This is a magnificent work of scholarship – it illuminates complex and ambiguous stories of assimilation and identity with verve and insight.
Menu
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.
This is a magnificent work of scholarship – it illuminates complex and ambiguous stories of assimilation and identity with verve and insight.
Edmund de Waal
This is a magnificent work of scholarship – it illuminates complex and ambiguous stories of assimilation and identity with verve and insight.
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.
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.
This lusciously illustrated book provides an essential tour of the Jewish country houses of Europe and the UK. Each of the thirteen essays furnishes an authoritative understanding of a specific house and uses a combination of new and historic images to showcase the lives of the inhabitants and the homes' rich interiors. The final essay compares this tradition to Jewish American country houses. A must-have book for anyone interested in elegant houses or Jewish history.
Founded in 1971, Brandeis University Press is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to publishing innovative, high-quality books for a general audience, as well as scholarship that advances knowledge and promotes dialogue in the humanities, arts, and social sciences around the world.
© Copyright 2024, Brandeis University Press
Brandeis University Press
Goldfarb Library 69-235, MS 046
Brandeis University
415 South Street
Waltham, MA 02453
(781) 736-4547
pressinfo@brandeis.edu
Stay up to date with the newest titles and promotions from Brandeis University Press—while saving 20% on your first purchase.
