David Sassoon דָּוִד שַׂשּׂוֹן

His father was Sheikh Sassoon ben Ṣāliḥ (1750–1830), who held in Baghdad both the office of nasi, lay head of the community, and that of ṣarrāf bāshī, chief banker and financial deputy of the wālī, from about 1781 to 1817. David himself was born in Baghdad in October 1792 (the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 gives 1793; the range should be printed) and held the ṣarrāf bāshī from 1817 to 1829.

The sequence of the flight matters more than is usually supposed. The wālī of Baghdad, Dāwūd Pasha (r. 1817–1831), moved against the Jewish notables; David was imprisoned and stripped; he fled to Bushehr in Persia around 1828–1830; there in 1830 his father died; and only in 1832 did the family reach Bombay, where David Sassoon & Co. was founded the same year. There was no move "from Baghdad to Bombay in 1832": between them lie four years of Persian exile, and the Bombay house was founded by a man who had been a refugee for four years. He died on 7 November 1864 at Pune.

Then the triangular India–China–Britain trade: opium, cotton, tea, silk; the "merchant prince of Bombay." His sons dispersed the firm to Calcutta, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Rangoon and London—and so the "Baghdadi Jews" arose as a trading diaspora. Halakhically the network rested on Baghdad: its supreme decisor was Abdallah Somekh, and his Zivḥei Ẓedeq the operative text.

Two corrections. The Sassoon emigration was not a "flight from Muslim persecution" in the generic sense but an attack on a specific office. Dāwūd Pasha's target was the institution of the ṣarrāf bāshī and the capital it controlled; the Sassoons' fall and the Ottoman abolition of the nasi's autonomy—the creation of the ḥakham bāshī in 1849—are two moves in one restructuring of Baghdad's fiscal apparatus. And the opium fortune on which the house rose in India should not be excised from the account: it is inseparable from the story.

The roster of the great Iraqi houses, for the record: Sassoon, Gabbai, Ezra, Kadoorie, Judah, Maʿtuk, Ḥasqel, Somekh, Zilkha, Shemtob, Daniel, Menashe, Lawee, Ades, Belilios. The first permanent Baghdadi merchant colony in India was Surat, 1730.

And separately, what should be struck out. The Farḥi family were Sephardi financiers who came to Damascus from Aleppo in the mid-eighteenth century, based on Damascus and Acre, not on Baghdad: Ḥayyim Farḥi (d. 1820) was ṣarrāf to Aḥmad al-Jazzār and Suleiman Pasha of Acre and Sidon, and organised Acre's defence against Napoleon in 1799. They have no place in an Iraqi chapter; the confusion arises because both houses held the identical office in the same empire in the same decades. If a second Baghdad dynasty is wanted beside the Sassoons, take Gabbai or Ezra—both Baghdad-born, both with the ṣarrāf connection, both founders of Bombay and Calcutta houses.