UCLA

From the early twentieth century and through at least mid-century, indigenous North African Jews came to play an outsized role as music-makers and music-purveyors across the Maghrib. In Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, all under French rule until the middle of the twentieth century, Jewish vocalists and instrumentalists, record label artistic directors and concessionaires, commercial agents, and sonic impresarios utilized the phonograph and recording technology to safeguard and promote traditional music –– described alternately as “Arab,” “Muslim,” and “Andalusian” –– and to pioneer popular musical forms mixed in style and language (often blending Arabic with French). Those forms produced an emerging realm of popular culture between World War I and World War II. Jewish prominence in music was challenged during the interwar period. That challenge emanated from a set of French officials and Muslim elites, who were uneasy with minority overrepresentation in a heritage increasingly considered in national terms and increasingly understood as the exclusive domain of the majority. With the fall of the French Third Republic and the rise of the Vichy Regime during the Second World War, Maghribi Jewish musicians in North Africa and those in metropolitan France were further sidelined and silenced –– although never completely. In the postwar period, as nationalist parties in Morocco and Tunisia and later Algeria marched toward independence –– defining their political programs in increasingly exclusionary Arabo-Muslim terms ––some Jewish musicians provided the soundtrack for that march and reached staggering heights of celebrity. Their celebrity came at the very moment that tens of thousands of Jews, unsure of their future, left the Maghrib for France and Israel. Despite their departure, the memory of Jews and especially the memory of Jewish musicians remains especially vivid among North African Jews and Muslims in the Maghrib and the Maghribi diaspora.

This dissertation then, explores both the Jewishness of music-making in the Maghrib over the course of much of the twentieth century and gives voice to North African Jewish cultural life by studying the music that Jews helped to promote and make popular. A musical frame not only points us to a unique timeline, different from that defined by political events, but provides us with new tools for thinking about Jewish-Muslim relations in the region as far more intimate and far more entangled than previously assumed.