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61 4 Coffee in Everyday Life Consumption, Petty Trade, and Religious Life I ronically, few things baffle a historian of everyday life as much as the routine of daily living. Describing the habitual often falls beyond what we can prove and perhaps even what we can guess. The writing of dailylife history requires considerable caution as we carefully cast the matrix of sources into a composite picture. At times we claim to know more than we do, claims that we cannot back up with sufficient evidence. In the case of writing about Jews, the scarcity of sources can also lead us to lump together materials across too broad a chronological framework, leaving us with a picture that fails to consider adequately the nuances of change. Indeed, much writing on eighteenth-century Jewish life ignores nuances, whether across time, space, or social class. Also, as I have argued previously, some scholars carelessly generalize from too limited a sample of evidence. This is not just true in the writing of daily-life history. Unfortunately, this trend has continued in recent writing on early modern Jewry as well. How did early modern German Jews integrate coffee into their lives? In order to provide even the broadest outlines of the development of Jewish coffee drinking and its implications for daily life, it is necessary to carefully squeeze what we can out of a small and diverse set of documents. Three main topics will interest us here: patterns of Jewish coffee consumption and how these compared with those of the surrounding society; the development of petty Jewish coffee trade among the lower classes, who found in coffee a new source of income that helped alleviate sudden economic reversals or chronic poverty; and the impact of coffee on religious life, in what was still largely a traditional, religiously observant society. Jewish Coffee Consumption Both male and female Jews were attracted to coffee, with some drinking it in public establishments and others at home. The attraction was so great that, as we have seen, by the early eighteenth century, rabbis were already concerned about actual or potential violations of Jewish law resulting from a deep desire to drink coffee. Few testimonies by Jews explained what attracted them to coffee or even discussed its attributes. As we saw in the previous chapter, Jacob 62 jews welcome coffee Hakohen mentioned coffee, but he discussed more explicitly how much he liked tea, emphasizing that this was true only when combined with sugar. Jacob Emden, as noted in the introduction, referred to various drinks that he consumed to help soothe his body, including tea, coffee, and cold water. The trained doctor Tuviah Cohen, as we shall see below, referred to coffee’s medical advantages. No reference I have seen mentioned coffee’s taste as a source of attraction for Jews, just as its bitter taste was rarely an attraction for the general population . Like their Christian neighbors, Jews may have been attracted to coffee because of its exotic image as a product originating in the Middle East and as a drink already known as a beverage of the wealthy. And like their neighbors, Jews definitely appreciated coffee as a stimulant. The late-seventeenth-century Italian rabbi Hezekiah da Silva wrote in Peri Hadash that “one cannot attain presence of mind without the aid of coffee.” The Egyptian rabbi Abraham Halevi wrote in a similar vein that it was “an everyday practice at sizable meals” to consume a glass of wine at the conclusion of the grace and then drink “another beverage called coffee” to restore one’s presence of mind. Writing in Bohemia in , Pinchas Katzenellenbogen, after describing a medicine that helped him with his cataracts, combined coffee’s medical attributes with references to its effectiveness in starting the day: And this is the thing that restored my health with God’s help, and I didn’t feel any pain in my eyes any more. But because of my weakness in my old age, my hands and body [organs] are heavy. And I found and noticed with God’s help to take regularly [in the morning] bread and a pitcher of water, as our sages instruct, meaning coffee with milk and white bread for [] or  pennies [?], and then I eat lunch, and at night I don’t eat anything except for a fruit according to the season, but I don’t have strength at all to fast even a single day. Elsewhere, Katzenellinbogen wrote: “In the morning I drink coffee with...

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