From their distinguished but not exceptional origins in Baghdad, the Sassoon dynasty made globalization their motto before anyone else had even coined the word.

(EXPLAINER) Many Israelis backpacking across India avail themselves of the network of travelers’ aid centers run by emissaries of the Chabad and Breslaver Chassidim — most located in exotic locales that have no indigenous Jewish community. But true cognoscenti know of Sassoon House, a “hekdesh” (nonprofit charitable trust) adjoining the historic Magen David synagogue in Mumbai’s Byculla district.

Here, for a fraction of the cost of a comparable hotel in relatively expensive Bollywood, all Jews are welcome in the air-conditioned kosher guesthouse that operates thanks to the perpetual generosity of the Sir Jacob Sassoon Trusts. And the impact of the Sassoon family trace forward to 2023 when a valuable Hebrew Bible from 1,000 years ago, the Sassoon Codex, goes to auction at Sotheby’s this spring as reported by ReligionUnplugged.com earlier this week.

Besides sustaining the landmark Keneseth Eliyahoo and Magen David synagogues in Mumbai and the Ohel David synagogue in Pune, some 160 kilometers (99 miles) to the east, the trust established by Sir Jacob Elias Sassoon (1844-1916) provides free Shabbat and Yom Tov meals, ongoing Torah classes and free medical treatment for needy Jews — while maintaining the two historic Jewish cemeteries in Mumbai and Pune.

A cursory internet search of “Sassoon” reveals links not only to Mumbai — formerly known as Bombay — Pune and Calcutta, but also to Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kobe, Nagasaki, Yokohama, the Moluccas, Baghdad, Saigon, Amsterdam, London, New York and Jerusalem. This Jewish dynasty knew the power of globalization — and planned for it — well before the word became fashionable.

Unlike the Rothschilds, whose plebian descent from the Frankfurt-am-Main ghetto is well documented, the Sassoons’ pedigree is hidden in a fog of fanciful fiction. Moreover, while the Rothschilds were essentially money-changers turned financiers and private bankers, the Sassoons were merchants, opium dealers and later industrialists who claimed royal descent from King David — and hobnobbed with British royalty.

Relying on namesakes of Sassoon, meaning “joy” in Hebrew, the family identified itself with great rabbis in Spain and elsewhere. One figure, the noted Kabbalist Avraham Sassoon, claimed descent from Prince Shephatiah ben Avital, the fifth son of King David.

Cecil Roth, in his “The Sassoon Dynasty,” dryly notes:

After it attained prominence, the Sassoon clan (or its dutiful panegyrists) endeavoured to link itself up with these remote, but temptingly distinguished, homonyms. In consequence, it was driven to postulate a wholly fictitious family history. It assumed that, after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain by the Catholic monarchs in 1492, their ancestors emigrated eastward — first (with the main body of exiles) to Salonica, then to Constantinople, then to Mesopotamia. But there is no particle of positive evidence to support this colourful story, which in fact robs the Sassoon saga of a great deal of its fascination.

More grounded in fact is the identity of the Sassoon dynasty’s patriarch, Sheikh Sassoon ben Salih (1750-1830). Born to an affluent Baghdadi family, he held the quasi-hereditary titles of “nasi” (prince of the exile) and “saraf bashi” (chief treasurer) to the city’s Ottoman Pasha — in his day Ahmet Pasha. The ancestral home of the family of court Jews, known as Beit Abu Rubin, stood in Baghdad’s Taht at-Takia district near the Tigris River. Like the whole old Jewish quarter, it was bulldozed in Saddam Hussein’s urban modernization program. The Iraqi dictator was just one in a long series of rulers who terrorized Jews. The Sassoons suffered persecution under the antisemitic Vali Dawud Pasha — the last Mamluk ruler before the Ottoman sultan restored direct rule. One night in 1828, the family now headed by Ben Salih’s eldest son David Sassoon (1792-1864), escaped Baghdad’s closely guarded gates thanks to judicious “baksheesh,” and made its way downriver to Basra. From there they continued to the Persian port of Bushehr, and then in 1832 settled in Bombay.

