Country Houses

Led by Juliet Carey and Abigail Green

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.

Individually, these palaces, villas and country houses tell a story of social forgetting and the problematic place occupied by even the most spectacular Jewish country houses within nationally constructed heritage cultures. Collectively, they illuminate the transformative impact of Jewish emancipation on modern European politics, society and culture. This is the first attempt to write these houses and their owners back into British, European and Jewish history and to establish their importance as sites of European – and Jewish - memory.