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85 5 It Is Not Permitted, Therefore It Is Forbidden Controversies over the Jewish Coffee Trade C offee provides a potent symbol of the tentative advance of Jews on the path toward increased economic and social integration into German society in the later years of the eighteenth century. In a period in which historians have found much reason for Jews to be hopeful concerning their future, most contemporary Jews had serious doubts about the significance of change that was so widely discussed. Despite the progress toward enhanced economic toleration combined with educational opportunities symbolized by Joseph II’s Edicts of Toleration beginning in , these advances amounted to limited achievements at best in the day-to-day life of Germany’s Jews, even in the areas of Joseph’s own domain. Christian Dohm’s proposals to expand Jewish political rights had limited resonance in Germany, though he did have some influence in prerevolutionary France. Underscoring the tentativeness of any such advances, prohibitions related to the coffee trade seemed to test such optimism . When the Jews of Frankfurt petitioned the imperial court in Vienna to allow local Jewish merchants to trade freely in coffee, their appeal referred caustically to the new movements for toleration for Jews in Prague and Vienna, at a time when the Jews of Frankfurt could not yet trade freely in the sale of coffee . This telling contrast revealed once again what a serious gap could at times divide theory from reality when it came to tolerating the Jews in early modern German lands. In an atmosphere in which a number of German states sought to limit coffee consumption in general and Christian merchants continually sought to limit Jewish trading rights altogether, Jewish trade in coffee could obviously be contentious. But this did not happen everywhere. My sample indicates that controversies emerged primarily in Frankfurt, where Jewish disabilities generally were more extreme than elsewhere, and in certain outlying parts of Prussia. My search for archival materials relating to Jews and the coffee trade produced extremely uneven results. As mentioned in the introduction, near the outset of this project, I discovered with the help of Michael Lenarz, a researcher at the Jewish Museum of Frankfurt, several thousand pages of documents in the city archive relating specifically to questions of Jews and the Frankfurt coffee trade in the eighteenth century. Encouraged by this discovery, I made 86 jews welcome coffee inquiries in other likely depositories such as the one at Metz and the regional archive in Strasbourg, but I found no relevant material there. Correspondence with other archives that I thought might produce results, especially in the trading center of Hamburg, received the same response: little if any material pertaining to the subject existed in the files. Aside from Frankfurt, it was only in the Prussian state archives in Berlin that I found several files relevant to my theme. I relate this information to comment on an obvious but sometimes overlooked methodological point. I can imagine some scholars concluding, based on the material that I did find, that conflicts similar to those in Frankfurt and several smaller towns in rural Prussia took place—or as the scholars might say, must have taken place—in other German cities as well. That conclusion—like many others I have seen on other subjects—would overlook a basic principle of documentary research: conflicts leave footprints, while smooth progress often leaves few or no traces. If the archives in Hamburg and Metz do not disclose conflicts over Jews and the coffee trade in these German centers of early modern times, then presumably whatever conflicts did take place were either not documented, or the materials are hidden away in bureaucratic files and extremely difficult to locate, or are lost altogether. My own working assumptions are as follows: Jews were allowed to trade in coffee in most locations even during the coffee prohibitions of the eighteenth century, more or less to the same extent that Christians were allowed to do so. Here and there, attempts were surely made to restrict the Jews specifically, but the Jews involved didn’t always actively oppose these restrictions through petitions. Either they ignored these prohibitions or—less likely—obeyed them, but in any case in most locations, neither the Jews nor the authorities made Jewish coffee trade into a major issue. I also assume that there are additional depositories of relevant materials buried in German archives that await discovery. As we also saw in the previous chapter, the Jewish role in the...

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