Downton Abbey Portrays Reality of Interfaith Relationships

By Gerri Miller. This article has been reprinted with permission from InterfaithFamily.com

 Nick Briggs/Carnival Film & Television Ltd. 2014 for MASTERPIECE

For five seasons, Downton Abbey has hooked viewers with its irresistible plots laden with love, lust, secret liaisons, betrayals, tragic deaths and even darker stories about rape and murder. The PBS Masterpiece series has given us a glimpse into the world of an aristocratic British family and their household staff, and used these haves and have-nots to explore themes of class divide, inheritance, changing attitudes and tradition versus progress early in the 20th Century. The subject of politics has always been front and center, but religion has not—until now.

As long time viewers know, the Abbey’s Lord and Lady Grantham, Robert and Cora Crawley (Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern), are an interfaith couple: She is Jewish on her father’s side (meaning not that she was necessarily raised Jewish, but that she has Jewish ancestry). Though the fact that Cora is American always mattered more to her upper crust British in-laws than the fact that she was from an interfaith family and Judaism rarely came into the storyline. But in this season’s fifth episode, creator Julian Fellowes introduces a Jewish love interest of Russian heritage, Ephraim Atticus Aldrige (Matt Barber), for Lady Rose (Lily James), and their relationship quickly meets with parental resistance on both sides. (Learn more here about the history of Jews immigrating to England.)

The entire series aired in the U.K. last year, and “it was generally well received,” says creator Julian Fellowes, who received a personal thank you from a Jewish peer in the House of Lords for truthfully portraying what it’s like to be a Jew in British society. Even though the series is set 90 years ago, themes of anti-Semitism, unfortunately, still resonate today, “when such feelings are on the rise in Europe,” he notes.

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