Two and a half years ago, Oxford scholar Abigail Green wrote a Have Your Say op-ed for us, titled “How recognizing the “Jewish country house” expands our understanding of Jewish heritage.”
She argued that, in addition to synagogues, Jewish cemeteries, tahara houses, and Jewish communal buildings, there is another set of buildings that should be included as part of Jewish architectural heritage – the Jewish country house: rural villas and mansions that were owned, renewed and sometimes built by Jews.
A conference on the Jewish Country House was held in March, 2018, and now a special issue of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies has been published devoted to the subject.
Abigail, David Rechter, and Juliet Carey edited the special issue.
Abigail and Juliet Carey write in the Introductory Essay, Beyond the Pale: The Country Houses of the Jewish Élite:
This special issue represents an initial foray into this problematic, heralding the launch of a major collaborative research project, which takes the country houses of the Jewish élite as a starting point for opening up a much broader intellectual agenda at the interface between Jewish history, art history and heritage culture.1The project is organized around two major strands – philanthropy and collecting – which will each result in focused publications. It will unite within a single analytical framework all the actors involved in creating, maintaining and decorating the Jewish country house, and situate these properties within bigger narratives about Jewish politics, cultural philanthropy and the national heritage.
In this special issue, with articles that range from eighteenth-century Holland and colonial Curac˛ao, through Lower Austria to France, Germany, Britain and even the USA, we aim to give a sense of the chronological and geographical range of Jewish country houses, and to open up key themes.2 What, if anything, was distinctively Jewish about the country houses of the Jewish élite? How does thinking about these houses help us to understand modern Jewish history differently? What does a focus on specifically Jewish country houses bring to the field of country house studies more generally? Is there anything material, visual or stylistic about these houses that marks them as Jewish?
Click here to read the Introduction online
For the other articles, purchase or other means of access is required.