Jews and Coffee: A Love Story Brewing for Centuries

The First Cup

The story of Jews and coffee begins, like so many Jewish stories, with commerce and exile.

In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was the center of the coffee world. Coffee had traveled from Ethiopia to Yemen to the great cities of Constantinople, Cairo, and Damascus. The drink was new, exciting, and slightly controversial — Ottoman authorities periodically banned it, worried that coffeehouses were breeding grounds for political dissent.

Jewish merchants, who were deeply embedded in Ottoman trade networks, were among the first to recognize coffee’s commercial potential in Europe. Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492 had settled throughout the Ottoman Empire, building trading connections that stretched from Istanbul to Venice, Amsterdam, and London.

Through these networks, coffee beans began flowing westward. And with the beans came the coffeehouses — and with the coffeehouses came a revolution in how people thought, talked, and organized.

The Jewish Coffeehouses of Europe

The history of the European coffeehouse has deep Jewish connections. In Venice, Jewish merchants in the ghetto traded coffee alongside spices, textiles, and other goods. In London, a Jewish entrepreneur named Jacob opened one of the city’s first coffeehouses in the 1650s. In Amsterdam, Sephardic Jews were prominent in the coffee import trade.

But it was in Vienna that the Jewish love affair with coffee found its fullest expression.

The legend — possibly apocryphal but too good to resist — credits a Polish Jewish merchant named Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki (or, in some versions, a Jewish spy named Georg Kolschitzky) with establishing Vienna’s first coffeehouse after the Ottoman siege of 1683. According to the story, he obtained bags of coffee beans left behind by the retreating Ottoman army and opened a café, teaching the Viennese to drink coffee with milk and sugar.

What is certainly true is that Jews became central figures in Viennese café culture. The great cafés of Vienna — the Café Central, the Café Griensteidl, the Café Herrenhof — were gathering places for Jewish intellectuals, writers, and artists. Theodor Herzl wrote in cafés. Stefan Zweig held court in cafés. Karl Kraus sharpened his satirical pen in cafés. Sigmund Freud was a regular café patron.

The Viennese coffeehouse was more than a place to drink. It was a library, an office, a debating hall, and a second home — particularly for Jews who may not have been welcome in other social spaces. You could sit for hours over a single cup, read every newspaper, argue about politics, and write the novel that would change literature. The coffee was almost incidental; the culture was everything.

New York: From the Lower East Side Up

When Eastern European Jews immigrated to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they brought their café culture with them. The coffeehouses of the Lower East Side and later the Upper West Side became the American equivalents of the Viennese cafés — places where Yiddish writers, labor organizers, intellectuals, and artists gathered.

The Jewish deli was, among other things, a coffee institution. A cup of coffee (always bottomless, always refilled by a waitress who called you “hon”) accompanied every meal, from breakfast lox to midnight pastrami. The deli coffee was not fancy. It was hot, strong, and served in heavy ceramic cups. It was fuel for conversation, for argument, for life.

As American coffee culture evolved — from diner coffee to Starbucks to artisanal third-wave roasters — Jewish participation evolved with it. Howard Schultz, the son of a Jewish family in Brooklyn’s housing projects, transformed Starbucks from a Seattle bean shop into a global phenomenon. His vision of the “third place” — a space between home and work where people gather — echoed the coffeehouse tradition his ancestors would have recognized.

Turkish Coffee and the Sephardic World

In Sephardic communities across the Middle East and North Africa, coffee is not just a beverage — it is a ritual. Turkish coffee (café turco, kahve, or buna) is prepared in a small brass or copper pot called a cezve (or finjan in Arabic), heated slowly, and served thick and strong in tiny cups.

The preparation is meditative. The coffee is ground to powder, mixed with water and sugar (the amount of sugar specified by the guest — sade for no sugar, orta for medium, sekerli for sweet), and heated until it foams. The foam itself is prized — a sign of a well-made cup.

In Sephardic and Mizrachi Jewish homes, coffee is served to guests as a matter of hospitality. Refusing coffee is almost an insult. Serving it is almost a mitzvah. The coffee grounds left in the cup are sometimes read for fortune-telling — a practice that sits uneasily with Jewish law but persists in folk tradition.

Israeli coffee culture inherited this Sephardic tradition. Café botz (“mud coffee”) — essentially Turkish-style coffee made by pouring hot water directly over finely ground beans in a cup — was the standard Israeli coffee for decades. Cheap, strong, and gritty, it was the drink of pioneers, soldiers, and students.

Israel: Café Nation

Modern Israel is a coffee-obsessed country. Israelis drink some of the highest per-capita quantities of coffee in the world, and café culture is woven into the fabric of daily life.

The Israeli café is where business deals happen, where first dates unfold, where soldiers on leave decompress, where writers write, and where everyone argues about politics. Sitting in a café for hours is not lazy — it is a national pastime.

Israeli coffee culture has produced its own innovations. Café hafuch (“upside-down coffee”) is a latte — espresso topped with steamed milk — that became ubiquitous in the 1990s. Café kar (iced coffee) is a blended, sweetened, frothy concoction that predated the global iced coffee trend by years and remains distinctively Israeli.

The specialty coffee revolution has reached Israel with full force. Tel Aviv is now home to world-class roasters and cafés that rival those of Melbourne, Tokyo, and Portland. But even in the fanciest third-wave café, you can still order a café botz and receive a knowing nod of respect.

Kosher Concerns

For the kosher-observant coffee drinker, a few issues arise:

Plain black coffee is universally accepted as kosher. Coffee beans are a plant product, and the roasting process does not introduce kashrut concerns.

Flavored coffees may contain non-kosher additives — artificial flavors derived from non-kosher sources, or dairy ingredients in flavored beans. Check for kosher certification on flavored products.

Coffee drinks made with milk raise the question of chalav yisrael for those who observe that standard. In most Western countries, mainstream authorities (following Rabbi Moshe Feinstein’s ruling) permit government-regulated commercial dairy.

Coffee equipment in non-kosher restaurants — steam wands, blenders used for non-kosher drinks — creates a gray area that different authorities resolve differently. Most permit plain black coffee from any source, but some are stricter about drinks involving steamed milk or flavorings.

On Shabbat, the question of making coffee touches on the prohibition of cooking. Instant coffee is generally permitted (since the water was heated before Shabbat on a blech or urn). Brewing fresh coffee on Shabbat is prohibited. French press, pour-over, and drip methods all involve issues of bishul (cooking) and borer (selecting/filtering).

More Than a Drink

The Jewish relationship with coffee is a story about connection — between continents, between centuries, between people who sit across a small table and share a cup and a conversation. From the coffeehouses of Ottoman Constantinople to the cafés of Vienna to the delis of New York to the sidewalk tables of Tel Aviv, coffee has been the fuel of Jewish intellectual, social, and cultural life.

It is, perhaps, the most Jewish of beverages — not because of any religious significance, but because of what it enables: talk, argument, debate, companionship, and the stubborn refusal to end a conversation when there is still coffee in the cup.