Jews Welcome Coffee: Tradition and Innovation in Early Modern Germany by Robert Liberles (review)

This is a short book about some large and important topics. Its main theme is assimilation, both of things and of peoples. It compares the introduction and assimilation of coffee into early modern central Europe with the assimilation and accommodation of Jews into early modern German society. Liberles notes that Central European Jews developed a taste for coffee quickly and that, on the whole, they faced comparatively fewer religious or moral objections about drinking it than did Gentile German communities, many of which sought to regulate, or even ban, coffee drinking or coffeehouses. Furthermore, many Jews became involved in the coffeehouse trade, both as patrons (or proprietors) of coffeehouses and as traders in coffee. Liberles finds evidence of Gentile resistance to the assimilation of Jews into this social world, which many historicans link to the emergence of a new secular and bourgeois public sphere.

Historians of urban society in Central Europe have often noted the prominent role that Jews played as coffeehouse patrons and proprietors in the modern age. The cultural world of the coffeehouses, particularly in the late Habsburg cities of Vienna, Prague, and Budapest, is often associated with a putative golden age of Jewish society in the years between emancipation and the Holocaust, as works by Torberg and Segel,will attest.¹ The early modern origins of this efflorescence of Jewish coffeehouse culture, however, are not so well understood; Liberles' book is a welcome and important contribution to this historiography.

Jews Welcome Coffee is far from a complete history of the reception of coffee in early modern Germany. For one thing, it discusses the late eighteenth-century trend in several German states to regulate coffee consumption—a complex topic—in just five pages (26-31). The bulk of the original archival research for the book concerns the city of Frankfurt and, to a much lesser extent, Berlin, whereas information relating to other German cities tends to be gleaned from secondary sources. Liberles attempted to locate further information about Jews and coffee culture in other German cities, such as Metz, Strasbourg, and Hamburg, but apparently the archival record of these cities is not nearly so rich (85-86).

Liberles situates his work within the historiography of everyday life in early modern Jewish society, but he does not engage with the substantial scholarly literature about early modern sociability and public life in Germany—by, for example, Blanning, van Horn Melton, or Hertz—or, more surprisingly, the influential arguments of Habermas about the origins of the bourgeois public sphere.² Hence, he misses an opportunity to advance the history of the Jewish role in creating a distinctively Germanic coffeehouse culture in the years between the end of the Thirty Years' War and Napoleon Bonaparte's dismantling of the Holy Roman Empire.

Nevertheless, Liberles provides several important leads for future scholars of this important theme in early modern social history. The most interesting, and best documented, chapters are the final two, which primarily concern with regulation of Jewish participation in the coffee trade and access to coffeehouse society in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Frankfurt. Many Christian merchants and civic authorities were opposed to Jews participating in the coffee trade, while others resented Jews frequenting public coffeehouses outside of their ghetto. Liberles' work demonstrates that the participation of Jews and Gentiles in coffeehouse society at the time was hardly on equal terms; it is certainly not evidence for Jewish assimilation into a predominantly Christian Germany: "When Jews and Christians did sit in the same tavern or coffeehouse, they often sat at separate tables" (132).

Unfortunately, Liberles did not live to see this book published, but he left his readers with a tantalizing set of speculations and archival trails that will surely lead to further work about early modern German coffee culture.