'A magnificent work of scholarship' - Edmund de Waal 'I learned something new on every beautifully illustrated page' - Neil MacGregor 'A fascinating book about a long-forgotten world' - Hadley Freeman A Country Life Architectural Book of the Year Through a series of striking case studies this revelatory book explores the world of Jewish country houses, their architecture and collections - and the lives of the extraordinary men and women who created, transformed and shaped them. Country houses are powerful symbols of national identity, evoking the glamorous world of the landowning aristocracy. Jewish country houses - properties that were owned, built, or renewed by Jews - tell a more complex story of prejudice and integration, difference and connection. Many had spectacular art collections and gardens. Some were stages for lavish entertaining, while others inspired the European avant-garde. A few are now museums of international importance, many more are hidden treasures, and all were beloved homes that bear witness to the remarkable achievements of newly emancipated Jews across Europe - and to a dream of belonging that mostly came to a brutal end with the Holocaust. Beautifully illustrated with historical images and a new body of work by the celebrated photographer Hélène Binet, this book is the first to tell that story: from the playful historicism of the National Trust's Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire to the modernist masterpiece that is the Villa Tugendhat in the Czech city of Brno - and across the Atlantic to the United States, where American Jews infused the European country house tradition with their own distinctive concerns and experiences. The book is part of the Jewish Country Houses research project at the University of Oxford. https://jch.history.ox.ac.uk/home

This is a magnificent work of scholarship - it illuminates complex and ambiguous stories of assimilation and identity with verve and insight. * Edmund de Waal *
I learned something new on every beautifully illustrated page. It sets the familiar country house story in a new, Europe-wide landscape, and tells a tale of often tragic splendour. The authors show that these are more than just houses - they are monuments to the long nineteenth-century battle between prejudice and assimilation, played out in magnificent buildings and princely collections. * Neil MacGregor *
A fascinating book about a long-forgotten world. * Hadley Freeman *
An absorbing, richly-textured history that illuminates how the aspirations of an ascendant Jewish elite transformed the traditional notion of the country house from a site of settled privilege into a dynamic microcosm of bold self-inscription - a catalyst for new forms of sociability, patronage, art collecting, and philanthropy. Interweaving a wide array of sources and perspectives from different cultures, these essays explore gripping tales of belonging and rejection, memory and erasure, dispossession and resilience. * Esther da Costa Meyer, Professor Emerita Princeton University, The Kirk Varnedoe Visiting Professor, Institute of Fine Art, New York University *
This lusciously illustrated book provides an essential tour of the Jewish country houses of Europe and the UK. Each of the thirteen essays furnishes an authoritative understanding of a specific house and uses a combination of new and historic images to showcase the lives of the inhabitants and the homes' rich interiors. The final essay compares this tradition to Jewish American country houses. A must-have book for anyone interested in elegant houses or Jewish history. * Laura Leibman *
An utterly absorbing book taking in architecture, art creation, patronage and collecting. it is a triumph of sensitive editing and an expression of compelling intellectual collaboration. -- Timothy Mowl * Country Life *
A fascinating and thought-provoking book, filled with new ideas and unfamiliar houses. It is also a thing of beauty, elegantly designed and lavishly illustrated with historical images and some exquisitely moody photographs taken for the book by Hélène Binet, who hoped, she tells us, to capture 'an impalpable world made of hope and dreams' ... Carey and Green and the contributors are to be congratulated on a pioneering work of scholarship. -- Adrian Tinniswood: * Literary Review *
Monumental both in content and form ... 352 pages of dense text lavishly illustrated with historical images and sumptuous photographs by the Franco-Swiss architectural photographer Hélène Binet. It is a weighty tome, literally and figuratively, combining coffee table looks with serious scholarship * The Art Newspaper *
An impressively researched and illustrated book -- Katharine Spurrier * Daily Mail *
Sheds new light on a previously overlooked category of country houses owned, renovated, and at times built by Jews and individuals of Jewish descent * Jewish News *
Magnificent -- Fiona McKenzie Johnston * House & Garden *
A highly original approach to country house history, it combines a scholarly understanding of its subject with beautiful new photographs of their rich interiors, bolstered by historical images. A nuanced story of prejudice, identity and assimilation that's also stunning to look at, this is a book with a head as well as a heart. * The Idler *
Impressively illustrated * The Spectator *
These houses . . . symbolize 'the dream of belonging' held by European Jews, and that moment when it seems possible. But the houses also represent something that is irreparably gone, destroyed by the Holocaust. * The Forward *
[A] beautiful, informative and enjoyable book -- Adam Sutcliffe * TLS *
Jewish Country Houses is a brilliant and beautiful book [it is] multilayered, serving a variety of purposes. One is an ode to the beautiful homes themselves, hauntingly captured by Binet. * Canadian Jewish News *
What renders Jewish Country Houses more than a good, instructive read is its alluring visual personality, a composite of drawings, portraits, vintage photograph albums, postcards, and, most strikingly of all, the photographic artistry of Hélène Binet, an internationally renowned architectural photographer. * Jewish Review of Books *
This stimulating book offers a thorough and welcome deconstruction of the Jewish country house. -- Clive Aslet * The Burlington Magazine *
An excellent publication: substantial and wide-ranging in its research, expertly written and edited by a variety of professional academics and curators and thoughtfully produced to a high technical standard ... the plentiful photographs are wonderful throughout. * Professor Timothy Brittain-Catlin, The Victorian *

Juliet Carey is Senior Curator at Waddesdon Manor. Abigail Green is an Oxford historian and author of the award-winning Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero. Hélène Binet has been described by Daniel Liebeskind as 'one of the leading architectural photographers in the world'.