Jewish Country Houses

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.