Jewish Country Houses by Juliet Carey & Abigail Green

Jewish Country Houses An exploration of 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. Lavishly illustrated with historical images and a new body of work by the celebrated photographer Hélène Binet, this book 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. ABOUT THE SPEAKERS 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 book, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero and has published widely on aspects of international Jewish history and European political culture. She is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the Jewish Review of Books. Juliet Carey is Senior Curator at Waddesdon Manor, where she is in charge of paintings, sculpture and works on paper and oversees academic collaborations and research. 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 is curating two exhibitions relating to the Jewish Country Houses project – photographs by Hélène Binet and a new commission for Pablo Bronstein.