Jewish Country Houses
edited by Juliet Carey and Abigail Green
(Profile Books/Brandeis University Press)
On the British sitcom To the Manor Born (1979-1981), a posh and haughty Englishwoman named Audrey fforbes-Hamilton finds herself widowed and financially obliged to sell her stately home in the countryside and move into a none-too-shabby outbuilding. The buyer is one Richard DeVere, proprietor of Cavendish Foods, previously residing in London. A new-money tycoon. The nerve of him, buying property that rightfully belongs to the aristocracy!
Richard may be self-made, but he wants to do right by his new environs. He just hasn’t a clue how to take on that role. If you’ve ever watched a TV show before, you can guess where this is headed. Audrey and Richard become a couple, thereby fusing old money and new.
New, and suspect: Richard, it turns out, was born Bedřich Polouvicek. While he seems every bit the British gentleman, Richard’s roots are exposed whenever his clingy, heavily accented mother shows up. “We came over in 1939, from Czechoslovakia,” Mrs. Polouvicek informs a horrified Audrey, who had until that point thought the elderly woman was Richard’s maid. “Do you mean he isn’t English at all?” Audrey’s husband is not just new money, but an obscenely wealthy Eastern European foreigner.
Is he meant to be, you know…?
Richard DeVere is not an explicitly Jewish character. Jewish-coded, though, is no stretch: the character is likely based on Sir James Goldsmith, of Cavenham Foods, a member of the Rothschild-associated Goldschmidt family.
The message the show sends is that you can buy your way into the gentry, but only if you abide by its traditions and find an aristocrat prepared to fall in love with you. Acceptance is possible but must be coaxed over the course of many episodes. You can’t just pay up, move in, and expect that this would be enough.
As in sitcoms, so too in real life.
“Country houses conferred on their inhabitants a significant position in the local community—sometimes even stewardship of its affairs.” So explains the collaborative introduction of Jewish Country Houses, a collection published late last year that is part academic anthology and part coffee-table book. Prior to emancipation, European Jews were, with rare exceptions, barred from property ownership, kept out of many professions, and otherwise legally constrained. The lifting of these legal restrictions did not immediately bring about social or economic integration, but in time some Jews became, in effect and sometimes in fact, aristocracy. What did it mean that a Jew could become a member of any part of mainstream society, including lord or lady of the manor?
The prospect of wealthy Jews displacing old-stock European nobility would come to be one of the main anxieties animating modern Western antisemitism. What could be more urgent, then, than a book about the Jews who did just that?
Edited by curator Juliet Carey and historian Abigail Green (herself descended from the Sebag-Montefiore family), with photographs by Hélène Binet, the thesis of Jewish Country Houses— if you can say a book this massive, complicated, and multi-authored has a thesis—is that manor houses can function as a site of resistance. Yes, the book is about rich people owning unfathomably lavish homes, but it was also, as Green told The Forward, “subversive” for Jews to be feudal landlords—indeed to be landowners at all.
This invoking of subversiveness in the context of something deeply conventional (admiring enormous, beautifully appointed houses) reminded me of filmmaker Greta Gerwig’s much-quoted remark about her approach to making the Barbie movie, “I’m doing the thing and subverting the thing.” The film is intended as both a feminist critique of the dolls and a promo for those same items.
Much like the homeowners themselves, Jewish Country Houses does the thing and subverts it. The book is to the country-estate coffee-table book what a Jewish tour of Europe is to a generic European tourist holiday. You can read the text and get an education on modern Jewish history, or you can flip through the art photos and gawk. The book’s audience is anyone who possesses both a desire to look at and enjoy the continent’s beauty and an irrepressible awareness of how things went, in Europe, for its Jews. The Holocaust, but not just: “This is not simply a book about country houses,” the editors write in the introduction, “it is also a book about Jewish memory in post-Holocaust Europe.”
The sombre cover image evokes the darkness of the history. But in a way, paradoxically, the subversiveness of the project encourages a kind of guilt-free appreciation of the luxury it depicts. A usual response to gazing at splendour along those lines—that ineffable mixture of wishing your own home looked like that, and resentment at the unjust world in which some have multiple palaces and others no homes at all—starts to seem beside the point when you read the stories of families losing their properties and, in many cases, their lives.
