‘I Never Lived More Beautifully’ The Country Houses of the Jewish Dutch Elite, 1870-1940

From the late nineteenth century until the German occupation of the Netherlands, Jewish members of the Dutch financial, political, and cultural elites increasingly established or settled in homes in suburban and rural areas. In this article I demonstrate, on the one hand, how Dutch Jewish country house owners resembled their counterparts in other European countries regarding their primary settlement near main cities, their familial and their artistic lives, their philanthropy, politics, collecting, and entertaining, and, ultimately, their pursuit of belonging. On the other hand, I show how in the Netherlands, a highly bourgeois country, Jews followed general elite practices of enclaving, many houses were permanent residences rather than seasonal homes, and several entrepreneurs were unique innovators in the modern repurposing of their estates. In a country where Jewish landownership was already visible before the modern period, Jews were, although a minority, an integral part of the country house landscape.