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Long after David Sassoon’s descendants had entered the highest echelons of English society, their collecting reflected the family’s ties to the Middle East, India and China

From the March 2023 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. ‘His grave countenance, commanding figure, rich turban and flowing robes, made up a picture worth beholding’: in such orientalising terms Sir Richard Temple, the governor of Bombay, described the impression made on him by David Sassoon in the early 1860s. Despite having come to India as a stateless refugee, David went on to lay the foundations of a global business empire which stretched between Bombay and Shanghai, Hong Kong and London. One hundred years later, David Sassoon’s descendants would be mixing with European royalty and buying masterpieces of art. His distant descendant, the writer Siegfried Sassoon, still cherished the patriarch’s photo in the 1960s, insisting that of all his relations: ‘He was the one that really counted.’ Born in Baghdad in 1792, David Sassoon was neither an Ashkenazi nor a Sephardi, but rather a Mizrahi Jew, the name given to those communities originating in the Middle East and North Africa. The Sassoons were communal leaders and over generations they had close commercial and marital ties with other influential Mizrahi families, such as the Ezras, the Kedouries and the Gubbays. In 1830 persecution by the Mamluk Pasha forced David to leave behind beloved Baghdad and relocate first to Persia, and then, as we have seen, to Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1832, where he was quick to recognise the opportunities for trade presented by this great port city. Fluent in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Turkish, and quickly acquiring Hindustani, the new-comer used his contacts to start trading in cottons. Soon, he had carved out a remarkable place for his firm in the commercial highways of the British Empire, amassing a fortune from the traffic between India and China in textiles, spices, pearls, dyes, tea and, most notoriously, opium (a drug that was technically legal in Britain and which had been forcibly imposed on the Chinese market).

The sensational collections of the Sassoon family