The 19th-Century Country Houses of Europe’s Jewish Elite

“To enter into high society,” Benjamin Disraeli wrote, “a man must either have blood, a million or a genius.” As soon as he was able to convert his own genius into power and fortune, the future British prime minister — who’d been raised by Sephardic Jews in London — bought Hughenden Manor, a “gentleman’s residence” on 750 hilly acres in the English countryside. Financially, Disraeli could barely afford to buy the place; politically and socially, he couldn’t afford not to. A house and lands were the necessary props to his ambitions.

Hughenden is one of the case studies presented in JEWISH COUNTRY HOUSES (Brandeis University Press, $60), an ambitious catalog of properties across Europe, ranging from the French chateau to the Italian villa to the Polish dwór to the German Schloss, inhabited by 19th-century moguls in such industries as textiles, finance, sugar, opium, coal. The flexible category proves a rich source of material in scholarly essays collected by Juliet Carey and Abigail Green, with archival imagery and moody photographs by Helene Binet.

Among images of gilded staircases and wedding-cake ceilings — and Baron James de Rothschild’s 1862 Château de Ferrières, “a hodgepodge of all styles” that incorporated the innovation of central heating — are stories of gardens flattened by war, homes looted, art collections confiscated by the Gestapo. The book is at ease with its air of inquiry: When we speak of Jewish country houses, are we discussing an architectural phenomenon or something more abstract — landownership as a symbol of national identity, of emancipation, of exploitation, of assimilation? The book’s reply: “Yes.”