Coffee, Coffeehouses, and the Nocturnal Rituals of Early Modern Jewry

Abstract

Although religious history has traditionally concerned itself with the transcendent dimension in human life, and social history with the mundane, the latter approach can also be used to illuminate the ways in which religion works itself out on the social plane. In fact, it might be argued that inquiries of this sort should occupy a prominent place on the agenda of any social and religious history of the Jews. Among historians of the Annales school, for whom the study of material life was long considered the backbone of historical inquiry, there has been a discernible move in recent years toward the study of religious life, especially in its popular forms. Whereas, for example, previous volumes in the valuable Johns Hopkins series of “Selections from the Annales” were devoted to such topics as food and drink in history, the one published in 1982 was entitled, significantly, Ritual, Religion and the Sacred.

Senses of Space in the Early Modern World

“…Their sociability is celebrated in some circles as having fostered a middle-class political culture, but most excluded women, laborers, and the poor. Caffeine also fed the needs of Torah students in the Venetian ghetto, as coffee allowed them to study and discuss scriptures long into the night after days spent working (Horowitz 1989;Cowan 2011).…”

The Origins of Jewish Secularization in 18th Century Europe

“…The new pleasures of the eighteenth-century public sphere could also intensify rather than undermine religious practice, as Elliott Horowitz has shown in his study of the importance of coffee in literally fuelling the emergence of nocturnal kabbalistic rituals. 2 Straightforward causal connections in this domain are extremely difficult to identify, and are particularly complicated in the Jewish case because the relationship between belief and practice in Judaism was itself a focus of lively contestation in this period. As Feiner's study advances through the eighteenth century, the unifying perspective of traditionalist critics of the impact of modernity, who lumped freethinking and behavioural transgressors together as one 'epicurean' enemy, becomes increasingly dominant.…”