Haunted Heritage

American Jews have a wistful soft spot for the bungalow colony; these days, their British coreligionists have one for the country house. Now, after a multi-year project spearheaded by Juliet Carey, senior researcher and curator at Waddesdon Manor, and Abigail Green, a distinguished European historian at the University of Oxford, the country house has, at long last, landed within the orbit of modern Jewish history, where it belongs.

A catchall term for a form of grand domestic architecture located in a rural area or by the sea, the “country house” has been heralded by the writer John Martin Robinson as the “greatest contribution made by England to the visual arts.” A site of pleasure and power, status and belonging, its various Tudor and Palladian, Baroque and Neoclassical expressions shape Britain’s relationship to its past, conjuring up the powerful but murky ideal of heritage.

Under the eagle eye of the National Trust, a late-nineteenth-century volunteer organization, real-life Downton Abbeys beckon millions of visitors annually who delight in romping through their lavish gardens and striking interiors, a testament to the glories of the British Empire. Lately, though, revelations about imperialism, colonialism, and, most strikingly, the slave trade, whose exorbitant profits often made the country house possible, have generated considerable controversy. To some, this ethical “audit” was a breath of fresh air and long overdue; to others, it constituted an act of cultural vandalism, a trashing of Britain’s past.

Back and forth it went, until a half-hearted compromise was struck in which information about the legacies of imperialism was presented at the country houses, but, as one eyewitness reported, “not enough to spoil the wonder.”

Although the national kerfuffle didn’t provide the impetus for the Jewish Country Houses project—it had already been in the works—the to-do furnished a paradoxically hospitable context for its deliberations, encouraging an international team of scholars to revel in visions of past luxury while also breaking a few windows. A series of richly researched and elegantly argued case studies situate audiences on the meticulously landscaped grounds of Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, England; within the fantastical Strawberry Hill manse outside of London and the sun-swept precincts of Villa Kérylos on the shores of the French Riviera; amid the towering Château de Ferrières outside of Paris.

Taking in the sights, we also encounter a panorama of personalities as memorable as the homes they created and inhabited. There’s Baron James de Rothschild, aka “Rothschild I, King of the Jews,” who, besotted as much by the latest technology as by Renaissance art, spent nine years constructing his French chateau; Frances, Countess Waldegrave, the daughter of a Jewish opera singer, who left her mark on Strawberry Hill’s interior by having its ceilings, fireplaces, paneling—even its wallpaper—festooned with floral imagery; and Theodore Reinach, a committed French Jew as well as an enthusiast for all things classical who named his getaway after the kérylos, a mythical bird that flew over the water only when it was stormy and hence a symbol of the storm-tossed Jewish people.

With such rich material in hand, the Jewish Country Houses project called for an end to the erasure of the Jewish country house—and the Jews—from the national heritage narrative. Little wonder, then, that this ambitious inquiry took off like a shot. Its contributions included articles, conferences, staff training, and collaborative programming with the National Trust; a “Palaces, Villas, and Country Houses” tour of sixteen properties in six countries; and, as its culmination, this hefty, lavish, multi-authored volume.

Grappling with the definition of a “Jewish country house” was the project’s first order of business, at once a stumbling block and a source of creativity. Sometimes, a synagogue might grace the lavish grounds of a stately home; in other instances, a Jewish star in stone or mosaic marked the spot. Most of the time, though, nothing explicitly Jewish characterized the country home except the faith of its residents and, over time, even that no longer held true as familial ties to Judaism grew so attenuated they were hardly in play at all. What, then, constituted a Jewish country house? What differentiated it from Chatsworth House or, say, Dyrham Park, the location for the film The Remains of the Day?

