Sassoon Eskell שַׂשּׂוֹן חֶסְקֵל

Born in Baghdad on 17 March 1860, died in Paris on 31 August 1932; buried at Père-Lachaise.

Deputy for Baghdad in the first post-1908 Ottoman parliament and until 1918, chairman of its budget committee. Iraq's first minister of finance, appointed in 1920 under the provisional government of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Naqīb; reappointed on 1 September 1921, nine days after Faisal's coronation, and serving until 1925. He represented Iraq at the Cairo Conference in March 1921. KBE from 1923.

He built the country's monetary and fiscal system, and one of his decisions is worth remembering: he insisted that the Iraq Petroleum Company's royalties be paid in gold rather than paper. Over the life of the concession that was worth an enormous sum to the Iraqi treasury.

Two corrections. He became finance minister before Faisal, not because of him: the appointment was in 1920, under the British-supervised provisional government—that is, he built the ministry and Faisal inherited him. "Faisal's first finance minister" is true only of the second appointment, of 1 September 1921. Both dates should be printed.

The second is general, and matters more. The Mandate was not an unbroken golden age. The commonplace "the Jews flourished under the British and were destroyed after independence" needs qualifying: the Zionist society in Baghdad was suppressed by 1929; independence came in 1932, and Eskell died the same year—Jewish representation in the cabinet ended for good; from 1934 Jews were progressively purged from the civil service and education quotas were imposed—seven years before the Farhud. The decline is gradual and begins before 1941.

And one more thing that he personally embodied. On 18 July 1921, five weeks before the coronation, Faisal addressed the Jewish community of Baghdad, insisting on the equality of all Iraqis irrespective of religion; the famous formula—that in the vocabulary of patriotism the words "Jews, Muslims, Christians" have no meaning, there is simply a country called Iraq—belongs to this moment. Eskell was the living proof of that formula, and his death in the year of independence was its end.