Coffee in the Pesach Haggadah

Coffee and the Haggadah seem to have been linked eternally though the yearly Haggadot issued by Maxwell House. Who doesn't own, use, know about the Maxwell Haggadah, a Jewish icon and the ultimate marketing gimmick? But this post is not about the Maxwell Haggadah but rather about the question when coffee was first mentioned in the Haggadah.

Although people will automatically assume that the earliest mention of coffee coincides with the appearance of the first Maxwell Haggadah (1932), it was actually much earlier. The second translator of the Haggadah into English was David Levi. His 1794 (London) translation was a big improvement on the very first English translation, produced by Alexander Alexander in 1770 (London). In 1808, a nowadays completely unknown editor by the name of Isaac Levi, took David Levi's translation and changed it considerably (also in London). And although David Levi's name would appear on numerous English Haggadah title pages (including the first Haggadah printed in the US), all post-1808 English Haggadah with David Levi's name actually used Isaac Levi's (edited) translation instead.

Isaac made many profound and sometimes radical changes to David Levi's translation. Some were lexical, others stylistic. There were also orthographic, syntactic and ideological changes. Mistakes made by Isaac were blindly copied for decades by publishers believing to use the renowned David Levi's translation instead. Some of the changed can be explained historically. For example, one of the things I found while comparing David Levi's translations with Isaac's editing job, was the following:

In 1794 David Levi writes in his instructions:

"After which they may not eat or drink anything for the remainder of the night except water."

In 1808 Isaac Levi changes David's instructions into:

"After which they may not eat or drink any thing for the remainder of the night except water, tea, or coffee."

As always, Isaac's change was copied by later Haggadah translators so that we find coffee in the first Haggadah printed in the US in 1837, in the Haggadah published in Times in 1840, in Schlesinger Haggadot printed in Vienna and in a WWI Haggadah for Jewish soldiers serving in India, printed in Calcutta. But why did Isaac add tea and coffee as permitted drinks? And why in 1808?

Shimon Soreq-Soester pointed out to me that the Be'er Heitev already writes that one is permitted to drink water, tea and coffee after the Afikoman. The Be'er Heitev for Orach Chayim was written by the German Rabbi Yehudah ben Shimon Ashkenazi (1730–1770), long before David Levi created his translation. But even though there was already a written halacha allowing this, he did not include this while Isaac did. By the way, it is no coincident that it was a German Rabbi who first mentions coffee in this context as Germany itself was the first European country to make mention of coffee in print (Leonhard Rauwolf, 1582).

Coffee drinking was introduced all over Europe in the late 17th century, first by royalty, then by aristocrats, then the rich started to drink it but it would take more than a century before the poor could afford it. Initially most coffee was drunk in coffee houses and not at home. Coffee beans needed to be roasted, ground and brewed, not something everyone could easily do. But this changed with the invention of the first commercial coffee maker, "Mr. Biggin", which was first released in 1780. Metal filters and improved filter pots were patented in France in 1802 and in 1806 the French patented a drip pot that filtered the coffee without boiling. These improvements enabled housewives to prepare coffee at home and it became quickly a household drink.

It is therefore exactly the period in-between David Levi's initial translation and Isaac's edited version that saw a sharp increase in home-made coffee and therefore worth mentioning in the Haggadah as an allowed drink after the afikoman. This might have moved Isaac to mention it. However, on the other hand, there might be another, until now unidentified, factor that influenced Isaac to do so. Below I present the title page of the Haggadah Isaac edited and Hyam Barnett published: