Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, in the aftermath of Israel’s establishment in 1948 and the Palestinian Nakba, hundreds of thousands of Jews from across the Middle East and North Africa restarted their lives in the Jewish state. Among this coalescing demographic, later known as Mizrahim (lit. Easterners) and soon to become the country’s majority, were some of the most celebrated musicians of the Arab world––and still others who were in the midst of launching their Arabic-language careers. Over a period of more than two decades, these veteran and up-and-coming artists released hundreds of commercial recordings, capturing a soundtrack of communal and individual triumphs and tragedies, quotidian difficulties, and disorienting new realities. In demonstrating the centrality of music to history, the deep connections between language and identity, and continuities before and after the ruptures of 1948, this talk challenges the notion that Arabophone Jews became muted upon their arrival in Israel and disconnected from their countries and cultures of origin. In listening for this particular past through a self-fashioned archive of vinyl records, it affords an opportunity to appraise the origins, meaning, and impact of a vast musical repertoire hitherto unstudied.

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.