Jewish Country Houses

This is a magnificent work of scholarship - it illuminates complex and ambiguous stories of assimilation and identity with verve and insight. * Edmund de Waal *
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 *
A fascinating book about a long-forgotten world. * Hadley Freeman *
An absorbing, richly-textured history that illuminates how the aspirations of an ascendant Jewish elite transformed the traditional notion of the country house from a site of settled privilege into a dynamic microcosm of bold self-inscription - a catalyst for new forms of sociability, patronage, art collecting, and philanthropy. Interweaving a wide array of sources and perspectives from different cultures, these essays explore gripping tales of belonging and rejection, memory and erasure, dispossession and resilience. * Esther da Costa Meyer, Professor Emerita Princeton University, The Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor, Institute of Fine Art, New York University *
This lusciously illustrated book provides an essential tour of the Jewish country houses of Europe and the UK. Each of the thirteen essays furnishes an authoritative understanding of a specific house and uses a combination of new and historic images to showcase the lives of the inhabitants and the homes' rich interiors. The final essay compares this tradition to Jewish American country houses. A must-have book for anyone interested in elegant houses or Jewish history. * Laura Leibman *
An utterly absorbing book taking in architecture, art creation, patronage and collecting. it is a triumph of sensitive editing and an expression of compelling intellectual collaboration. -- Timothy Mowl * Country Life *
A fascinating and thought-provoking book, filled with new ideas and unfamiliar houses. It is also a thing of beauty, elegantly designed and lavishly illustrated with historical images and some exquisitely moody photographs taken for the book by Hélène Binet, who hoped, she tells us, to capture 'an impalpable world made of hope and dreams' ... Carey and Green and the contributors are to be congratulated on a pioneering work of scholarship. -- Adrian Tinniswood: * Literary Review *
An impressively researched and illustrated book -- Katharine Spurrier * Daily Mail *
Sheds new light on a previously overlooked category of country houses owned, renovated, and at times built by Jews and individuals of Jewish descent * Jewish News *
Magnificent -- Fiona McKenzie Johnston * House & Garden *
A highly original approach to country house history, it combines a scholarly understanding of its subject with beautiful new photographs of their rich interiors, bolstered by historical images. A nuanced story of prejudice, identity and assimilation that's also stunning to look at, this is a book with a head as well as a heart. * The Idler *
Impressively illustrated * The Spectator *
These houses . . . symbolize 'the dream of belonging' held by European Jews, and that moment when it seems possible. But the houses also represent something that is irreparably gone, destroyed by the Holocaust. * The Forward *