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. served them well after the communist take- languished on the verge of outright starva-
Not to be outdone, Victor Sassoon, a grand- over forced them to leave Shanghai for good. tion.
son of David who relocated from Britain to In Hong Kong the two Kadoorie brothers The Jewish tycoons proved pivotal in pro-
Shanghai to run his family’s business ven- would start all over, turning into billionaires viding succor. They fed thousands of Euro-
tures, built the Cathay, an even more impos- once again with their various holdings, in- pean Jews and found jobs for many of them.
ing and trendy hotel, stealing the Kadoories’ cluding public utilities. The Kadoories also set up a school for hun-
thunder with his soirees and costume parties. Yet before the curtain finally fell on the dreds of Jewish children. The Japanese take-
A savvy, Cambridge-educated bon vivant storied reign of the Kadoories and the Sas- over of Shanghai at the end of 1941 brought
with a monocle, a pencil mustache and an soons in Shanghai, they ended up doing a even more severe hardships, but it was partly
arm invariably wrapped around a fetching great service to thousands of their co-reli- thanks to the Kadoories and Victor Sassoon
young woman, Victor was a perennially el- gionists from Germany and Austria who be- that the refugees in Shanghai survived the
igible bachelor and another larger-than-life gan fleeing the Nazis’ escalating campaigns war while millions of other Jews in Europe
character in the long and illustrious line of of violence against them in the late 1930s. perished.
Sassoons. Coming to the aid of many Austrian Jews For that the Jewish tycoons deserve ac-
Disabled from the waist down after a mil- was Ho Feng-Shan, a sympathetic Chinese colades, yet they have long since been rele-
itary plane crash in World War I, he hobbled diplomat in Vienna who issued more than gated to footnotes in modern Jewish history.
along on crutches, but that didn’t slow him 4,000 Jews with exit visas and encouraged Kaufman’s book, which weaves a page turner
down. “[He] loved everything new in the them to seek refuge in Shanghai where Elly of a tale, restores the two legendary families
1920s: fast cars, airplanes, motion pictures, Kadoorie and Victor Sassoon, albeit rivals in from Baghdad to their rightful place as mas-
movie stars,” Kaufman writes. Victor Sas- business, joined forces to turn the Chinese ters of their universe during a bygone era in
soon was also an avid photographer who city into a more welcoming haven for the one of the Far East’s most fabulous cities.  ■

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