s Recording History: Jews, Muslims, and Music across Twentieth-Century North Africa reconceptualizes the cultural and political history of the Maghreb through the lens of recorded sound. Focusing on the Arabophone music scene and its recording industry, Silver reconstructs a forgotten world in which Jewish and Muslim musicians shaped a shared soundscape. Drawing on a unique corpus of shellac records, forgotten archives, and a decade of ethnographic and archival research, the author delivers a compelling narrative that fuses microhistory with broader regional analysis.

The book is structured thematically and chronologically, beginning with the origins of recording in early 20th-century North Africa and culminating in the transformations brought on by decolonization and migration. At the heart of this work is a cast of remarkable artists—Lili Labassi, Salim Halali, Samy Elmaghribi, Habiba Messika, and Louisa Tounsia—whose recordings embodied the sounds of political upheaval, urban modernity, and cultural hybridity. Silver challenges nationalist historiographies that erase or marginalize these figures, documenting how Jews and Muslims were not oppositional communities but cultural collaborators and co-creators of modern Maghrebi music. 

In addition to addressing aspects of the technological, commercial, and cultural history of the North African recording industry, the book makes several historiographical interventions. It re-centers the cultural agency of North African Jews, not merely as witnesses to a vanishing world but as central agents in shaping popular musical modernity. The book further illuminates how music functions as a political tool as nationalist songs circulated widely in marketplaces and cafés, often defying colonial surveillance. Artists such as Samy Elmaghribi produced political records that were embraced by both the public and nationalist parties, even as these artists themselves later faced displacement. The book also explores some of the gendered challenges that female performers faced when wielding their public voices in defiance of colonial and patriarchal structures.

Perhaps most significantly, Recording History is a historical study conducted in a deeply humanistic tone with strong affective resonance. Silver’s writing is poetic and richly narrative. His archival labor—collecting old records from flea markets, digitizing them, and tracking down the descendants of performers—translates into a text that is as much about memory and loss as it is about music and politics. One of the book’s most poignant insights is that music can remember what history has forgotten. These records, long discarded or ignored, become portals to a vibrant and complex world that colonialism, nationalism, and migration have fragmented. 

The book presents a methodological innovation through its incorporation of sound recordings as historical sources. By considering records not merely as musical artifacts but as historical documents, Silver elevates the status of music to that of historiographical evidence. His methodology is informed by sound studies, media archaeology, and cultural history, and is underpinned by a decolonial perspective that prioritizes regional interconnectedness over colonial dichotomies. Consequently, the work documents an unprecedented horizontal historical insight—one that crisscrosses the landscapes of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, rather than confining itself to the metropole-colony framework. Silver's establishment of the ‘Gramophone’ digital archive, which houses digitized shellac records, serves as an extension of this initiative, effectively transforming the book from a traditional scholarly monograph into a feat of cultural repatriation.

If there is a limitation to this otherwise exceptional work, it lies in the difficulty of accessing the sounds for those not engaged with the Gramophone archive. While a printed book cannot fully translate the sonic dimension it so vividly evokes, Silver’s commitment to digital accessibility goes some way towards mitigating this concern. Additionally, the book might leave some readers wishing for a more sustained discussion of audience reception beyond anecdotal glimpses, though this does little to detract from the richness of its material. In addition to the challenge of accessing the Gramophone archive, it is also important to note the inevitable gaps in the soundscape itself. Many musical expressions or performances from the period were never recorded, often due to structural factors shaped by class, geography, or limits in recording infrastructure. These absences are not shortcomings of Silver’s work, but rather reflect the material limits of the archive the author draws from. They also point to broader silences in the historical record; voices and sounds that were excluded not by choice, but by the constraints of technology, power, and access.

The regional breadth of the book, spanning Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia over the course of several decades, is both a major achievement and perhaps a shortcoming. The broad scope can compel a panoramic treatment of local dynamics. Whereas this regional approach enables insightful transnational comparisons, a more locally focused study would allow for deeper engagement with specific musical forms, performance contexts, or political developments in a given social setting.

Silver’s innovative use of colonial-era recordings and European label archives, combined with family interviews and ethnographic encounters, forms a powerful archival foundation. Still, the research would be enriched by engagement with Arabic-language sources or local archival materials in North Africa to yield complementary perspectives grounded in indigenous cultural and institutional contexts. The author’s commitment to the decolonial method is evident throughout, and expanding the source base further would continue to deepen this important effort.

While Recording History delivers a rich and original exploration of music, memory, and cultural life in twentieth-century North Africa, aspects of the study open promising avenues for further inquiry. The book’s focus on the production and circulation of shellac records—particularly through the lens of artists, impresarios, and recording networks—yields invaluable insights. Yet, this emphasis means that the reception and lived experience of music among broader publics receive less sustained attention. Anecdotes and traces of audience response are present, but there remains room to explore how ordinary listeners, both Muslim and Jewish, engaged with this music in their daily lives and what meanings they drew from it.

The book powerfully illustrates shared aesthetic traditions and collaborative artistic worlds. The work would benefit from a deeper analysis of what this entanglement entailed, a more sustained reflection on the tensions, asymmetries, or ruptures that shaped these relationships—especially in the context of colonial hierarchies and the political transformations of the post-independence era. That said, Silver is careful to foreground complexity, and readers are left with a nuanced sense of coexistence that was at once intimate, improvised, and historically contingent. 

Finally, the lyrical, evocative quality of the writing—one of the book’s most distinctive strengths—invites readers into a sensorial, emotionally resonant history of music and memory. While this style enhances accessibility and narrative depth, it can soften some of the more difficult social and political contours of the story. For instance, the discussion of colonial policing and censorship of musical spaces is rendered with poetic subtlety, which, while powerful, may underplay the coercive force of state power in shaping what could be recorded or heard. Nevertheless, the author’s deep humanism and imaginative use of archival material more than compensate, and provide a compelling model for how to write cultural history with both intellectual rigor and affective force.

Ultimately, Recording History is a transformative contribution to the fields of North African history, Jewish-Muslim Studies, and sound studies. It reshapes our understanding of the cultural and political life of the Maghreb in the 20th century, not through state documents or elite narratives, but through music—music that moved across borders, communities, and decades. In doing so, it restores voices, melodies, and meanings that have long been silenced, offering a model for how to write history not just as text, but as sound, memory, and sensation. The book’s innovative framework invites further exploration into how music was received, interpreted, and lived by diverse audiences, and encourages deeper investigation into local variations in performance and production across North Africa. By demonstrating the historical value of ephemeral media and neglected archives, and by aiding in building an archive that others can research and add to, the book will undoubtedly inspire a new generation of scholars to engage more sensitively and imaginatively with the sonic dimensions of modern history throughout the region and beyond.