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Jews belong in the study of Jewish history, regardless of whether these people understood themselves to be Jews. But once the title is Jewish Coun- try Houses , it is Jewish country houses the authors all set out to find. The case studies themselves at times seem to be projecting a kind of Jewish iden- tity or even Jewish pride onto people who didn’t necessarily give evidence of the same. The bar is set so low, en- compassing anyone who did not out- right deny all Jewish ancestry. A wall in Nymans, a British manor house built and rebuilt by members of an originally German-Jewish fam- ily that had become Christians, has a Star of David as part of its décor. It is “the most tangible indication that Leonard Messel, a practising mem- ber of the Church of England, had not forgotten his Jewish roots,” ac- cording to author and academic John Hilary. Hilary goes on to explain that even this may not be what it looks like. “Leonard had become an avid Freemason at the same time as the new Nymans was being constructed, and the six-pointed star bears an im- portant significance in the Masonic tradition,” and is found “prominent- ly on façades” of other well-known buildings in that context. In other words, Leonard very pos- sibly had forgotten his Jewish roots. Leonard’s wife, Maud, was not from a Jewish family. What we’re left with is the story of a house owned by non- Jews, with one tiny detail that one could choose to interpret as a nod to Jewish heritage, but one would proba- bly be wrong in doing so. Hilary writes of the Messels’ “suc- cessful integration,” but the more ac- curate word would be assimilation , not in a derogatory sense but a descriptive one. To speak of this as success is mere- ly to say that Nazi-style racial antisem- itism wasn’t always a dominant force.
stood? Indeed, I did not expect to find Victorian prime minister Benjamin Disraeli’s estate, Hughenden Manor, included. Disraeli’s childhood baptism was a pragmatic conversion, but Dis- raeli was not privately practicing Juda- ism. “Benjamin never forgot his Jewish heritage,” writes Hughenden custodi- an Robert Bandy, in a chapter that also includes evidence of the pains Disrae- li’s antisemitic contemporaries took to make sure he remembered it. If other people see you as a Jew, but you say you’re something else, who gets the determining vote? I suppose Country Houses of Peo- ple Antisemites Saw as Jews and Who Might Have Also Seen Themselves as Jewish would have been too clunky a title. But that’s a more precise way of looking at it. The overarching fact about all these people was that the world around them saw them as Jews, regardless of whether they were regu- lars at the synagogue or churchgoers with a secret. Nino Strachey—a histo- rian related to her subject — writes, of Frances Waldegrave, Strawberry Hill’s owner, “Regardless of her mother’s an- cestry, or the faith in which she and her four successive husbands had been raised, Frances figured as the Jewish Lady Waldegrave, her good reputation held perpetually in balance against the weight of hostile prejudice.” This is the story, then, of obstacles on the road to full assimilation. Strachey’s chapter includes a sec- tion called “Asserting her Jewish iden- tity”— thereby claiming that this is a thing Frances did. This assertion con- sisted of, among other faint hints, a painting of Masada by a non-Jewish artist (Edward Lear) and a portrait of her own father, who was Jewish. I’m not persuaded that Frances was assert- ing anything of the kind. The stories of people widely un- derstood by their contemporaries as
And even the Nazis didn’t use a one- drop ancestral rule for Jewish origin. Moments like this serve as a re- minder that part of the reason the Jew- ish history of these houses has gone unremarked — the lacuna Jewish Country Houses seeks to remedy—is that the owners themselves weren’t much remarking on it. (“When such houses do open to the public, visitors often encounter a striking failure to en- gage with their Jewish context.”) Some of these are houses that ceased to be “Jewish” in any real sense long before the Second World War and longer still before contemporary historians and preservationists started trying to make sense of them. What this highlights is the tricky na- ture of doing modern European Jew- ish history, when so much of it is about people whose Jewishness was, as ar- cheologist and art historian Henri La- vagne writes, “expressed discreetly.” Antisemitism absolutely affected peo- ple of Jewish origin who didn’t identify religiously as Jews. You can’t study Jews and skip the ones who opted out, or did their darndest. But there’s a way to do this that doesn’t involve placing every hint of their continued Jewish identifi- cation under a magnifying glass. At times, a “Jewish” reading of de- tails in the homes requires a bit of straining, even when the subjects’ Jewishness is not in doubt. James de Rothschild was certainly Jewish, but Prevost-Marcilhacy’s analysis of “two spectacular [art] works with biblical themes” amounts to, maybe this was about asserting Jewish identity, may- be not. Given the relationship be- tween Judaism and Christianity, an Old Testament reference in Western art is possibly less of a tell than a Ben Shahn print. Similarly, Théodore Reinach, “a very sincere Jew,” not to mention founder of France’s first reform syn-
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