Masters of the opium trade: the fabulous wealth of the Sassoons

Just before I started to read this book I had been immersed in the letters written by Jewish merchants based in Cairo from the tenth to the 12th centuries describing the trade they conducted across the Indian Ocean all the way to the Malabar coast. These letters are written in a difficult cursive Hebrew script and in a Judaeo-Arabic dialect, so one needs greater expertise than I possess to read them in the original.

It was therefore with what was almost a sense of dejà vu that I encountered Joseph Sassoon’s fascinating account of the rise and fall of the Sassoon family, from the beginning of the 19th century to the disappearance of their trading name in 1978. Rare mastery of letters and business accounts written in Judaeo-Arabic — this time from Iraq rather than Egypt — has enabled him to write an intimate history of a Jewish family whose commercial successes and fabulous wealth have often been compared with that of the Rothschilds — with whom eventually they intermarried

Several Jewish families in France, Germany and even Tsarist Russia were admitted (though not necessarily welcomed) into the ranks of the aristocracy because of their skill and success as bankers. The Sassoons were not bankers but merchants, whose business methods reveal an uncanny continuity via the Jewish India traders of the Middle Ages back to the ancient Sumerians trading with India around 2000 BC.

The family argued that opium was no worse than tobacco, and even placed a poppy on their coat of arms

They understood the importance of working as a family, and had the instinct about when to invest, when to sell and when to hold on to goods that most successful entrepreneurs possess. Saleh Sassoon had been chief treasurer to the governor of Iraq; but, threatened by the political convulsions of the waning Ottoman empire, he fled Baghdad east to Persia in the 1820s, after which his son David moved to Bombay.