The history of Cairo’s Jewish community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is a history of migration and embourgeoisement. As a community of relatively recent immigrants to Egypt, moving up the social ladder shaped their habitus: their choice of occupation and business, their choice of education, their choice of neighborhood, the languages they chose to learn and speak, the social codes they chose to practice, how they worshiped and externalized their Jewishness, even their political choices. These choices also needed to be publicly performed, not only for affirming their social status, but also for achieving it. As the primary place for socializing and networking, there were no better places in which to perform that social status than the city’s coffeehouses: they were a crucible for the emerging Egyptian middle-class, or effendiyyah, during that time. Examining how Egyptian Jews partook in the social culture of those and other urban spaces in the capital shows the lengths that they went to in order to move up that social hierarchy and to integrate within that Egyptian middle-class. This paper argues that for Egyptian Jews, this embourgeoisement held a powerful promise of equality and assimilation, equally or even more powerful than official promises of equal citizenship, or nationalist and communist promises of religious-blind equality. Moreover, examining the performance of middle-class culture in Cairo’s coffeehouses shows that the so-called Cosmopolitan culture of the Egyptian Jewish bourgeoisie, in contrast to the notions of diversity and pluralism that it conjures, was rather robust and homogenized, and was part of, rather than stood against, Egyptian effendi culture. Thus, attention to social hierarchy and habitus has the strong potential of writing Jews back into the history of the Egyptian effendiyyah, and writing effendis back into the history of Egyptian cosmopolitanism.