What makes a country house Jewish? At first glance, the answer is obvious: it is a house that belongs or belonged to a Jew. Ferdinand de Rothschild was Jewish. He built Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire. Ergo, Waddesdon is a Jewish country house. But the situation is more complicated than that. Sir Philip Sassoon, descended from a line of Baghdadi Jews, acquired Trent Park in Middlesex, which is included here. His sister Sybil became Marchioness of Cholmondeley and chatelaine of Houghton Hall. But I’ve never seen Houghton described as a Jewish country house and it is not included here. 

Jewish Country Houses, the fruits of a four-year research project at Oxford University, shows just how complex the subject is. The fourteen case studies that make up the bulk of the book are written by a distinguished cast of historians brought together by Juliet Carey and Abigail Green; the villas and country houses described are scattered across Europe, from Prussia to the Mediterranean. There’s Schloss Freienwalde, a delightful little palace built at the end of the 18th century and bought in 1909 by Walther Rathenau, who was briefly foreign minister in the Weimar Republic before being assassinated by right-wing nationalists. There’s Kérylos on the French Riviera, built by the lawyer and polymath Théodore Reinach, who combined religious devotion with a passion for ancient Greece that found expression in the classical features of his villa. Pauline Prevost-Marcilhacy writes tellingly about Château de Ferrières, fifteen miles east of Paris, built for James de Rothschild between 1853 and 1862 by the Crystal Palace architect Joseph Paxton. Its ‘underlying theme’, says Prevost-Marcilhacy, ‘is regal power, wielded not by a conventional monarch but by James himself’. Rothschild appropriated French royal emblems like the sun of Louis XIV and plastered the place with his monogram and the family emblem topped with a crown, ‘clearly proclaiming the reign of the Rothschilds’. 

Most of the essays in this book are heavy on biography, exploring and often emphasising the roles played by the owners of these houses in public affairs. England is particularly well represented, with essays on six country houses, ranging from Broomhill in Kent, acquired by David Salomons in 1829,