Tying his star to the rising British Raj, David Sassoon established an international trading company at the Arabian Sea port, staffing it with Baghdadi kith and kin. His eight sons from his first and second wife established branches of David Sassoon, Sons & Company in Calcutta, Rangoon, Malay and across east Asia — each with an in-house rabbi. David’s business interests were diversified; among other goods, he traded in textiles, tea, dried fruit, metals and property in Bombay, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

It was an auspicious time in colonial Bombay. In 1861, as part of reforms carried out following the Sepoy Rebellion four years earlier,  the Indian army passed from control of the East India Company to that of the British monarchy. The Jews there, almost all from Baghdad, were part of what was called the “gray community” in the British days — neither fully Indian, nor Angrez — a corruption of the French “Anglais” by which the colonial “memsahibs,” foreign residents of high social status, were called in Hindi. They lived alongside the Armenians, Parsis, Portuguese and Anglo-Indians. Implementing its divide and rule policy, the British favored them over the teeming population of Hindus and Muslims because they were small and posed no threat. Thus the Jews and other tiny ethnic/religious minorities all thrived under colonial rule.

Britain launched the ambitious Hornby Vellard infrastructure project linking the seven main islands of the Bombay archipelago and developing a deep natural harbor, completed by 1838. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 further enhanced the city’s status as the gateway to India. In 1875 David’s son Abdullah David Sassoon (1818-1896) opened the Sassoon Docks on reclaimed land along the Colaba Causeway. The dawn market there, with women dressed in colorful saris balancing baskets of fish, remains one of contemporary Mumbai’s many photogenic attractions.

As a major benefactor of the city — he donated much of the cost of Elphinstone High School as well as the Sassoon Docks — the younger Sassoon was showered with honors by the viceroy, the highest ranking British colonial administrator. He was made a companion of the Order of the Star of India in 1867 and five years later a knight companion of the Order of Bath. The following year, Sir Albert — who Anglicized his name from Abdullah  — visited England, eventually settling there. He was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1872.

Dealers in the ‘flower trade’

It remains unclear how much of David Sassoon’s fortune came from his dominant position in the Sino-Indian opium business, euphemistically dubbed the “flower trade.” The magnate’s entrepôt in Shanghai and Hong Kong especially were built to capitalize on narcotics. India regulated the growth of opium poppies in 1913, leaving the business today to lawless regions in Afghanistan and Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

With vast profits to be earned from Chinese and Japanese opium dens, David Sassoon, Sons & Company rapidly expanded its drug dealing business. In 1836 the company exported more than 30,000 chests of Indian opium (each containing about 55 kg) to the Far East, resulting in endemic drug addiction in China’s coastal cities. By 1864 — following the First Anglo-Chinese War (1839-42), known popularly as the First Opium War or simply the Opium War, and the Second Opium War (1856-1860) — the company’s trade soared to 58,681 chests. By 1880 it had nearly doubled again to 105,508 chests. Parallel to those figures were the sales of the breakaway E.D. Sassoon & Co., founded by Elias David Sassoon in 1867. 

Through the fictitious character of Dinah Sassoon, Gay Courter’s meticulously researched historical novel “Flowers in the Blood” (2002) brings to life the close-knit world of Baghdadi Jews in Victorian Calcutta and their key involvement in the opium business. The lush fields of poppies — grown in Patna, Bihar, and in Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh — were processed in the British East India Company’s enormous factory at Ghazipur, shipped down the Ganges and Hooghly Rivers to Calcutta (today known as Kolkata), and from there transported to China. Courter’s book is loosely based on the 1858 murder of Leah Judah, the wife of a Jewish opium trader, who was slain by her lover. 

The central role of Jews in the opium trade is documented by Chiara Betta in “Marginal Westerners in Shanghai: the Baghdadi Jewish community, 1845-1931” and in Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot's “New Frontiers: imperialism's new communities in East Asia, 1842-1953.” From today’s perspective, the trade in highly addictive opium by the Sassoons and Jewish brokerage firms like E. Gubbay and DEI Ezra was pernicious and morally reprehensible. But in the 19th century, it was viewed as a legitimate business backed by the world’s greatest empire. Jews weren’t the only profiteers from the Far East drug trade. U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fortune was inherited from his maternal grandfather Warren Delano, who was a senior partner of Boston-based Russell & Company. It’s merchant fleet of Yankee clippers carried the Sassoons’ opium to the Orient and returned with tea. FDR always knew the origin of the family wealth but refused to discuss it.

One can make an analogy between the opium trade by David Sassoon, Sons & Company and E.D. Sassoon & Co. and the vast fortune created in the 1920s and 1930s by Canadian whiskey baron Samuel Bronfman, whose Seagram company legally distilled oceans of booze in Montreal for export to the tiny French colony of St. Pierre et Miquelon off the coast of Newfoundland. That the Canadian whiskey was then smuggled by Prohibition-era bootleggers and gangsters to the United States, where alcohol was illegal, was not Bronfman’s direct concern or responsibility. 

