Now published! "(Jewish Country Houses) illuminates complex and ambiguous stories of assimilation and identity with verve and insight." (Edmund de Waal)

We are delighted to announce the publication of 'Jewish Country Houses', edited by Juliet Carey and Abigail Green, and with photography by Hélène Binet.

A core output of this project, 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.

'This is a magnificent work of scholarship – it illuminates complex and ambiguous stories of assimilation and identity with verve and insight'. Edmund de Waal

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.

"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". Neil MacGregor

Beautifully illustrated with historical images and a new body of work by the celebrated photographer Hélène Binet, this book is the first to tell this important 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.

November 7th 2024. Published by Profile Books and Brandeis University Press in association with the National Trust.

ISBN: 9781800810358 (Profile). ISBN-13: 9781684582204 (Brandeis UP)