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artifacts. An 1881 painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Pink and Blue (Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers) , depicts two little girls, members of one of the upscale families profiled. (They had been Cahens but, writes cu- rator Alice S. Legé, “acquired a new and aspirational surname”—one root- ing them in the French spelling of An- twerp, as befits a family commission- ing paintings from Renoir.) Their out- fits are the indirect aesthetic inspira- tion for what my own young daughters wear from H&M today, all pastel and tulle. It’s a pretty, inoffensive painting, the sort that could be up in a waiting room and you wouldn’t think anything of it. A caption explains what came of them: “Alice, on the left, married a British army officer; Elisabeth died on the way to Auschwitz in 1944.” The text, individual essays by dif- ferent historians and curators, tells the story of families who seemingly had everything — until the tide turned against Jews and everything was not, in many cases, enough. Moreover, here were the very Jews doing the most to be ‘rooted.’ Even they weren’t safe. The symbolic significance of Jew- ish manor-house ownership prompted nineteenth century antisemites to rail about Jews’ displacement of the aris- tocracy. Alphonse Toussenel’s 1845 Les Juifs, rois de l’époque (The Jews, Kings of the Age) , a foundational text of social- ist antisemitism, is among the earlier and better-known examples. It is cited in the chapter on James de Rothschild’s Château de Ferrières — a house that in- spired criticisms not dissimilar to those made these days of so-called McMan- sions. Big and ornate, but distasteful, some felt, and not in keeping with any existing style. “The underlying theme of this château,” writes Pauline Pre- vost-Marcilhacy, who researches the Rothschilds, “is regal power, wielded not by a conventional monarch but by
Jewish Country Houses is a bril- liant and beautiful book whose com- plexity I fear I cannot do justice to as a reviewer— this despite knowing the history of French Jewish dynasties from doctoral research, and the in- teriors of British manor houses from such shows as Downton Abbey and Midsomer Murders . I had no idea that Highclere Castle, where Down- ton was filmed, had been “lived in and renovated by Alfred de Rothschild’s illegitimate daughter, Almina,” but could not be more here for this infor- mation. The family stories are all interesting in their own ways, but the standout is author Helen Fry’s chapter about the Sassoon family manse becoming the site of Second World War espionage and covert gay gatherings. High-rank- ing Nazi prisoners of war got a bit too comfortable in the manor house lav- ishly hosting them, didn’t realize the place was bugged—and what do you know, the Allies won the war. EVERY PROJECT asserting a Jewish theme — every Jewish Studies sylla- bus, every Jewish publication — has its own way of defining what consti- tutes Jewish subject matter. Will only practising Jews be included in a study? Only those active in community orga- nizations? In the case of Jewish Coun- try Houses , subjects include observant Jews and secular Jews, philanthropists supporting Jewish causes, as well as those without communal ties. This strikes me as both correct and, given the subject matter, inevitable. Jews of different sorts owned stately homes, and the goal is a greater understanding of how European Jews lived. I was less persuaded by the choice to include the homes of converts from Judaism to Christianity and their nev- er-Jewish spouses. Were these “Jew- ish country houses” properly under-
JEWISH COUNTRY HOUSES Edited by
Juliet Carey & Abigail Green Brandeis University Press November 7, 2024
James himself, defiantly subverting an- tisemitic attacks on his influence and position.” This specific anxiety — about wealthy Jews becoming Europe’s new aristocracy — kept pamphleteers busy. The daughters of Jewish bankers were marrying decadent aristocrats! New money had replaced that which was genteel and gentile. Per the introduc- tion of Jewish Country Houses , “As the wealth of the landed aristocracy waned, they looked to marriage with members of the industrial and finan- cial elite, including Jews, as a means by which dilapidated estates could be returned to their former glory.” Not everyone loved this. Antisemites, for example. The old Christian nobil- ity may have been a much-despised elite (recall the 1789 French Revolu- tion), but they were part of a known system; Jews were interlopers. (Inso- far as nineteenth century antisemites understood Jews as being ‘from’ any- where, it would either have been wher- ever a Jews’ family had last lived, or Palestine, in the pre-1948 sense of ‘Go back to Palestine.’) Nor was this senti- ment confined to Europe: an Ameri- can “postscript” reveals just how much exclusion Jewish Americans faced in high society during these years. A country doesn’t need an entrenched aristocracy to come up with its own old-money versus new-and-foreign- money distinctions.
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