Today Shanghai landmarks like Sassoon House — now the north wing of the Fairmont Peace Hotel on the Bund — and the magnificent Ohel Rachel synagogue on Shanxi Bei Road in the swank French Concession, as well as Hong Kong’s Ohel Leah synagogue, stand as testimony to the huge profits the Sassoons made trading in the Far East. 

Anglo-Sassoons

Textiles were a second major commodity for David Sassoon, Sons & Company. Capitalizing on the Union blockade of Confederate cotton exports during the 1861-65 American Civil War, the Sassoons supplied Lancashire looms with Indian yarn at prices inflated by scarcity. Fortuitously, in 1858, David Sassoon was withdrawn from his posting in Shanghai and stationed in London as the firm’s first representative there. Discarding his father David’s Middle Eastern garb of a turban, “dagla” (robe) and “jubba” (tunic) for tails and a top hat, David Sassoon (1832-1867) trailblazed a rapid acculturation into Britain’s aristocracy. Most of his seven brothers and half-brothers ultimately followed him, adopting the favorite Anglo-Indian pastime of polo and sending their children to be educated at Eton and Oxford.

With two of his transplanted brothers, Arthur (Abraham) (1840-1912) and Reuben (1835-1905), Sir Albert became great friends of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII — the raffish playboy clown prince who waited decades for his mother, Queen Victoria, to vacate the throne in Buckingham Palace. Edward frequented the Sassoon brothers’ beach houses in Brighton. Perhaps the long waiting crown prince felt a lonely kindred connection with the brothers as the ultimate outsider. Of Arthur and Reuben, it was said they took nothing seriously except their pleasure. Today’s British-Jewish love affair with the royals can be traced back to them. 

Victorian Britain was supremely class conscious; notwithstanding their wealth, the Sassoons were sometimes mocked as parvenus and Jews — as shown by the satirical limerick in the racing paper The Pink 'Un about Albert, who had been made a baronet in 1890:

Sir Albert Abdullah Sassoon
That Indian auriferous coon
Has bought an estate called Queen's Gate
And will enter upon it in June.

Further integrating the family with Europe’s moneyed Jewish elite, Sir Albert’s son Sir Edward Albert Sassoon (1856-1912) married the Parisian beauty Aline Caroline de Rothschild (1865-1909) and was a Conservative member of Parliament from 1899 until his death. The seat was then inherited by his son Sir Philip Sassoon (1888-1939) for a further 27 years. Sir Philip served in World War I as military secretary to Field Marshal Douglas Haig and, during the 1920s and 1930s, as Britain's undersecretary of state for air. As such, he pioneered Imperial Airways’ five-day passage on seaplanes from London to Bombay, with stops near Marseille, Naples, Athens, Gaza (or Tiberias or the Dead Sea), Baghdad and Karachi. Other routes connected the empire’s furthest dominions in Australia and South Africa. 

As the airline’s name expressed, developing civilian aviation in Palestine was a matter of empire building and had nothing to do with promoting Zionism. Quite the contrary, Sir Philip’s father, Sir Edward Albert, used his considerable influence to browbeat Moses Gaster, a well-known scholar and the rabbi of London’s elite Spanish and Portuguese Congregation, into silence when he tried to express support for Theodor Herzl. The founder of the modern Zionist movement addressed a mass rally in London's East End in July 1896, the same year he wrote his visionary tract “Der Judenstaat.”

In early generations of Sassoons, family members married among the diaspora of Baghdad’s Jewish elite, in many cases their cousins and grandnieces. After the family settled in England, there were some marriages with other wealthy British and European Jewish dynasties, including the Rothschilds, Raphaels and Franklins. But as the 20th century approached, marriages with non-Jews became common. 

The first Sassoon in Britain to fully integrate into the gentile world was David Sassoon’s son, Alfred Ezra (1861-1895), who in 1884 married Georgiana Theresa Thornycroft. Alfred’s mother, Flora née Reuben, boycotted the wedding and sat shiva, ritual mourning, for her “dead” son. 

But there was no turning back the tide of assimilation. The family’s Jewish identity became a diluted vestige of the pride that had once endowed sumptuous synagogues, just as its wealth, too, diminished with the passing generations .

It takes all types

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), one of Britain’s best known World War I poets, typifies this phenomenon. Born to an Anglo-Catholic mother, he denied that he was “a typical Jew” and disliked to be thought of as rich. He made antisemitic remarks and mocked his family's “Jewish gold” made “in the east by dirty trading.” Siegfried Sassoon’s wartime experiences on the Western Front and in Palestine were expressed in his antiwar poetry, which is filled with realistic detail of rotting corpses, mangled limbs, filth, cowardice and suicide. On Armistice Day in 1985, Sassoon was among sixteen Great War poets commemorated on a slate slab unveiled in the Poet's Corner of London’s Westminster Abbey. 

