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Jews & Brews
Martin Elliot Jaffe discusses the history and joys of Jewish coffee house culture. ‘One cannot attain presence of mind without the aid of coffee’. These words of Italian Rabbi Hezekiah Da Silva from the early 1600s fueled my immersion into the rich Jewish role in the rise of European coffeehouses and the cultural, political and […]
Napoleon and the Jews of Europe
On the bicentenary of Napoleon’s death, François Guesnet reflects on his relationship with Europe’s Jews. During a stagecoach journey in the north of France in 1799, an agent of the secret police struck up a conversation with a Jewish fellow traveller to find out what he thought of the revolution. The answer was prudent enough: […]