Journal of Levantine Studies Vol. 8 No. 2, Winter 2018, pp. 85-108 J Music, Ethnicity, and Class between Salonica and Tel Aviv-Jafa, or How We Got Salomonico Oded Erez During the second half of the twentieth century, Salonican Jews occupied multiple, and at times contradictory, positions in the cultural imagination of Israelis. They were associated with Ladino culture and song or identified with a spectrum of “Greek” stereotypes—trades of the sea, café culture, and arak/ouzo/retsina drinking—drawing on a mix of local realities and cinematic ready-made representations of “Greekness” designed for a Western gaze. Corresponding to these general ambiguities is an array of musical imaginaries that link the slippery concept of “Greek music” with the even more slippery concept of “Greek Jews,” ranging from the Oriental sounds of Jewish singer Roza Eskenazi to iconic and touristic tunes such as “Zorba’s Dance.” Drawing on previous research documenting musical life in interwar Salonica, interviews I conducted with Salonican immigrants and their descendants in Israel, and a historical study of the practice and discourse of Greek music in Israel during the 1960s and 1970s, this article traces the development of such musical imaginaries, demonstrating how their multiplicity stems from the existence of several overlapping taste communities—or musico-cultural sensibilities—among Salonican Jews. It also seeks to illuminate the situatedness of these sensibilities in two different ethno-class contexts: interwar Salonica and post-statehood Israel. In interwar Salonica, turn-of-the-century Westernizing trends among the Jewish and Greek elites that had emerged in the late nineteenth century were joined by a rejection of Oriental cultures, which were labeled by Greek nationalists Bar-Ilan University oded.erez@biu.ac.il