BOOKISH
historically persecuted and disadvan- taged minority.” Is this how ordinary nineteenth and early twentieth cen- tury European Jews would have seen it at the time? The introduction spells out that, apart from Eastern Galicia, with its “Yiddish-speaking farmwork- ers,” the extensive staff of these homes tended not to be Jewish, because few Jews lived in those areas of rural Eu- rope. Jewish servants were unlikely to be serving Sebag-Montefiores their tea, or the Cahens d’Anvers their crois- sants. But would they have found Roth- schild-built mansions impressive, or would they have scoffed and gone back to work, with breaks to read Marx? Exploring how ordinary Jews viewed mega-posh ones is beyond the scope of the book, which is more fo- cused on architectural choices than on the sorts of inter-class relations ex- plored by social historians or in Up- stairs, Downstairs . But it would have been helpful to emphasize that not all Jews are gazillionaires. I suspect this context was omitted because, to his- torians, it’s obvious. It is less so, I sus- pect, to readers, and it’s needed to get at what it meant for antisemites to latch onto the idea of the rich Jew. While very wealthy Jews were the victims of an- tisemitic campaigns—some detailed in Jewish Country Houses —and not necessarily able to parlay their funds to- wards escaping genocide, Jews without their means were despised for privilege they did not in fact possess. The Holocaust is the end point to many of the stories in Jewish Country Houses , but not all. The book reminds that British Jews had a different experi- ence than those of continental Europe. Some of the English stories are ones of a gradual, but ultimately quite seam- less, assimilation into the aristocracy. If Richard DeVere were a real person, and not the foil to a Penelope Leach television character, he’d fit right in.
A squint-and-you-may-see-it six-pointed star on a wall at Nymans, in West Sussex.
agogue, is a clear choice for a book about Jews with epic houses, seeing as he owned a (gorgeous) Greek-style one on the French Riviera. Lavagne nevertheless asks why Villa Kérylos was “so completely lacking in refer- ences to Judaism.” There are never- theless some “allusions.” A bathroom with a pool may be a reference to the mikveh, and there are some Star-of- David mosaics. It feels forced. Why can’t Reinach’s truth have been that he was a proud Jew who didn’t feel the need to include this facet of his being in his decorating choices? I’m now imagining a scholar com- ing into my Toronto kitchen, a century after my own demise, noting its blue cabinets and white walls, and explain- ing that this was intended to evoke a tallit, or an Israeli flag. After all, the owner worked for The Canadian Jew- ish News. And I wouldn’t be there to explain that the colour scheme was in- spired by something I once saw in a New York Times Real Estate section article about a house in New Jersey.
THE BOOK covers so much ground, literally and figuratively, that it took me a moment to notice a missing piece: Jewish Country Houses obscures the extent to which Jewish feudal-style landowners were the exception among Jews. If this book were your introduc- tion to the general subject matter of modern European Jewish history, you’d be forgiven for thinking that, following emancipation, most Jews promptly took up ownership of for- merly aristocratic dwellings or con- structed their own. The book would have therefore benefitted from more context about European Jewry at the time. What proportion of Jews in each of these countries were in the state- ly-homeowner caste across this peri- od? But also: What were their relations like with poor and middle-class Jews? This, from the introduction, seems correct: “[T]hese houses cannot sim- ply be understood as symbols of wealth, power and exploitation be- cause, uniquely, they also served as a vehicle for the emancipation of a
5785 אביב 63
PHOTOGRAPHS BY HELÉNE BINET
Made with FlippingBook Digital Proposal Creator