Jewish Country Houses

Juliet Carey and Abigail Green (ed.) Photography by Hélène Binet.

Through a series of striking case studies this revelatory book explores the world of Jewish country houses, their architecture and collections - and the lives of the extraordinary men and women who created, transformed and shaped them.

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.

Beautifully illustrated with historical images and a new body of work by the celebrated photographer Hélène Binet, this book is the first to tell that 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 Atlantic to the United States, where American Jews infused the European country house tradition with their own distinctive concerns and experiences.

"I learned something new on every beautifully illustrated page. It sets the familiar country house story in a new, Europe-wide landscape, and tells a tale of often tragic splendour. The authors show that these are more than just houses - they are monuments to the long nineteenth-century battle between prejudice and assimilation, played out in magnificent buildings and princely collections". Neil MacGregor

'This is a magnificent work of scholarship – it illuminates complex and ambiguous stories of assimilation and identity with verve and insight'. Edmund de Waal

"An absorbing, richly-textured history that illuminates how the aspirations of an ascendant Jewish elite transformed the traditional notion of the country house from a site of settled privilege into a dynamic microcosm of bold self-inscription - a catalyst for new forms of sociability, patronage, art collecting, and philanthropy. Interweaving a wide array of sources and perspectives from different cultures, these essays explore gripping tales of belonging and rejection, memory and erasure, dispossession and resilience." Esther da Costa Meyer, Professor Emerita Princeton University, The Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor, Institute of Fine Art, New York University