Jewish Country Houses is a multilayered book, serving a variety of purposes. One is an ode to the beautiful homes themselves, hauntingly captured by Binet. It’s a richly illustrated book, one with its very own gold bookmark ribbon, with paintings and renderings of the houses and their inhabitants, and photos of other historic artifacts. An 1881 painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pink and Blue (Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers), depicts two little girls, members of one of the upscale families profiled. (They had been Cahens but, writes curator Alice S. Legé, “acquired a new and aspirational surname”—one rooting them in the French spelling of Antwerp, as befits a family commissioning paintings from Renoir.) Their outfits are the indirect aesthetic inspiration for what my own young daughters wear from H&M today, all pastel and tulle. It’s a pretty, inoffensive painting, the sort that could be up in a waiting room and you wouldn’t think anything of it. A caption explains what came of them: “Alice, on the left, married a British army officer; Elisabeth died on the way to Auschwitz in 1944.”
The text, individual essays by different historians and curators, tells the story of families who seemingly had everything—until the tide turned against Jews and everything was not, in many cases, enough. Moreover, here were the very Jews doing the most to be ‘rooted.’ Even they weren’t safe.
The symbolic significance of Jewish manor-house ownership prompted nineteenth century antisemites to rail about Jews’ displacement of the aristocracy. Alphonse Toussenel’s 1845 Les Juifs, rois de l’époque (The Jews, Kings of the Age), a foundational text of socialist antisemitism, is among the earlier and better-known examples. It is cited in the chapter on James de Rothschild’s Château de Ferrières—a house that inspired criticisms not dissimilar to those made these days of so-called McMansions. Big and ornate, but distasteful, some felt, and not in keeping with any existing style. “The underlying theme of this château,” writes Pauline Prevost-Marcilhacy, who researches the Rothschilds, “is regal power, wielded not by a conventional monarch but by James himself, defiantly subverting antisemitic attacks on his influence and position.”
This specific anxiety—about wealthy Jews becoming Europe’s new aristocracy—kept pamphleteers busy. The daughters of Jewish bankers were marrying decadent aristocrats! New money had replaced that which was genteel and gentile. Per the introduction of Jewish Country Houses, “As the wealth of the landed aristocracy waned, they looked to marriage with members of the industrial and financial elite, including Jews, as a means by which dilapidated estates could be returned to their former glory.” Not everyone loved this. Antisemites, for example. The old Christian nobility may have been a much-despised elite (recall the 1789 French Revolution), but they were part of a known system; Jews were interlopers. (Insofar as nineteenth century antisemites understood Jews as being ‘from’ anywhere, it would either have been wherever a Jews’ family had last lived, or Palestine, in the pre-1948 sense of ‘Go back to Palestine.’) Nor was this sentiment confined to Europe: an American “postscript” reveals just how much exclusion Jewish Americans faced in high society during these years. A country doesn’t need an entrenched aristocracy to come up with its own old-money versus new-and-foreign-money distinctions.
Jewish Country Houses is a brilliant and beautiful book whose complexity I fear I cannot do justice to as a reviewer—this despite knowing the history of French Jewish dynasties from doctoral research, and the interiors of British manor houses from such shows as Downton Abbey and Midsomer Murders. I had no idea that Highclere Castle, where Downton was filmed, had been “lived in and renovated by Alfred de Rothschild’s illegitimate daughter, Almina,” but could not be more here for this information.
The family stories are all interesting in their own ways, but the standout is author Helen Fry’s chapter about the Sassoon family manse becoming the site of Second World War espionage and covert gay gatherings. High-ranking Nazi prisoners of war got a bit too comfortable in the manor house lavishly hosting them, didn’t realize the place was bugge —and what do you know, the Allies won the war.
