A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture
by Shachar M Pinsker
The Digital Humanities began in Vienna cafés — notably the Arkaden — where a group of student philosophers and mathematicians worked out, for the first time, the power and the limitations of the computer. They had no interest at all in making machines: they were interested in those limitations.
I’m not sure Pinsker knows this story: he is more interested in the literary debates that went on at the other tables. But they’re part of the story, too: those students (mostly guys, but also a couple of young women) met at cafés because that is where you argued about ideas. And they were used to arguing about ideas because they were university students, and because they were Jews.
Everyone knows about those Vienna cafés, but that cafés were Jewish spaces was news to me. That so many of these students were Jews would have been, I think, news to them: they weren't religious, they weren’t observant, and their parents’ Judaism was, for some at least, a quaint family detail, of no importance. The world was about to prove them wrong, but they didn’t know that, not yet.