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. Everyone knows, of course, that a Jew invented fish and chips (Joseph Malin, an immigrant, opened the first chippy in 1860 in London). And thanks to this summer’s blockbuster, everyone also knows what Oppenheimer invented (if you need me to tell you, try Google — also invented by Jews).
Thing is, when I find a new one like the coffee house, I am never surprised. I’m inclined, you see, to think that Jews invented everything. Blame the parents; like many of us, I was brought up with a running commentary to every TV programme pointing out — or just guessing — which of the actors was Jewish. I think that must have seeped into my general consciousness because now I treat most of the world around me in the same way.
(And I am now inflicting the same thing on my children, although we have invented an inversion of it by pointing out in supposedly Jewish programmes such as Friday Night Dinner which of the actors aren’t Jewish.)
But the thing is, if you play the Jewish inventions game, the chances are you’ll win easily.
Talking of the kids, it was two Jews who invented the teddy bear. Morris and Rose Michtom, who owned a sweetshop in Brooklyn, made a stuffed toy bear in honour of Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, after the then president famously went on a bear-hunting trip but didn’t find any. A cartoonist turned the trip into satire and when the Michtoms saw it, they made “Teddy’s Bear”.
In the olden days, when we wrote things on that archaic relic known as paper, we used a biro, invented by Hungarian Jew László Bíró.
Now, of course, we use phones instead. Who came up with the technology behind mobiles? Engineers at Motorola’s Israel research and development centre. And who first had the idea of using your phone to send a picture? French Jew Philippe Kahn was sitting in hospital looking at his newborn baby and wanted to send a picture to his family there and then. He wrote some code on his laptop, synchronised it with his Motorola mobile phone and a digital camera and bingo.
Cardiologist Paul Zoll invented both the pacemaker and the defibrillator, while scientist Paul Berg came up with the first recombinant DNA molecules, which laid the groundwork for GM foods and other forms of genetic engineering.
We (almost) invented stainless steel. German chemist Hans Goldschmidt first produced carbon-free chromium in 1893. He then patented the thermite reaction, which as an alloy of more than 10 per cent chromium enabled stainless steel to be created in the early 1900s.
You could argue that we invented capitalism — or, if you’re being pedantic, named it — when economist David Ricardo coined the word in his On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation in 1817.
But my favourite is the Jewish Space Laser.
Remember how, a couple of years ago, we all laughed at the eminently laughable US Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, after someone unearthed a 2018 Facebook post of hers? She had suggested that a laser in space funded by the Rothschilds could have concentrated the sun’s energy and created a solar beam that set fire to parts of California. The phrase Jewish Space Laser became a thing.
Well, now… on May 16, 1960, the Jewish American physicist Theodore Maiman fired the first laser, based on (er, do I need to say Jewish?) Einstein’s theories. According to accounts of his experiments, he fired his new laser in all sorts of directions. I like to think that one of those directions was into space. Yes, it would have been in the opposite direction to Sen Taylor Greene’s suggestion — but, heh, it would still have been an actual Jewish Space Laser.