Every project asserting a Jewish theme—every Jewish Studies syllabus, every Jewish publication—has its own way of defining what constitutes Jewish subject matter. Will only practising Jews be included in a study? Only those active in community organizations? In the case of Jewish Country Houses, subjects include observant Jews and secular Jews, philanthropists supporting Jewish causes, as well as those without communal ties. This strikes me as both correct and, given the subject matter, inevitable. Jews of different sorts owned stately homes, and the goal is a greater understanding of how European Jews lived.
I was less persuaded by the choice to include the homes of converts from Judaism to Christianity and their never-Jewish spouses. Were these “Jewish country houses” properly understood? Indeed, I did not expect to find Victorian prime minister Benjamin Disraeli’s estate, Hughenden Manor, included. Disraeli’s childhood baptism was a pragmatic conversion, but Disraeli was not privately practicing Judaism. “Benjamin never forgot his Jewish heritage,” writes Hughenden custodian Robert Bandy, in a chapter that also includes evidence of the pains Disraeli’s antisemitic contemporaries took to make sure he remembered it. If other people see you as a Jew, but you say you’re something else, who gets the determining vote?
I suppose Country Houses of People Antisemites Saw as Jews and Who Might Have Also Seen Themselves as Jewish would have been too clunky a title. But that’s a more precise way of looking at it. The overarching fact about all these people was that the world around them saw them as Jews, regardless of whether they were regulars at the synagogue or churchgoers with a secret. Nino Strachey—a historian related to her subject—writes, of Frances Waldegrave, Strawberry Hill’s owner, “Regardless of her mother’s ancestry, or the faith in which she and her four successive husbands had been raised, Frances figured as the Jewish Lady Waldegrave, her good reputation held perpetually in balance against the weight of hostile prejudice.” This is the story, then, of obstacles on the road to full assimilation.
Strachey’s chapter includes a section called “Asserting her Jewish identity”—thereby claiming that this is a thing Frances did. This assertion consisted of, among other faint hints, a painting of Masada by a non-Jewish artist (Edward Lear) and a portrait of her own father, who was Jewish. I’m not persuaded that Frances was asserting anything of the kind.
The stories of people widely understood by their contemporaries as Jews belong in the study of Jewish history, regardless of whether these people understood themselves to be Jews. But once the title is Jewish Country Houses, it is Jewish country houses the authors all set out to find. The case studies themselves at times seem to be projecting a kind of Jewish identity or even Jewish pride onto people who didn’t necessarily give evidence of the same. The bar is set so low, encompassing anyone who did not outright deny all Jewish ancestry.
A wall in Nymans, a British manor house built and rebuilt by members of an originally German-Jewish family that had become Christians, has a Star of David as part of its décor. It is “the most tangible indication that Leonard Messel, a practising member of the Church of England, had not forgotten his Jewish roots,” according to author and academic John Hilary. Hilary goes on to explain that even this may not be what it looks like. “Leonard had become an avid Freemason at the same time as the new Nymans was being constructed, and the six-pointed star bears an important significance in the Masonic tradition,” and is found “prominently on façades” of other well-known buildings in that context.
In other words, Leonard very possibly had forgotten his Jewish roots. Leonard’s wife, Maud, was not from a Jewish family. What we’re left with is the story of a house owned by non-Jews, with one tiny detail that one could choose to interpret as a nod to Jewish heritage, but one would probably be wrong in doing so.
Hilary writes of the Messels’ “successful integration,” but the more accurate word would be assimilation, not in a derogatory sense but a descriptive one. To speak of this as success is merely to say that Nazi-style racial antisemitism wasn’t always a dominant force. And even the Nazis didn’t use a one-drop ancestral rule for Jewish origin.
Moments like this serve as a reminder that part of the reason the Jewish history of these houses has gone unremarked—the lacuna Jewish Country Houses seeks to remedy—is that the owners themselves weren’t much remarking on it. (“When such houses do open to the public, visitors often encounter a striking failure to engage with their Jewish context.”) Some of these are houses that ceased to be “Jewish” in any real sense long before the Second World War and longer still before contemporary historians and preservationists started trying to make sense of them.