Equally challenging was the researchers’ decision to cross the channel to the continent and move beyond the British Isles. The global reach of the families who resided in these houses, at once domestic and commercial, warranted a more cosmopolitan perspective, or so it was claimed. What the inquiry now made up in depth, though, it lost in focus: The shifting of its geographical boundaries blurred its conceptual ones. What did Max Liebermann’s villa on Lake Wannsee outside of Berlin have in common with Philip Sassoon’s Trent Park outside of London? Or the twentieth-century Villa Tugendhat in Brno with Ramsgate, Moses Montefiore’s nineteenth-century coastal redoubt?

More striking still was that once on European soil, all roads inexorably led away from the National Trust and toward Nazism. The tragic fate of these homes and those who inhabited them cast an air of doomed inevitability so very absent from the British context.

Jewish Country Houses reflects these tensions even as it attempts to resolve them by situating its subject within the context of antisemitism. The Jewishness of the country house, goes its argument, resides more in gesture than actualization, in intentionality more than execution. The book’s contributors maintain that the decision to erect these architectural wonders was nothing less than a Jewish cultural statement and a “transgressive” one, at that: a throwing down of the gauntlet in an otherwise unwelcoming world.

Once prohibited from owning land, newly emancipated European Jews of great means made up for lost time by buying acres and acres of property in the countryside or by the sea, cultivating lush gardens, assembling marvelous collections of paintings and objets d’art, and either restoring stately houses down on their heels or commissioning the construction of new ones from scratch. Both inside and out, the scale of the enterprise took Gentile observers’ breath away, resulting occasionally in praise. More commonly, it stuck in their craw, giving rise to forked remarks, the stuff of vicious cartoons, snide literary characterizations of Jewish “plutocrats” with names like “Sir Reuben Lichtenstein,” and Jewish real estate firms such as “Glogoul and Faulmann.” As late as 1976, appeals to save Mentmore—a storied Rothschild complex of the Victorian era—fell short on the grounds that the house was an exemplar of the “international bankers’ Jewish taste” and “not in any way characteristic” of Great Britain.

Yet for all their sting, expressions of derision and hostility only inspired the Jewish grandees to even greater displays of extravagance. As the Jewish Country Houses historians would have it, the spectacle of modern Jews flaunting their wealth was not just a determined bid for inclusion but a cross between cultural bravery and a communal imperative.

What renders Jewish Country Houses more than a good, instructive read is its alluring visual personality, a composite of drawings, portraits, vintage photograph albums, postcards, and, most strikingly of all, the photographic artistry of Hélène Binet, an internationally renowned architectural photographer. Extending well beyond documentation, her images are the book’s beating heart.

Standing alone on the page or in pairs, usually in black and white, they capture the play of light on a floor or on a wall, the whimsy of a wallpaper flocked with strawberries, the incised linear striations of a marbled column, the sculptural quality of a brass doorknob, and the presence of shadows, lots of them. Courtyards and ceilings catch Binet’s eye, as does the interplay between the natural and the man-made, between dimpled birch trees and the fanciful creatures that snake across a mosaic floor. Confronting the energy of a house is how she explains her “reading” of a building: Apertures—windows and doors—seem to be a source of particular fascination. They frame the Jewish country home as the site of much coming and going, looking in and looking out.

Scale, too, affects her approach. Though they depict sumptuous grandeur, Binet’s photographs are intimately scaled; they sit comfortably on the page. Relishing the detail rather than the whole, her perspective doesn’t distance so much as bring the viewer in close—a reminder that for all their splendor, these were once real spaces inhabited by real people, not demigods. And yet, eschewing information in favor of imagination, her images bear no captions. At no point does the reader know for sure whether the picture on the page corresponds to the subject of the essay in which it’s enclosed—maybe, maybe not.

The open-endedness of Binet’s strategy may well frustrate the likes of the historically minded. It frustrated me. I wanted to know which graceful archway belonged to which house and whose property contained those beautiful birch trees lest the larger narrative escape. But the more I looked, the more I came to realize that this de-anchoring, destabilizing, and etherealizing was the narrative. In manifesting the dreaminess, the vision, that made the Jewish country house possible, Binet’s imagery resembles nothing so much as a haunted house.