Counter-Attack (1918)

by Siegfried Sassoon

We'd gained our first objective hours before
While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,
Pallid, unshaved and thirsty, blind with smoke.
Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,
With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed,
And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.
The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.
And then the rain began,— the jolly old rain!

A yawning soldier knelt against the bank,
Staring across the morning blear with fog;
He wondered when the Allemands would get busy;
And then, of course, they started with five-nines
Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud.
Mute in the clamour of shells he watched them burst
Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell,
While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke.
He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear,
Sick for escape,— loathing the strangled horror
And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.

An officer came blundering down the trench:
'Stand-to and man the fire-step! 'On he went...
Gasping and bawling, 'Fire- step...counter-attack!'
Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right
Down the old sap: machine- guns on the left;
And stumbling figures looming out in front.
'O Christ, they're coming at us!' Bullets spat,
And he remembered his rifle...rapid fire...
And started blazing wildly...then a bang
Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out
To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked
And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,
Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans...
Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,
Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.

Conversely, a few Sassoons carried on their ancestral tradition. Rabbi Solomon David Sassoon (1915-1985) retired from London to Jerusalem in 1970. He was the son of the David Solomon Sassoon who collected Jewish books and manuscripts and who catalogued them in the two-volume work “Ohel David.”

The Sassoons have left behind scores of hospitals, libraries and public works as a perpetual sign of the dynasty’s vast philanthropy. Come stay at Mumbai’s Sassoon House, guarded by a troop of Indian Army soldiers, and experience the hospitality of Sir Jacob Sassoon and Sir Jacob Elias Sassoon — Indian Jewish rajahs.

While there, one might ponder the greater meaning of the Sassoon saga, of Sir David Sassoon’s eight sons — the male issue of the family amounted to 14 grandsons. These in turn had only 13 sons. By the fourth generation, the family was facing a catastrophic decline in fertility — not to mention more and more members of the family who were no longer professing Judaism. Here we can finally understand the significance of the Sassoons — to the extent that they embodied globalization, they also personified the sociological process whereby today’s multicultural, multiracial Britain has been enriched by its former colonial subjects who have immigrated to the mother country and adopted its mores. Abandoning the age-old strictures and piety of the Baghdad Jewish community and its diaspora, the Sassoons embraced modernity in Britain’s more open society, including a family structure with few — if any — children.

The result is a cultural crescent of identity: At one end are figures like Hakham Isaac S.D. Sassoon, a graduate of the renowned Gateshead Talmudical College who today teaches at a Lakewood, New Jersey, rabbinical school called the Institute of Traditional Judaism, also known as the Metivta or the ITJ.

At the other end are those who are not Jews according to halakha, like Siegried Sassoon’s only son, George Sassoon (1936-2008), the author of “The Kabbalah Decoded” (1978).

In the middle are assimilated or unaffiliated figures like Baron James Meyer Sassoon — who holds the title Lord Sassoon of Ashley Park and was appointed to Britain’s House of Lords in 2010 after a long career in finance and public service.

The Sassoon fortune too underwent globalization, being transformed from family wealth to corporate capital. Initially privately owned and later publicly traded, David Sassoon, Sons & Company, its rival  E.D. Sassoon & Co. and their many subsidiaries have been swallowed up by international corporations and conglomerations. It would take a forensic accountant to understand the companies’ countless mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcies.

For example, in 2012, London Metropolitan Archives cataloged and put online the records of E.D. Sassoon Banking Company Limited. Established in Hong Kong in 1928 as a subsidiary of E.D. Sassoon and Company Limited, which was founded in Bombay in 1867, the company became Wallace Brothers Sassoon Bank Limited after it was acquired by Wallace Brothers in 1972. The latter, founded in London in 1862  to trade in India and East Asia, was liquidated in 1989 and taken over by the London-based Standard Chartered Bank — which today operates more than 1,700 branches and offices in 68 countries. The records, mainly of the firm’s financial and accounting records, document how banking and business were conducted across continents at the dawn of modern commerce before wire transfers were instantaneous. The convoluted story of the Sassoons and their fortune are a metaphor for the power of globalization to break down barriers.

Gil Zohar was born in Toronto, Canada and moved to Jerusalem, Israel in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine, and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.