What this highlights is the tricky nature of doing modern European Jewish history, when so much of it is about people whose Jewishness was, as archaeologist and art historian Henri Lavagne writes, “expressed discreetly.” Antisemitism absolutely affected people of Jewish origin who didn’t identify religiously as Jews. You can’t study Jews and skip the ones who opted out, or did their darndest. But there’s a way to do this that doesn’t involve placing every hint of their continued Jewish identification under a magnifying glass.
At times, a “Jewish” reading of details in the homes requires a bit of straining, even when the subjects’ Jewishness is not in doubt. James de Rothschild was certainly Jewish, but Prevost-Marcilhacy’s analysis of “two spectacular [art] works with biblical themes” amounts to, maybe this was about asserting Jewish identity, maybe not. Given the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, an Old Testament reference in Western art is possibly less of a tell than a Ben Shahn print.
Similarly, Théodore Reinach, “a very sincere Jew,” not to mention founder of France’s first reform synagogue, is a clear choice for a book about Jews with epic houses, seeing as he owned a (gorgeous) Greek-style one on the French Riviera. Lavagne nevertheless asks why Villa Kérylos was “so completely lacking in references to Judaism.” There are nevertheless some “allusions.” A bathroom with a pool may be a reference to the mikveh, and there are some Star-of-David mosaics. It feels forced. Why can’t Reinach’s truth have been that he was a proud Jew who didn’t feel the need to include this facet of his being in his decorating choices?
I’m now imagining a scholar coming into my Toronto kitchen, a century after my own demise, noting its blue cabinets and white walls, and explaining that this was intended to evoke a tallit, or an Israeli flag. After all, the owner worked for The Canadian Jewish News. And I wouldn’t be there to explain that the colour scheme was inspired by something I once saw in a New York Times Real Estate section article about a house in New Jersey.
The book covers so much ground, literally and figuratively, that it took me a moment to notice a missing piece: Jewish Country Houses obscures the extent to which Jewish feudal-style landowners were the exception among Jews. If this book were your introduction to the general subject matter of modern European Jewish history, you’d be forgiven for thinking that, following emancipation, most Jews promptly took up ownership of formerly aristocratic dwellings or constructed their own. The book would have therefore benefited from more context about European Jewry at the time. What proportion of Jews in each of these countries were in the stately-homeowner caste across this period? But also: What were their relations like with poor and middle-class Jews?
This, from the introduction, seems correct: “[T]hese houses cannot simply be understood as symbols of wealth, power and exploitation because, uniquely, they also served as a vehicle for the emancipation of a historically persecuted and disadvantaged minority.” Is this how ordinary nineteenth and early twentieth century European Jews would have seen it at the time? The introduction spells out that, apart from Eastern Galicia, with its “Yiddish-speaking farmworkers,” the extensive staff of these homes tended not to be Jewish, because few Jews lived in those areas of rural Europe. Jewish servants were unlikely to be serving Sebag-Montefiores their tea, or the Cahens d’Anvers their croissants. But would they have found Rothschild-built mansions impressive, or would they have scoffed and gone back to work, with breaks to read Marx?
Exploring how ordinary Jews viewed mega-posh ones is beyond the scope of the book, which is more focused on architectural choices than on the sorts of inter-class relations explored by social historians or in Upstairs, Downstairs. But it would have been helpful to emphasize that not all Jews are gazillionaires. I suspect this context was omitted because, to historians, it’s obvious. It is less so, I suspect, to readers, and it’s needed to get at what it meant for antisemites to latch onto the idea of the rich Jew. While very wealthy Jews were the victims of antisemitic campaigns—some detailed in Jewish Country Houses—and not necessarily able to parlay their funds towards escaping genocide, Jews without their means were despised for privilege they did not in fact possess.
The Holocaust is the end point to many of the stories in Jewish Country Houses, but not all. The book reminds that British Jews had a different experience than those of continental Europe. Some of the English stories are ones of a gradual, but ultimately quite seamless, assimilation into the aristocracy. If Richard DeVere were a real person, and not the foil to a Penelope Leach television character, he’d fit right in.
