Jewish Country Houses: Memory and Heritage
The 61st Annual Simon Rawidowicz Memorial Lecture
Presented by Juliet Carey and Abigail Green
March 25, 2025
4:30 pm Eastern
Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Brandeis Library
Reception to follow
Photo Credit: Hélène Binet
Dr Juliet Carey is Senior Curator at Waddesdon Manor (National Trust / Rothschild Foundation). She previously worked at the National Museum & Gallery, Cardiff, the Royal Collection and the National Gallery, London. She has curated exhibitions and published on subjects including Nicholas Hilliard, Guercino, Jean-Siméon Chardin, Thomas Gainsborough and Gustave Moreau, as well as French drawings, Sèvres porcelain, contemporary ceramics and the history of collecting.
Abigail Green is Professor of Modern European History at Brasenose College, University of Oxford. Her first book, Fatherlands: state-building and nationhood in 19th century Germany (2001), explored the tensions between state-building and nationhood in Germany through a comparative analysis of Hanover, Saxony and Wurtemberg. More recently her work has focused on international Jewish history and transnational humanitarian activism. She has won the Sami Rohr Choice Award 2012 for her biography of Sir Moses Montefiore (1784-1885), the preeminent Jewish figure of the 19th century. She has been awarded a three-year Senior Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust to work on her new project, a book on liberalism and the Jews tentatively entitled Children of 1848: Liberalism and the Jews from the Revolutions to Human Rights.
The 61st Rawidowicz lecture is sponsored by the Tauber Institute with the support of the Valya and Robert Shapiro Endowment, the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, the Center for German and European Studies, the Ronald and Deborah Ratner Teaching Award, and the School of Arts and Sciences Co-Curricular Fund.
For more information, email tauber@brandeis.edu or call 781-736-2125.
About Simon Rawidowicz
Simon Rawidowicz (1896-1957) was one of the most innovative Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. He was an erudite and wide-ranging student of Jewish and European philosophy, recognized by specialists for his studies of Maimonides, Nachman Krochmal, and Ludwig Feuerbach, among others. Over the course of a long and peripatetic career that took him from Lithuania to Germany to England, and finally the United States, Rawidowicz affirmed his commitment to a Jewish cultural nationalism anchored by Hebrew. His lifelong devotion to the study of Jewish philosophy and Hebrew literature was further realized at Brandeis University where he was a founding member of the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies.
WATCH RECENT RAWIDOWICZ MEMORIAL LECTURES
Jewish Country Houses, the book
Edited by Juliet Carey and Abigail Green
Photography by Hélène Binet
A Tauber Institute Series publication
PURCHASE FROM BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS
A complex story of prejudice and integration, difference and connection.
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.
Lavishly illustrated with historical images and a new body of work by the celebrated photographer Hélène Binet, this book is the first to tell their 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 pond to the United States, where American Jews infused the European country house tradition with their own distinctive concerns and experiences. This book emerges from a four-year research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council that aims to establish Jewish country houses as a focus for research, a site of European memory, and a significant aspect of European Jewish heritage and material culture.
Cloth: $60 | E-book: $59.95
ISBN-13: 9781684582204
Pages: 300 | Size: 8 in. x 10.5 in.
Date Published: November 7, 2024