Journal of the History of Ideas

The article explores the shifting meanings and unstable boundaries of a specifically Jewish “modernity” that came into existence in fin-de-siècle Budapest. It argues that contemporary understandings of the modern were encoded within discourses about the coffee house, which was simultaneously seen as the site of immorality and instability; as well as the space where literary culture and urban identities were produces. The article concludes that the conditions of possibility for Budapest modernity came to an end with the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, when Hungary changed from a multi-ethnic state into a homogeneous nation.