Tally Ho

Victorian writers like Anthony Trollope saw hunting as quintessentially British. For Jews, hunting was about social acceptance. It also meant buying into a different kind of masculine ideal – one that had nothing to do with either synagogue or stock exchange.

[T]here is no other national amusement… so alien to foreign habits, so completely the growth of the peculiarities of the people with whom it has originated, as is the sport of hunting.”
Anthony Trollope, British Sports and Pastimes (1868)

Sir Moses Mainchance is one of the main characters in R.S Surtees’ comic novel Ask Mama (1858). The accompanying illustrations reflect the book’s strong antisemitism. Here, Sir Moses is depicted with the horns of Moses and a version of the Brazen Serpent of Moses wound around a wine bottle. Illustration by John Leech, from R. S. Surtees, Ask Mama, or The Richest Commoner in England. Project Gutenberg

Hunting for sport was an important feature of aristocratic life. Contemporary literature poked fun at social climbers from London, who joined subscription hunts to get on. In one story, a Jew swaps a ham sandwich for a veal sandwich with a dentist. In another, a carriage-load of Jewish spectators block the Easter Hunt altogether.

In the 1840s, the Rothschilds established their own stag hunt near Tring, in part to avoid prejudice on the hunting field. Soon, Mayer Amschel Rothschild became High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire – an important role in rural life.

Full Cry, by Francis Grant (1841) depicts four Rothschild brothers out hunting in the Vale of Aylesbury. Grant was a fashionable artist who had painted Queen Victoria on horseback a year earlier. The image contrasts with antisemitic caricatures and with paintings the family commissioned that portrayed them as bourgeois businessmen.
©National Trust Images/John Hammond

Siegfried Sassoon’s classic novel Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928, 2nd edition). Sassoon came from an aristocratic Jewish family, although he and his mother were Christian. Courtesy of Caleb Crain

 Exhibition continues: City Jews