A man’s home is his cas­tle. For few peo­ple could this say­ing be more lit­er­al than for the own­ers of the prop­er­ties fea­tured in Jew­ish Coun­try Hous­es. 

In Jew­ish Coun­try Hous­es, we are treat­ed to a stun­ning array of pho­tographs and paint­ings of the impres­sive coun­try estates owned by Jews in the nine­teenth and ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­turies, many of them in Eng­land and some on the Euro­pean con­ti­nent and in the US. Accom­pa­ny­ing the images are the deeply absorb­ing sto­ries of the new­ly eman­ci­pat­ed Jew­ish fam­i­lies who inhab­it­ed these homes. ​“In these hous­es we can trace how Jews — so long treat­ed as out­siders in Chris­t­ian Europe — chose to lay claim to, and play with, cul­tur­al sym­bols hal­lowed by tra­di­tion, putting their own spin on what it meant to belong,” note edi­tors Juli­et Carey and Abi­gail Green and oth­er con­trib­u­tors in a joint intro­duc­tion. ​“The coun­try house bestowed upon these fam­i­lies a spe­cial claim to gen­tle­man­ly leisure and largesse.” 

Some hous­es were built to order; oth­ers were exist­ing estates that were painstak­ing­ly ren­o­vat­ed. The own­ers’ rela­tion­ships to Judaism var­ied wide­ly, from proud obser­vance, to ambiva­lence about assim­i­la­tion, to out­right con­ver­sion to the dom­i­nant faith of the coun­try in which they resided. A house became the medi­um through which they could tell a sto­ry about their unique rela­tion­ship to their nation and reli­gious heritage. 

The new pho­tog­ra­phy in this book is by archi­tec­tur­al pho­tog­ra­ph­er Hélène Binet, who, as she explains, seeks to cap­ture the con­flu­ence of ​“the ear­ly dream for the house, and the lit­er­al vision of that house shaped by inhab­it­ing it.” Sad­ly, the ear­ly dreams were often short-lived. With the rise of anti­semitism in Europe in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, many Jews were mur­dered or forced to flee the nations in which they had so tire­less­ly made their homes.