It has been a millennium since Ethiopians discovered the stimulating effects of chewing the berries of native coffee trees and exported them to Yemen, where Sufi Muslims learned to roast and brew them into a tasty hot drink. The drink immediately caught on, says Gil Marks in his Encyclopedia of Jewish Cooking: Not only did it serve as a social substitute for alcohol, which is forbidden in Islam, but it kept the Sufis awake during their evening prayers.

 Coffee, which often has added sugar to counter its bitter taste, quickly spread throughout the Ottoman Empire. Religious Jews, like Muslims, drank it to stay awake during their nightly devotions, says Israeli history professor Elliott Horowitz in his article "Coffee, Coffeehouses, and the Nocturnal Rituals of Early Modern Jewry." “Coffee, Horowitz explains, has expanded the opportunities for usage during night hours, whether for pious or profane purposes." But at the same time, the new drink sparked a debate in the Jewish world. Was it kosher? (Yes). Should it be considered as a medicine? (No). What blessing should be said on this drink? (Shehakol, the all-encompassing blessing.)

During the centuries preceding home coffee machines, most people tasted this new drink in coffeehouses, the first of which opened in Constantinople around 1550, then in Damascus, Mecca and Cairo. This led to another question: Can Jews drink coffee in non-Jewish establishments? While David ibn Abi Zimra, a Cairo Rabbi, ruled in 1553 that Jews could drink coffee prepared by a non-Jew, he also warned them against coffeehouses and told them to have their coffee “delivered home.”

Nevertheless, it was a Jew who exported this new kind of drinking establishment to Europe, opening the first coffeehouse in Livorno (Italy) in 1632. In 1650, a Lebanese Jew known as "Jacob the Jew" founded the first English coffeehouse in Oxford. Sephardic Jews, many of whom also became coffee traders, were quickly followed by Armenian and Greek traders who brought coffeehouses to the Netherlands and France. But the process was not always smooth: Verona authorities forbade Jews from hosting "women of any religion" in their coffeehouses.

Meanwhile, in post-medieval Germany, according to the late Israeli historian Robert Liberles, the authorities tried to restrict Jewish coffee trade, because they feared that the new drink would threaten the flourishing beer industry. "My people must drink beer," proclaimed Frederick the Great.

In the nineteenth century, the coffeehouses of Berlin, Vienna, Budapest and Prague will be at the forefront of societal change. Vienna's 'coffee culture' will turn into an incubator for the Jewish intelligentsia: leading figures such as the writer Stefan Zweig, psychologist Alfred Adler and young journalist and playwright Theodore Herzl, will be among those who were sipping coffee in the Austrian capital. Zweig once described the scene as "a sort of democratic club, open to everyone for the price of a cheap cup of coffee, where every guest can sit for hours with this little offering, to talk, write, play cards, receive mail, and read an unlimited number of newspapers and magazines. “

"Coffeehouses became egalitarian meeting places where people exchanged ideas," says Mark Pendergrast, author of the 2010 book Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. "The American and French revolutions have fostered in coffeehouses, Lloyds Insurance Company of London originated in Lloyds’ Coffeehouse; the creativity of Bach and Beethoven was fueled by coffee," he says, adding that coffee also had a dark side. "It was cultivated by slaves, whether they were abused native from the East Indies or real slaves brought from Africa to the West Indies and Brazil. "

In America, coffee consumption flourished thanks to the Boston Tea Party, which made it unpatriotic to drink tea. When European Jews arrived in the 19th century, they brought coffee cake, inspired by the German kaffeekuchen and streussel, which quickly replaced the English teacake. They also entered the coffee trade in cities like San Francisco, New Orleans and Tucson. "Jews found that trading and peddling were commercial areas open to them, so they plied their trade in seaport cities dealing with coffee as a commodity,” says Donald Schoenholt, president of Gillies Coffee Company in New York, the oldest coffee company in the country, founded in 1840 and bought by Schoenholt's grandfather in the first half of the 20th century.

The New York market was particularly competitive. Joseph Martinson, an immigrant from Latvia, first sold his beans from a cart on the Lower East Side, and then opened a factory on Water Street in Manhattan in 1898. In the 1930s, he had built a thriving business delivering large hotels and restaurants, making deliveries in Rolls Royce trucks and soon developing ramifications with Martinson's Coffee to sell retail boxes. His rival and neighbor, located on Water Street, was another Jew, Samuel Schonbrunn, who produced the high-quality Savarin brand served at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. A later guest on the market was William Black, whose nut stores became Chock Full o 'Nuts coffee shops. Some of these brands were bought out by larger businesses, but Schoenholt and a number of other old Jewish families remain in the coffee business, mostly producing luxury brands.

These companies fought one another for the non-Jewish market and also for Jews, because many mistakenly believed that coffee was a bean that could not be eaten during Pesach. In 1923, this led Joseph Jacobs, director of one of New York's first Jewish advertising agencies, to find an Orthodox rabbi who ruled that coffee was a berry and certified that the Maxwell House coffee (produced by the non-Jewish General Foods) was Kosher for passover. Jacobs went even further and in the early 1930s brought the company to distribute free Haggadot, printed with illustrations and ads. Some 50 million copies have been printed since then, in what has been called the longest-running sales promotion in the history of advertising.

In recent decades, American coffee culture has been reinvented by

Starbucks, which was acquired in 1987 by Howard Schultz, a Brooklyn-born Jew. Interestingly enough, Israel, where coffee is also highly present, has resisted the Starbucks lure; the famous coffeeshops were disliked in the Jewish state. Even before the founding of the state, Israel was a strong coffee scene; members of the underground Haganah forces would meet at the Atara coffeeshop in Jerusalem, as well as writers such as Shai Agnon. For a long time, there were only two widely available options: Nescafé, from the Nestlé brand, the generic term in Israel for "instant coffee" and a thick Turkish coffee known as "botz", which means mud. Today, “café hafuch” (the name means "upside-down coffee"), referring to the overwhelming ratio of milk to coffee, dominates the booming local café scene. Coffee shops line the streets as in the popular Emek Refaim in the Mochava Hagermanite district of Jerusalem. But instead of Starbucks, Israel coffee lovers prefer a homegrown chain of cafés, appropriately named Aroma.