Books The Baghdad taipans How two Sephardi Jewish families helped create the business hubs of Hong Kong and Shanghai By Tibor Krausz YOU KNOW you are in for a treat when and one wishes the author had spent more effects, yet their job was to make money, not you pop open a book of nonfiction about the time on it than a few sentences relayed mat- prohibit vice.” fabled Jewish tycoons of Shanghai, glance ter-of-factly. Elias, one of David’s sons, proved himself at the first entry in a prefatory cast of char- In any event, the Jewish exile made it to especially adept at navigating the quicksand acters chapter, and read the following about Bombay, today’s Mumbai, in the British terrain of doing business inside China, a David Sassoon, the Baghdad-born entrepre- Raj where he wasted little time setting up in country closed off to foreign trade until the neur and patriarch who struck it rich in Chi- business, turning himself into a prominent British and the French pried it open forceful- na in the 19th century: local tycoon with his finger in many a prof- ly in the Opium Wars of the mid-19th cen- “Though he never learned Chinese or En- itable pie. “Less than a decade after arriving tury. Strong-willed, solitary and secretive, glish,” writes Jonathan Kaufman in The Last in Bombay, David Sassoon was one of the Elias relocated to Shanghai to strike out on Kings of Shanghai, “he piloted his family to richest men in India,” writes Kaufman, a sea- his own, becoming a quintessential taipan, dominate the China trade, subdue and shape soned reporter who is director at the North- as prominent foreign businessmen in China Shanghai, control the opium business, bank- eastern University of Journalism in Boston, were known. “He would stroll across the roll the future king of England, and advise Massachusetts. “He was just getting started.” courtyard of his house, dressed in aristocrat- prime ministers.” With his sons the steadfastly observant ic Chinese robes and spectacles,” Kaufman There in a sentence is a life encapsulated, Sassoon, who built a Victorian-style syna- writes. more or less, in neat bullet points. It’s the gogue in the Indian city for fellow refugees Halfway around the planet in London the story in shorthand of a man who made it big from Baghdad and became a prominent Sassoons, dubbed “the Rothschilds of Asia,” in an exotic, faraway land during an epoch benefactor of Jews far and wide, “pioneered set up another headquarters for the family of historic change and great sociopolitical many of the tools of modern capitalism and business. There, Reuben and Albert, two of upheavals. applied them ruthlessly, deploying steam- David’s other sons, befriended Prince Ed- That Sassoon, a scion of a patrician fami- ships, the telegraph and modern banks,” the ward, the profligate, wayward heir to the ly of wealthy Jewish merchants in Baghdad author explains in a well-researched tome British throne. The brothers attended horse where they had lived for centuries, never that is frequently engaging with enough races with the Prince of Wales, accompa- learned Mandarin despite his prominent role twists and turns to qualify as a real-life fam- nied him on his weight loss trips to Eastern in the hugger-mugger business of the opium ily saga. Europe, visited him in Windsor Castle and trade, is understandable. He lived in Bombay One especially lucrative line of business helped finance his lavish lifestyle. Before and did business in China only from afar by for the Sassoons involved running opium long, the Sassoons became just as influential help of some of his eight sons. from India to China at huge profit mar- in London as they were in Bombay. That he would never learn English despite gins, which helped make them fabulously Ultimately, however, it was in the emerg- being a professed Anglophile who was al- wealthy. The Sephardi Jews, whose eth- ing oriental business hubs of Shanghai and ready fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish and nic origins were routinely mocked by their Hong Kong that the family would truly make Farsi is more peculiar. Sassoon fled Bagh- snooty British competitors, proceeded to its mark. So would Eleazer “Elly” Kadoorie, dad in fear for his life in 1829 under cover outwit their main rival Jardine, Matheson & another Baghdad Jew whose biography of darkness after being sprung from prison Co, one of the largest trading companies in seems ready-made for a Hollywood rags-to- by his elderly father, who was the city’s trea- the Far East, by dealing directly with Chi- riches blockbuster. A son of a widow, Ka- surer and its nasi, or head of the local Jewish nese traders to sell the narcotic to coolies, la- doorie was just 15 in 1880 when he traveled community. borers and shopkeepers in the Middle