BOOKISH
of many episodes. You can’t just pay up, move in, and expect that this would be enough. As in sitcoms, so too in real life. “COUNTRY HOUSES conferred on their inhabitants a significant position in the local community—sometimes even stewardship of its affairs.” So ex- plains the collaborative introduction of Jewish Country Houses , a collec- tion published late last year that is part academic anthology and part coffee- table book. Prior to emancipation, Eu- ropean Jews were, with rare excep- tions, barred from property owner- ship, kept out of many professions, and otherwise legally constrained. The lift- ing of these legal restrictions did not immediately bring about social or eco- nomic integration, but in time some Jews became, in effect and sometimes in fact, aristocracy. What did it mean that a Jew could become a member of any part of mainstream society, includ- ing lord or lady of the manor? The prospect of wealthy Jews dis- placing old-stock European nobili- ty would come to be one of the main anxieties animating modern Western antisemitism. What could be more urgent, then, than a book about the Jews who did just that? Edited by curator Juliet Carey and historian Abigail Green (herself de- scended from the Sebag-Montefiore family), with photographs by Hélène Binet, the thesis of Jewish Country Houses — if you can say a book this massive, complicated, and multi- authored has a thesis — is that man- or houses can function as a site of re- sistance. Yes, the book is about rich people owning unfathomably lavish homes, but it was also, as Green told The Forward , “subversive” for Jews to be feudal landlords — indeed to be landowners at all. This invoking of subversiveness in
Théodore Reinach founded France’s first Reform synagogue, and was not averse to Judaica-tinged mosaics, like this one in his home, Villa Kérylos.
the context of something deeply con- ventional (admiring enormous, beau- tifully appointed houses) remind- ed me of filmmaker Greta Gerwig’s much-quoted remark about her ap- proach to making the Barbie movie, “I’m doing the thing and subverting the thing.” The film is intended as both a feminist critique of the dolls and a promo for those same items. Much like the homeowners them- selves, Jewish Country Houses does the thing and subverts it. The book is to the country-estate coffee-table book what a Jewish tour of Europe is to a generic European tourist holiday. You can read the text and get an education on modern Jewish history, or you can flip through the art photos and gawk. The book’s audience is anyone who possesses both a desire to look at and enjoy the continent’s beauty and an irrepressible awareness of how things went, in Europe, for its Jews. The Ho- locaust, but not just: “This is not sim- ply a book about country houses,” the editors write in the introduction, “it is
also a book about Jewish memory in post-Holocaust Europe.” The sombre cover image evokes the darkness of the history. But in a way, paradoxically, the subversiveness of the project encourages a kind of guilt- free appreciation of the luxury it de- picts. A usual response to gazing at splendour along those lines — that in- effable mixture of wishing your own home looked like that, and resentment at the unjust world in which some have multiple palaces and others no homes at all — starts to seem beside the point when you read the stories of families losing their properties and, in many cases, their lives. JEWISH Country Houses is a multi- layered book, serving a variety of pur- poses. One is an ode to the beautiful homes themselves, hauntingly cap- tured by Binet. It’s a richly illustrat- ed book, one with its very own gold bookmark ribbon, with paintings and renderings of the houses and their in- habitants, and photos of other historic
60 SPRING 2025
PHOTOGRAPH BY HELÉNE BINET
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