Jewish Invention Myths: The Coffee Shop
Sometimes jewish invention myths are simply folk myths such as an example is the false claim that jews invented Britian’s iconic national dish of ‘Fish and Chips’ which I have previously debunked. (1)
Another of these types of philo-Semitic folk myths is the idea that the first coffee house in England was opened by a jew named Jacob in the city of Oxford and it was from this that sprang Britain’s famous coffee house culture of the 17th to the 19th centuries.
As Stephen Pollard writes in ‘The Jewish Chronicle’:
‘I was reading this week the non-story of all non-stories, that coffee has overtaken tea as our favourite drink (of course it’s more popular; no serious person would prefer tea to coffee), when I came across one of those factoids that makes life worth living. At the end of the story was this little gem: “The first coffee house was established in Oxford in 1650 by a Jewish man named Jacob, in the building now known as The Grand Café.”
Chalk up another one on the board.’ (2)
Now Pollard isn’t being dishonest here in the sense that this is a commonly believed myth since ‘Old Spike Roastery’ makes a similar claim:
‘The first record coffee house in England was opened by a Turkish man by the name of Jacob in the Angel in Oxfordshire in 1652. This was swiftly followed by the first in London in that same year, established by a Greek man by the name of Pasqua Rosee at St Michael’s Alley, Cornhill.’ (3)
And ‘The History of London’ repeats a not dissimilar claim albeit with a different date of 1650 rather than 1652:
‘The first coffee house in England was established by a Turkish Jew named Jacob at the Angel in Oxford in 1650, in the building now known as the Grand Café, during the time of the Commonwealth when the sale of alcohol was banned by the puritan government. Two years later another opened in London at St. Michael’s Alley off Cornhill, with the coffee probably imported by Daniel Edwards, who traded in Turkish goods. It was managed by his Dalmatian servant Pasqua Rosée and known as Pasqua Rosée’s Head.’ (4)
Now the problem with all this is that it is myth as the historian of coffee houses Markman Ellis explained in detail in his 2004 history of them:
‘Not only was this the first London coffee-house, it was the first in Christendom. Reliable evidence of when it opened does not exist, although it was certainly before 1654 and perhaps as early as 1652, the date asserted by many later authorities, for which there is some corroborating evidence. The picture is confused by a rival claim, which has very little credibility. In 1671, nearly twenty years after the events he describes, the Oxford antiquarian Anthony Wood stated that public coffee selling was initiated in Oxford in 1650.
There is much reason to suppose this date imprecise. In the earliest version of Wood’s diary, written up to the end of 1659 and now in the British Library, he merely claims that coffee was first consumed in private in Oxford in 1650, and at in unstated date between 10 August 1654 and 25 April 1655 adds that coffee was ‘publickly solde at or neare the Angel within the East Gate of Oxon … by an outlander or a Jew’. In 1671 Wood redrafted his diary, now called his ‘Secretum Antonii’, a document held in the Bodleian Library. In this revision he claims that ‘Jacob a Jew opened a coffey house at the Angel in the parish of S.Peter, in the East Oxon’ and that ‘When he left Oxon he sold it in Old Southampton buildings in Holborne neare London’, a building first constructed in 1664. In the late nineteenth century this undated addition was conjecturally dated by Wood’s editor Andrew Clark at ‘March 1651’, but there is no evidence to support this earlier date. No positive evidence – such as building leases or licences issued by regulatory authorities – has come to light to back up these assertions, but nonetheless most authorities have accepted Oxford’s claim. Much better evidence can be found for Pasqua Rosee’s coffee-house in London.’ (5)
Ellis’ argument is not contested since Zurdo Serrano among others agrees. (6) His point that the basis for this the argument for a jewish coffee house in Oxford is an unsubstantiated later claim and that there is no actual evidence on which to base that claim unlike Pasqua Rosee’s coffee-house in London.
Therefore, we can reasonably say that the idea that the coffee house was a jewish creation in England is complete nonsense since the first coffee house was created by Pasqua Rosee and Daniel Edwards in London and the claim of ‘Jacob the Jew’s’ Oxford coffee house is a later myth probably started – to make a personal conjecture – because Anthony Wood – as an early Oxford don - wanted to make culture flow from Oxford not London not the other way around.
Scratch another jewish invention myth.
References
(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/is-the-origin-of-fish-and-chips-jewish
(2) https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/did-you-know-that-jews-invented-everything-g0z36e86
(3) https://oldspikeroastery.com/blogs/blog/history-of-london-coffee-houses
(4) https://www.thehistoryoflondon.co.uk/coffee-houses/
(5) Markman Ellis, 2004, ‘The Coffee House: A Cultural History’, 1st Editon, Phoenix: London, pp. 32-33
(6) Marta Zurdo Serrano, 2017, ‘The Birth and Development of British Newspapers in the Coffee Houses’, Publicaciones Didacticas, Vol. 89, p. 106