שבת בבית הקפה של ק״ק פראג (original) (raw)
Jewish Social Studies 19.3 (Summer 2014)
In the second decade of the eighteenth century, a trial unfolded in the city of Prague that challenged the transnational philanthropic ties of Jews. Beginning as a dispute between a creditor from Ottoman Palestine and Prague's chief rabbi, David Oppen heim, the affair soon took on interconfessional dimensions, engaging the proprietor of Prague's coffeehouse, a Jesuit censor of Hebraica, and the agents of the Habsburg monarchy. The dispute's unfolding in the legal arena offered opportunity for polemic and created a context in which claims about Jewish loyalty, belonging, and trust worthiness could be publicly interrogated in light of conversionary agendas and juris dictional contests over the power-and control-of the printed word and of Jewish global networks.
The Rise of the Coffeehouse Reconsidered
The Historical Journal, 2004
This article offers a history of British seventeenth-century coffeehouse licensing which integrates an understanding of the micro-politics of coffeehouse regulation at the local level with an analysis of the high political debates about coffeehouses at the national level. The first section details the norms and practices of coffeehouse licensing and regulation by local magistrates at the county, city, and parish levels of government. The second section provides a detailed narrative of attempts by agents of the Restoration monarchy to regulate or indeed suppress the coffeehouses at the national level. The political survival of the new institution is attributed to the ways in which public house licensing both regulated and also legitimated the coffeehouse. The rise of the coffeehouse should not be understood as a simple triumph of a modern public sphere over absolutist state authority; it offers instead an example of the ways in which the early modern norms and practices of licensed privilege could frustrate the policy goals of the Restored monarchy.
Coffee’s Contribution to the Political Role of Coffeehouses in England During 1660-1720
Journal of Student Research
According to German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, coffeehouses had a political role—creating a public sphere for the bourgeoisie to talk about politics. Therefore, coffeehouses, or salons in France, could lead to civil revolts. However, it leads to the question that why coffeehouses prevailed over teahouses, taverns, or other kinds of public places. This study shows the traits of coffee that made it an appealing product to facilitate political engagement among people. Through 17th-and-18th-century letters and diaries, this paper focuses on coffee—the object itself, rather than coffeehouses—to argue and explain why coffee became a popular and political beverage.
Coffee was once Ḥarām? Dispelling Popular Myths regarding a Nuanced Legal Issue
Islamic Studies, 2021
This paper attempts to address many misconceptions regarding the coffee controversy, which engulfed the Muslim world in the tenth/sixteenth century. It argues that rather than there simply being an oppositional binary of scholars permitting or forbidding coffee, in fact, a number of other positions can actually be discerned in the legal debate, namely that of recommendation and disapproval. Furthermore, it argues that besides holding the balance of power insofar as being the majority position, jurists who deemed coffee to be a permissible substance resorted to a number of epistemically powerful indicators to refute the prohibitionists, such as experimentation and the testimony of numerous individuals that the drink did not intoxicate or bring about any adverse side effects. In addition, by referring to some important but oft-ignored conventions pertaining to fatwās, the author argues that not all scholars typically labelled as being prohibitionists of coffee may have deemed the drink to be forbidden. Instead, many of them simply based their answers exclusively on the information provided to them by the questioner, in accordance with the legal precept that "the jurisconsult is the prisoner of the questioner." This paper is unique in its depth and comprehensiveness as it studies all the existing scholarly views on coffee. Furthermore, it provides a detailed study of the proceedings of the Meccan Assembly. Regarding the assembly, I argue that the attending jurists actually disagreed on the drink's ruling and that the different forms of evidence provided by the prohibitionists are not persuasive from a legal viewpoint. Keywords: Meccan Assembly, experimentation, coffee, sense experience, analogy, Yasir Qadhi.
The Publicness and Sociabilities of the Ottoman Coffeehouse
javnost-thepublic.org
It has been emphasised that in the Ottoman society there was no public sphere in its political sense, at least until the nineteenth century. The importance of a cultural interpretation of this sphere has been ignored by sociologists, too. Sociological studies of the old urban publicness were restricted to historians analysis, and a culturalistic view of sociology has been lacking. In this article I discuss this issue by focusing on the publicness created by the Ottoman coffeehouses. The public sphere that emerged was of course not similar to the rational and rather elitist understanding of the concept. The coffeehouses, which were part of the Ottoman public sphere, represented the complex everyday realities of that public life, the political and cultural contest and negotiations within the Ottoman society.
The Role of Vilmos Tarján in the History of the Newyork Coffeehouse
Different Approaches to Economic and Social Changes: New Research Issues, Sources and Results, 2022
The purpose of the study. To examine how the Newyork Coffeehouse was run between 1920 and 1936. What were Vilmos Tarján’s, the executive board member and main shareholder’s, business policies. What profile did he intend for the Coffeehouse? The Coffeehouses were struggling between the two World Wars. What were the Coffeehouse’s solutions for the post- World War challenges and the problems of the Great Depression? Applied methods. To get to know the Newyork Coffeehouse Company Limited, the sources were the documents of the Company Registry. These helped to reconstruct the list of the shareholders. The balance and profit loss accounts were used to examine the profitability of the Coffeehouse. The problems of the Coffeehouses in Budapest between 1920 and 1936 were examined through the articles of professional journals. To understand Vilmos Tarján’s aspirations, his own books and articles of the daily newspapers were used. Outcomes. Vilmos Tarján wanted to turn the Newyork Coffeehouse i...
"Furnishing the Taste for Coffee in Early Modern France"
The Mobility of People and Things in the Early Modern Mediterranean The Art of Travel, 2019
When Arabian coffee reached France in the mid-seventeenth century, it was quickly established as more than just a beverage. Merchants, scholars, and diplomats who brought coffee across the Mediterranean also carried knowledge of an Arab-Ottoman coffee culture of associated objects (pots, cups, trays), practices (rituals of prepara- tion and consumption), and drinking spaces (private residences, public coffeehouses). In these same years, luxury goods imported from other parts of Asia also became fashionable, including Chinese porcelain, Ottoman sofas, and Indian dressing gowns. Soon bundled with coffee in the social imagination, these items became nearly insepa- rable over the next century. Between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centu- ries, scarcity and prohibitive prices drove enterprising individuals to create domestic imitations of these imports using French resources, and to break Yemen’s monopoly on coffee production by starting coffee plantations in French East and West Indian colonies. Nonetheless, consumers persisted in associating coffee with ideas about the exotic East. This essay investigates coffee’s aura of Orientalism by examining the material culture surrounding it in old regime France. Despite ties to turquerie and chinoiserie, the French adoption of coffee culture transformed a Mediterranean import into a domestic French beverage over the course of the eighteenth century.