Jewish culture played an important role in the life of the town, which had one of the biggest Jewish populations in Europe.
The Austrian writer Joseph Roth, exiled due to his opposition to the Nazi regime, lived at Thiais at the end of the 1930s and is buried at the local cemetery.
Joseph Stalin | Joseph Conrad | Saint Joseph | Joseph Haydn | Joseph Beuys | Joseph | Joseph Goebbels | Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor | Joseph Barbera | Philip Roth | Joseph Chamberlain | Joseph Brodsky | Franz Joseph I of Austria | Joseph Henry Blackburne | Joseph Banks | Joseph McCarthy | Joseph II | Joseph Campbell | Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat | Joseph Priestley | Joseph Bonaparte | Joseph Pulitzer | Joseph Stiglitz | Joseph Paxton | Joseph Addison | Joseph Rothrock | Joseph Losey | Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister | Joseph Story | Joseph Whitworth |
Regular guests of the Café in the early twentieth century included: Peter Altenberg, Alban Berg, Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Karl Kraus, Franz Lehár, Robert Musil, Leo Perutz, Joseph Roth, Roda Roda, Egon Schiele, Georg Trakl, Otto Wagner and Franz Werfel.
In 1988, his La leggenda del santo bevitore (The Legend of the Holy Drinker), based on the novel by Joseph Roth and starring Rutger Hauer, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival as well as a David di Donatello award.
Their story is crossed by others from their circle, Heinrich's brother Thomas Mann, his sister Carla, friends Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth and Kurt Tucholsky, and beyond them, the writers Egon Kisch and Else Lasker-Schüler, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Virginia Woolf and Nettie Palmer among others.
Over the years it was prominent enough to attract such internationally famous contributors as Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Alfred Polgar, Ferenc Molnár, Dezső Kosztolányi, Egon Erwin Kisch, Bertha von Suttner, Franz Werfel and Felix Salten.