The best cafés, I learned there, were the ones that the old-timers sighed over, the Herrenhof in Vienna, the Romanisches in Berlin and the Garden Cafeteria at 165 East Broadway, on New York’s Lower East Side, where Isaac Bashevis Singer weaved his tales. The best cafés, in other words, exist in a mist of aromatic memory to sustain our weakened civilization through cardboard slurps at Starbucks.

Shachar M. Pinsker, a Hebrew scholar at the University of Michigan, believes that cafés in six cities created modern Jewish culture. It’s the kind of claim that sounds as if it might be a game-changer, and there are enough grounds and gossip in “A Rich Brew” to keep this customer engrossed from cup to cup, pausing only to note a couple of nagging omissions, not least the lamented Alaska.

Mr. Pinsker gets percolating at Signor Fanconi’s establishment in Odessa, an Italian café where women were unwelcome and Jews periodically excluded. The young Sholem Aleichem, arriving penniless from Kiev in 1891, found a marble table in the corner and started writing short stories that become the bedrock of Yiddish literature. What else went on in a Black Sea café? They “talk politics day and night . . . read newspapers from all over the world . . . and speculate on currencies and stocks,” writes Mr. Pinsker, drawing on letters of the cafe’s habitués. Isaac Babel found Fanconi’s “packed like a synagogue on Yom Kippur.” It got shut down by Lenin’s commissars.

The cafés of Warsaw, seedier by far, were literary incubators. One owner forced a pamphlet he had just written on new patrons. A writer would start scribbling at Kotik’s and graduate as soon as he could afford it to the Ostrowski or the Bristol (later to be Gestapo headquarters). Warsaw had cabaret cafés. One of them, Café Sztuka, astonishingly stayed open under Nazi rule, becoming the “most popular establishment in the ghetto,” according to Mr. Pinsker. “Be careful not to step on a corpse,” a departing customer was warned.

PHOTO: WSJ

Viennese Coffeehouse Culture was recognized by Unesco in 2011 as “an intangible cultural heritage.” The Turks spilled beans at the gates of the city in 1683. By 1900, Vienna had 1,000 cafés, and it was proverbially said that “the Jew belongs in the coffeehouse.” The signature habitué was the poet Peter Altenberg, who had his mail delivered to the Café Central, care of the head waiter. Leon Trotsky plotted Russian Revolution from a corner of the Central.

In one Berlin café between the wars you might find the future movie director Billy Wilder jostling for space with the philosopher Walter Benjamin, while the novelist and physician Alfred Döblin dispensed free medical treatment to poets. All human life was there. Jewish cafés in New York were no less cultural. Strunsky’s on Second Avenue advertised itself as “the prettiest restaurant on the East Side, where the artists gather.” Café Royal was where playwrights awaited their reviews. Herrick’s caused a scandal by opening on the Day of Atonement. Among the copious illustrations in Mr. Pinsker’s book is a treasurable photograph of the classic New York Jewish café pose—a laid-back slouch, one arm flung over the back of the chair.

The most lyrical chapter in “A Rich Brew” is devoted to Tel Aviv, a town founded on sand dunes in 1909 and relying on Arab coffeehouses in neighboring Jaffa until Dizengoff Street woke up and smelled the coffee. The signature Tel Aviv cafés were the Rowal and the Cassit, both staying open until dawn to allow émigré writers to conclude their disputations. The poet Leah Goldberg, in a feuilleton from the mid-1940s, reimagined her regular café there as a tragic aviary: “Each bird shows in its face a mark of the past with a foreign landscape and longing for the world it had to leave.” Goldberg, whose student I would become, lived around the corner from her café; it was her second home.

Seldom have I accepted a scholarly premise as trustingly as I did Mr. Pinsker’s notion that Jewish culture was born in a café. If it wasn’t, it probably should have been. Still, by confining himself to six cities, he worryingly overlooks the cafés of Budapest, where Jews pioneered photography and nuclear science, and Bucharest, whose literati designated it “the Paris of the south.”

And then there is Paris. How could anyone forget Paris? Its cafés were battlegrounds of the Dreyfus Affair, each side encamped in partisan locales. The post-1945 philosophical revivals led by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida began in cafés around the Marais. Most seminal of all, and much earlier, a Lithuanian student called Eliezer Ben-Yehuda sat down with a friend at an outdoor café on the Boulevard Montmartre on a summer’s day in 1881 and conducted the first modern conversation in Hebrew, converting the language for contemporary use and establishing the vernacular of the state of Israel. It was either the Lapin Fou or the Chat Noir, according to my research. Alas, neither café has put up a plaque.

Mr. Lebrecht is the author of “Why Mahler ? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World.”