The modern country house as a Jewish form: a proposition

ABSTRACT

Although the vast majority of modern country houses built or refurbished in the long nineteenth century were owned by non-Jews, Jews owned some of the most magnificent. Thus, these dwellings pose the same question that historians have raised about other aspects of diasporic Jewish practices: Was there anything particularly “Jewish,” about country houses owned by Jews? In this essay I propose a hypothesis – that Jewish country houses were the ideal-type of the modern country house. On the one hand, super-elite Jews took their capital, both cultural and real, their family networks, and their long experience interpreting and navigating the often-hostile worlds in which they found themselves and created country houses that were the model of the genre. On the other hand, I argue that Judaism itself mattered as much as the social and economic positioning of Jews produced by discrimination. Uniquely Jewish conceptualizations, and practices, of home, of time, and of space rendered Jews particularly comfortable with the complex interweaving of public and private intrinsic to the country house.