Jewish country houses and country house studies

ABSTRACT

The Jewish country houses explored in this issue represent a group of properties spread across Europe that have hitherto escaped systematic research by country house studies. In thinking about what was distinctively Jewish about the country houses of the Jewish elite this issue consolidates three significant trends in country house studies – the house, collections and wider estate as a dynamic entity shaped by a range of historical processes; the global interconnectedness of country houses; the importance of collaborative projects spanning the heritage sector and academic – and poses exciting new questions that may be profitably adapted by country house studies to advance scholarly understanding of non-Jewish houses.

KEYWORDS:

• Country house
• historiography
• international
• collaboration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Oliver Cox is Heritage Engagement Fellow at the University of Oxford, where he leads the university’s engagement with the UK and international heritage community by co-ordinating, supporting and brokering collaborative research projects. He is a historian with particular interest in the social and cultural history of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic World. His research in heritage focusses on the social, cultural and political position of the British country house in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Recent publications include: “Horseracing and the Country House”, in Terence Dooley and Christopher Ridgeway, The Country House: Sport & Leisure, Dublin, 2019, and “New Fictions: Downton and the Country House”, in David Cannadine and Jeremy Musson (eds.), The British Country House: Past, Present and Future, New York, 2018.

Notes

1 Mandler, The Fall and Rise, 265–295.

2 Cannadine, The Country House Past, Present and Future, 9–18; Smith, Uses of Heritage, 115–161.

3 Hall, “Wealth and Pleasure.”

4 Stobart and Rothery, Consumption and the Country House, 72.

5 Finn and Smith, The East India Company at Home, 9.

6 Hann and Dresser, Slavery and the British Country House; Hall et al., Legacies of British Slave-Ownership.

7 Barczewski, Country Houses and the British Empire.

8 Dooley, O’Riordan and Ridgway, Woman and the Country House.

9 Hague, The Gentleman’s House.

10 Finch, Drymann and Frausing, Estate Landscapes in Northern Europe.

11 Reed, “Collaborating across Heritage.”

12 Smith, Uses of Heritage.

13 Stobart and Rothery, Consumption and the Country House, 262.