Country houses are powerful symbols of national identity, evoking the glamorous world of the landowning aristocracy. Jewish country houses—properties that were owned, built, or renewed by Jews—tell a more complex story of prejudice and integration, difference and connection. Many had spectacular art collections and gardens. Some were stages for lavish entertaining, while others inspired the European avant-garde. A few are now museums of international importance, many more are hidden treasures, and all were beloved homes that bear witness to the remarkable achievements of newly emancipated Jews across Europe—and to a dream of belonging that mostly came to a brutal end with the Holocaust.
Lavishly illustrated with historical images and a new body of work by the celebrated photographer Hélène Binet, Jewish Country Houses is the first to tell their story, from the playful historicism of the National Trust’s Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire to the modernist masterpiece that is the Villa Tugendhat in the Czech city of Brno – and across the pond to the United States, where American Jews infused the European country house tradition with their own distinctive concerns and experiences. This book emerges from a four-year research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council that aims to establish Jewish country houses as a focus for research, a site of European memory, and a significant aspect of European Jewish heritage and material culture.
Join us for a discussion of Jewish Country Houses with editors Juliet Carey and Abigail Green.
Juliet Carey is Senior Curator at Waddesdon Manor, where she is in charge of paintings, sculpture and works on paper. She has curated exhibitions and published on subjects including Elizabethan portraits and French drawings, Guercino, Chardin, Gainsborough and Gustave Moreau, Sèvres porcelain and Edmund de Waal. This year she has curated two exhibitions relating to the Jewish Country Houses project – photographs by Hélène Binet and Pablo Bronstein: the Temple of Solomon and its Contents (opening July 16th).
Abigail Green is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Brasenose College. She is author of the award-winning Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero, which was a TLS Book of the year, and a New Republic Best Book of 2010, and a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. Her next book, to be published by Princeton UP, will tell the story of the Jewish revolutionaries who made European liberalism, and their children – who took that tradition into the twentieth century and across the Atlantic. She has led the Jewish Country Houses project since its inception.