Agnon’s journey took him to many cities and to many cafés. He traversed much of the route that we will follow in this book. But Agnon’s café-laden path also tells us something about Jewish modernity writ large. These coffeehouses, way stations for Jewish intellectuals on the move across Europe and beyond, were central to modern Jewish creativity. In order to begin to contemplate the role of cafés in the development of Jewish modernity, we can turn to Agnon’s fiction, to texts such as the novel Tmol shilshom (Only Yesterday), which he wrote in Jerusalem when he was a middle-aged man. In the novel, Agnon used episodes from his own biography to depict the life of Yitzḥak Kumer, a young and naïve protagonist. In one of the early chapters of the novel, Kumer travels to Lemberg, and upon arrival at the train station, he hurries to one of the local cafés. Why the coffeehouse? What, after all, is so important about a local café that Kumer feels that he must go there as soon as he arrives in the city? Agnon’s narrator explains:
A big city is not like a small town. In a small town, a person goes out of his house and immediately finds his friend; in a big city days and weeks and months may go by until they see one another, and so they set a special place in the coffeehouse where they drop in at appointed times. Yitzḥak had pictured that coffeehouse … as the most exquisite place, and he envied those students who could go there any time, any hour. Now that he had arrived in Lemberg, he himself went to see them.
A few hours later, Kumer finds himself
standing in a splendid temple with gilded chandeliers suspended from the ceiling and lamps shining from every single wall, and electric lights turned on in the daytime, and marble tables gleaming, and people of stately mien wearing distinguished clothes sitting on plush chairs, reading newspapers. And above them, waiters dressed like dignitaries … holding silver pitchers and porcelain cups that smelled of coffee and all kinds of pastry.5
This explanation of the significance of the café in the big city is simple yet quite accurate. In contrast to the intimate and thoroughly familiar small town from which Kumer—and Agnon—came, the urban environment is inseparable from, and often thrives on, a sense of anonymity and alienation. And yet city dwellers also need a place to meet people and establish a sense of community. Thus, cities have always included some sort of gathering places. For the past three hundred years, one relentlessly popular and profoundly influential place has been the café, offering the city’s inhabitants—locals, migrants, and even visitors—an easy place to buy coffee and pastries in comfortable surroundings.
Of course, the items for sale are often the entry for something more profound. The urban café is not just a site of consumption but also an institution of sociability and exchange, where people can meet, converse, read newspapers, or discuss and debate the news of the day or other matters. In Agnon’s novel, the Jewish students in Lemberg can do all of this for the price of a cup of coffee, if they can afford it. Kumer’s experience as a wide-eyed young migrant who envisions the café as “a most exquisite place” and a “splendid temple” is telling. The café is seen here as a substitute for what has been lost in modern life and at the same time a place that is completely novel and exotic, a place that can open doors to unfamiliar worlds. Thus, cafés embody the search for a space that can be both comforting and exhilarating, both familiar and strange. For Jews in the modern world, whether in Europe, America, or the Middle East, that search took on an even greater urgency.
Figure I.1. Photograph of the interior of Café Central, Lemberg, 1904 (Courtesy of the Urban Media Archive of The Center for Urban History of East Central Europe / Collection of Oleksandr Korobov)
Agnon and his literary protagonist Kumer were far from alone in moving from a small town to large cities and in gravitating to their cafés. This movement across cities and cafés was very common and was an essential aspect of Jewish modernity. From antiquity through the eighteenth century, traditional Jewish culture was quintessentially collective: to be a Jew meant to belong to the community. Thus, the culture that traditional Jews created was distinct from the surrounding society. Yet what may be “the most defining characteristic” of modern Jewish culture is precisely “the question of how to define it.”6 From around the time of the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, modernity created new possibilities and challenges, which went hand in hand with processes of secularization, emancipation, and urbanization.7 As Jews left close-knit Jewish communities and migrated to large cities, cafés emerged as significant sites for the modern Jewish experience and for the production of modern Jewish culture, a culture that became difficult to define or to pinpoint as “Jewish” in traditional terms.
Amid the enormous historical, cultural, and economic upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Jews migrated to large cities and found their cafés. Indeed, Jews were often owners of cafés. Jewish writers have written in cafés, and they have written about cafés. Jewish intellectuals have used the café to create a place to argue with each other. Jewish merchants have made the café into a negotiating table. The café, in other words, has been an essential facet of the modern Jewish experience and has been critical to its complex mixture of history and fiction, reality and imagination, longing and belonging, consumption and sociability, idleness and productivity.
Jewish Urbanization, the Public Sphere, and the “Thirdspace” of the Café
Urban cafés, as we shall see, acted as points in a silk road of modern Jewish culture in the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. The “Silk Road” is a modern concept, coined in Berlin by the geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877, to describe a vast premodern Afro-Eurasian trade network between Byzantium and Beijing, Samarkand and Timbuktu. This nineteenth-century European invention of the silk road—a concept that became widespread only in the twentieth century—was more about the interconnection of modernity through railroads, commerce, and cultural exchange than about describing an ancient reality.8 I invoke the silk road here as a spatial metaphor to describe a network of mobility, of interconnected urban cafés that were central to modern Jewish creativity and exchange in a time of migration and urbanization. Significant numbers of Jews migrated to cities across Europe and to the U.S. and to Palestine/Israel during this time period, often frequenting cafés and finding them to be places ripe with possibilities for fostering creativity and debate and for negotiating their roles in an uncertain world. The migration of café habitués and their role in moving ideas through global networks had important ramifications for the modern Jewish experience, which reached far beyond the confines of the café itself.9
Unlike the synagogue, the house of study, the community center, or even the American Jewish deli, the café is rarely considered a Jewish space.10 Rather, it is mostly associated with the development of modern urban culture more generally. That broad link—with modernity, with urbanity, and with culture, rather than any specific association with Jewishness—is key to café culture. Although the café is understood as a chiefly European institution, it originated—like coffee itself—in the Islamic Near East. Along with coffee, a new and exotic commodity, the coffeehouse was imported to Europe from the vast Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.11 Initially flourishing in London and Oxford, coffeehouses were established, and became popular, throughout European cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.12 Jews have been attracted to, and associated with, the coffee trade and the institution of the coffeehouse from its arrival in Christian Europe. Oxford was the location of one of the first western European coffeehouses: the Angel was launched in the 1650s by someone we know only as Jacob, a Jewish entrepreneur of Sephardi origin, possibly from Lebanon.13
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