Why the English country house was also often Jewish

Ten years ago, when Juliet Carey and I first began thinking about Jewish country houses at Waddesdon Manor, minority heritage was only just becoming fashionable. Now, of course, it is all the rage. So much so, that the National Trust finds itself in the crossfires of the so-called “culture wars”.

Meanwhile, in the Jewish world, everything has shifted. First we had Corbyn, and now we are living with the aftermath of October 7. Newspapers like this one are full of stories about how hard it is for British Jews to remain in the cultural mainstream: Jewish actors complain they are forced to operate in an increasingly hostile environment’, books about Jewish subjects are apparently struggling to find publishers, and arthouse cinemas are reluctant to show films about British Jewish life.

Into this world comes Jewish Country Houses: a book that looks establishment but is in fact deeply subversive

This is a book that plays with the country house genre. It’s reassuringly weighty and beautifully illustrated, a size and shape that feels familiar. Except that the photographs in this book, which have been taken by the wonderful Hélène Binet, are touring the country as works of art in their own right.

Instead of showing a collonaded Georgian mansion and manicured lawn, Binet’s mysterious and beautiful cover image transports us to the darkly frescoed interior of Villa La Montesca in Italy. A shaft of intense summer illuminates the stairwell, and beckons us in.

This, it transpires, is not a book about Englishness. It’s a book about what it meant to be a rich Jew during the age of emancipation - a book that takes us beyond the familiar world of high society, hunting and croquet into the darkness of the Holocaust, and beyond. Britain, in this story, is one element in a much larger European narrative. What sets it apart is that in Britain – more than anywhere else – these houses and their owners survived.

Writing in the 1970s, the British-based journalist Chaim Bermant famously described the network of elite families who dominated British Jewry into the 1950s as the “Cousinhood”, repeatedly emphasising their native, English qualities. In writin

g this book, it became clear that these families were also Europeans: they married rich foreign Jews, as well as English ones; owned houses in different countries; and cultivated a sophisticated taste that reflected the cosmopolitan, international milieu in which they move

Importantly, they also served as a model for Jewish elites in other places. The Château de Ferrières in France was built for James de Rothschild by Joseph Paxton of Crystal Palace fame in a blatant attempt to outdo his English cousins. (He succeeded). Schossberger Kastely in Hungary  was inspired by Alfred de Rothschild’s Halton Hall.

When we first started talking about this subject, country house professionals were dubious. Nobody talks about Christian country houses, they moaned. At first we equivocated. To be fair, a lot of the Jews who owned, built and renovated these houses were not really that Jewish. There was the Rothschilds and the Montefiores, but there were also converts like Disraeli, rationalists like Sir Herbert Leon of Bletchley Park, and women like Lady Frances Waldegrave of Strawberry Hill House, who were the Christian daughters of Jewish fathers – but never rejected the stock of which they came.

Gradually, we realised this critique was based on a set of faulty assumptions, like the idea that Jewishness is an exclusive identity. Or the idea that “Jewish taste” – a 19th century antisemitic stereotype – is necessarily extravagant. In other words: bad. Jewish academics were dubious for different reasons. Heritage theory posits that telling marginalised narratives promotes social inclusion, but some Jewish heritage professionals felt we should stick to telling the stories of the Jewish poor – after all, the overwhelming majority of society for most of British Jewish history. Both in Britain and in Italy, they worried that telling the stories of rich Jews would simply confirm well-worn antisemitic stereotypes.

At the time, I was inclined to pooh-pooh this, because I experienced the failure to tell Jewish stories in these houses as a kind of erasure. That feeling hasn’t changed. It applies to countries like France and Germany, where the owners were murdered in the Holocaust, or forced to flee for their lives. But it is also true in Britain, where attacks on the National Trust in recent years only serve to remind us how seriously we take the cult of the English country house. Most people know Waddesdon belonged to a Jewish family – and doesn’t it look bling and foreign? Surprisingly few realise something similar could be said about quintessentially English-seeming properties like Nymans, Ightham Mote and Upton House.

Nevertheless, I can see why Jewish Country Houses might prompt those anxieties. Sometimes I share them, but I hope it proves them wrong. Because this is a book that uses the country house as a medium to confront the uncomfortable relationship between Jewish money, power and antisemitism head on. Now that Jewish Country Houses is out in the world, I know there will be reviews that revert to familiar tropes about Jewish taste and the lost aristocratic idyll of the interwar years. But I like to think they will encourage readers who rarely encounter Jews and don’t think much about them to buy a book that will fascinate and entertain – and teach them something they didn’t know about rich Jews and antisemitism along the way.

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‘Jewish Country Houses’, edited by Juliet Carey and Abgail Green.  Photography by Hélène Binet

‘Discovering Jewish Country Houses: Photographs by Hélène Binet’ is showing at Strawberry Hill House until 8 January 2025, and at Waddesdon Manor from 26 March to 22 June 2025

Country Houses, Jewish Homes is showing in the library of the University of Chester until late January 2025