As our tour of Jewish India gets underway, Richard A Kaye looks back to last summer, when New York's Jewish Museum presented The Sassoons, an exhibition about the clan whose generations spanned the globe, including India, Iraq, China and England
When Alfred Ezra Sassoon, father of World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon, became the first member of his family to marry outside his faith, relatives were appalled. Alfred’s mother was disconsolate, his grandmother visited a local synagogue to curse his future offspring, and his father disinherited him. They considered his marriage to London artist Theresa Thornycroft a misalliance.
This romantically charged story of ethnic pride, social ambition , and the perils of assimilation, played out at a pastoral Kent estate (with what one family chronicler described as the “sleekest cattle in England”), came to mind after seeing The Sassoons exhibition at New York City’s Jewish Museum last summer. The display, a century-spanning overview, traced the extraordinary fortunes of the Anglo-Jewish clan, sometimes described as the 'Rothschilds of the East'. A family myth held that the Sassoons descended from King David, after whom David Sassoon, treasurer for the pasha of Ottoman Baghdad who was expelled from Iraq in 1834, was named.
The contradiction between social ambition and Jewish faith was conveyed by a vibrant 1832 portrait of David wearing the traditional garment of Baghdadi Jews against a backdrop of Bombay’s Back Bay, painted by the British artist William Melville, a resident of India. Two paintings by Winston Churchill, executed at a Sassoon home, evoke the family’s social success in Britain (and leave one gratified the artist did not quit his day job). The exhibition was perhaps a bit too stately. One would never know, for instance, that the great-great-great grandson of businessman and philanthropist Albert Sassoon is the actor Jack Huston, one of the stars of HBO's Boardwalk Empire.
The Sassoon clan transformed their financial largesse into the collecting of ritual Jewish objects and promotion of Jewish causes. Albert (son of David) sponsored the David Sassoon Library in Bombay (now Mumbai), which was recently restored. Ambitious survivors, the Sassoons forged canny marriages, but also sent many of their offspring to outposts across the globe, arguably comprising the first multinational corporation. What propelled the fortunes of the Sassoons was opium. The 1839-42 Opium War led China to relinquish the Port of Hong Kong, opening Shanghai to foreign investors. Sasssoon-owned ships carrying the drug traversed the globe and the family became worldly collectors, evident in the exhibition through many exquisite objects, including an ivory casket with a painting of China’s Pearl River; a handwritten Haggadah (in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic) made in Calcutta in the 1790s; and two silver cases from 1868 with floral patterns for Torah and Haftorah scrolls. Ornate ketubot (marriage contracts) chart the family’s intricate alliances. Many of the most gorgeously adorned objects are religious, a reminder that Jewish artists, toiling under the Second Commandment’s injunction against graven images, created functional objects within Jewish ritual.
In 1912 the Oxford-educated Philip Sassoon, whose mother Aline was a Rothschild, became a member of UK Parliament, while his sister Sybil married a marques. Included in the exhibition were paintings of Philip, Aline and Sybil by the prolific portrait artist John Singer Sargent (who apparently claimed he preferred painting Jewish ladies because they were livelier than non-Jewish sitters).
The Sassoon women became active in public life. Flora Sassoon, an Orthodox Jew who travelled with a minyon of 10 men, campaigned for Muslims and Hindus in India to get cholera vaccinations. The Bombay-born Rachel Beer became editor of the Sunday Times and The Observer, where she reported on the Dreyfus affair, interviewing Count Major Esterhazy in 1898, who confessed to her that he was the culprit. Like her brother Alfred, she too was cast out of the family for marrying a non-Jew. In the exhibition, her legacy was emphasised by a photograph from 1898 of her nephew Siegfried as an 11-year-old donning a billboard and adorably hawking The Observer.
The poet dominated the show's last room, which featured a draft of his 1917 protest letter, A Soldier’s Declaration, decrying World War I as misguided – an act that landed him in Craiglockhart, a military psychiatric hospital, where he became one of the first English patients to undergo Sigmund Freud’s 'talking cure'. His late-in-life conversion to Catholicism would seem to be yet another instance of the family’s protracted dissipation. An equally telling example was the 1978 decision by the descendants of bibliophile David Solomon Sassoon (grandson of the other David) to sell the Codex Sassoon, a millennium-old Hebrew Bible that is the earliest most complete version still in existence, to the British Rail pension fund. In 2023, the volume was purchased by the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv for $38.1 million.
The decline of the Sassoons (compared to, say, the Rothschilds) lay in the foundational enterprise of opium trading. Banking, the Rothschilds' legacy, remains an intrinsic part of the modern everyday, whereas opium no longer retains the romantic aura it harboured throughout the 1800s. As French banker Edmond James de Rothschild supposedly confided to a visitor before a collection of splendid objets d'art during a private tour of the family château outside Paris: “Ah, the 19th century – that’s when you really could make money.”
By Richard A Kaye
Photos: Installation view of The Sassoons at the Jewish Museum New York, 2023 © Kris Graves / courtesy of the Jewish Museum, NY
For more on the Sassoons, check out the accompanying book to the exhibition, The Sassoons by Esther da Costa Meyer and Claudia J Nahson (Yale University Press, 2023, £45). yalebooks.co.uk