King- to the Far East to try his luck as an apprentice David Sassoon ran away to escape the dom as an addiction epidemic was sweeping for the Sassoons, who ran their own training clutches of Dawud Pasha, an avaricious the country. programs to create a cadre of highly skilled Mamluk ruler who sought to lay his hands “The suffering of China’s opium addicts employees for their various ventures. on some of the Sassoons’ wealth. This the rarely entered into the Sassoons’ letters, tele- The young upstart soon decided to go pasha did by threatening to hang the 37-year- grams and ledger books,” Kaufman reports. his own way and succeeded spectacularly, old merchant unless a large ransom was paid “Seen in the most favorable light, the Sas- metamorphosing from a humble stockbroker during the Ottoman potentate’s persecu- soons’ view of the opium trade paralleled into a prominent financier after he made a tion of local Jews. The episode is the stuff that later taken by entrepreneurs peddling fortune by speculating on the price of rub- of bona fide cloak-and-dagger adventures tobacco and alcohol. They knew its harmful ber, a commodity highly prized in a new era 40 THE JERUSALEM REPORT MARCH 22, 2021 of mass-produced automobiles whose tires especially enjoyed taking pictures of women needed rubber from countries like Malaysia. in the nude. He invested wisely and widely He married a well-bred woman from a prom- around Shanghai, which by then was China’s inent Jewish family in London and sired two dominant economic center — in textile mills, sons, Lawrence and Horace, who would help shipyards, automobile dealerships, public take the thriving family business to even transport and numerous high-end properties. greater heights in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Ironically, however, the freewheeling cli- It was a turbulent period in Chinese his- mate of the cosmopolitan city with its mod- tory. In 1912 the Qing Dynasty was over- ern high-rises and art deco buildings was thrown in an armed uprising and the country also its undoing. It highlighted the stark con- disintegrated into lawless fiefdoms. Luck- trasts between rich foreigners and impover- ily for the Sassoons and the Kadoories the ished locals, helping incubate Mao Zedong’s foreign-protected extraterritorial enclave of nascent Communist Party, whose members the International Settlement in Shanghai re- began holding secret meetings within walk- mained an island of peace and calm. Once a ing distance of the palatial mansions of the backwater with muddy streets of ramshackle Sassoons and the Kadoories. hovels and open sewers, the city was now a Mao’s movement drew its support from bustling Western-style hub of finance, com- among the great masses of disenfranchised merce, popular culture and raucous nightlife. urban and rural poor among native Chinese Lawrence Kadoorie, a chip off the old block who lived in grinding poverty and might face when it came to business, called the city the daily humiliations in the foreign-run parts of “Paris of the Orient.” Shanghai where indigent locals were treated At the heart of it all were the two prom- as second-class residents. In just one year, inent families of Sephardi Jews from in 1935, nearly 6,000 corpses of desperately The Last Kings of Shanghai: Baghdad, who “helped open the world to poor Chinese people were collected off the The Rival Jewish Dynasties China — and open China to the world,” as streets of the International Settlement where That Helped Create Modern China Kaufman puts it. In 1924, capitalizing on the they succumbed to disease and starvation or Jonathan Kaufman city’s newfound popularity, the Kadoories were dumped by relatives unable to afford Viking, 2020 opened a magnificent hotel called the Ma- funeral services. 384 pages, $28.00 jestic, which promptly turned into a fulcrum Within a little over a decade the Chinese of high society. That same year they moved communists would bring the whole west- into a sumptuous, newly built residence of ern-built edifice of boisterous free market refugees. In all, over 18,000 European Jews stately grandeur called Marble Hall (which capitalism in Shanghai crashing down. Vic- fled to in Shanghai, most of them penniless is now the China Welfare Institute Children’s tor would lose his entire fortune in the city and traumatized. They needed all the help Palace) where they threw lavish parties in and the Kadoories would lose theirs. The lat- they could get in the decrepit, overcrowded the ritzy style of the Roaring Twenties for ter, though, had presciently diversified their tenements in a bombed-out, rundown part of tycoons, socialites, and visiting Hollywood portfolio by investing in Hong Kong, which town where they were housed. Most of them movie stars.