The Sassoon name

Sassoon — Sasson in the older spelling — is the Hebrew word sasson, 'joy' or 'gladness', the word that pairs with simcha in the wedding blessings. Among the Jews of Baghdad it was first a given name, handed down the generations, before it settled into a surname. It sits in this tree as a first name well before it became ours: a 4×great-grandfather, born in Baghdad in 1804, was simply called Sasson.

The best-known bearers of the name were the dynasty of David Sassoon (1792–1864) — treasurer of Baghdad, then merchant prince of Bombay, the family the Victorians called 'the Rothschilds of the East'. They came from the same small Baghdadi Jewish world this line did, and shared its name and its city. That is not the same as a documented descent from them, and this page does not claim one — the name is shared heritage, not proof of a link. The honest version is the better story anyway.

When Babylon destroyed the First Temple in 586 BCE and carried Judah into exile, most never returned. Their descendants built, on the rivers of Babylon, what became the largest and longest-lived Jewish community on earth — the Babylonia of the Talmud, of the great academies, of two and a half thousand unbroken years. This line sat in it. The deepest names the records reach are the Gabbay family of Baghdad, traceable to a 9×great-grandfather, Joshua Gabbay, born around 1680.

Under the Ottomans the Jews of Baghdad lived as dhimmi — taxed, legally second-class, and largely left in peace, terms that looked enviable from the Europe of the expulsions. The community ran to perhaps a third of the city: traders, bankers, silversmiths, musicians, civil servants. This line ran through its middle — the Gourgi, Zubeida, Isaac-Heskel and Haim families, merchants for the most part, with at least one scholar among them: a 4×great-grandfather carried the title Hakham, the Sephardi word for a sage.

Baghdadi merchants followed the British Empire's trade routes out across the world — Bombay, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore, Shanghai, London. This family went with them. A 3×great-grandfather, Yehouda Isaac-Heskel, born in Baghdad in 1849, settled in Paris and died there in 1927; his sister's branch reached Manchester. The same currents would, in the next generation, carry the name itself to England.

It ended in a decade. The Farhud — the pogrom of June 1941 — took a 2×great-grandfather, Menashi Meir Gourgi, and with him the community's belief that Baghdad was home. Dismissals, arrests and seizures followed; after 1948 the squeeze became expulsion in all but name; and the airlifts of 1950–51 emptied the city of Jews. Those still there scattered as the whole community did — one 2×great-grandmother, Serah Haim, made her way to the new State of Israel. The line that carries this name had read the room early and left long before, as the last chapter tells.

Shaul Gourgi Sassoon was born in Basrah in 1900, at the Gulf end of the same Baghdadi world; he married Victoria, born in Baghdad in 1901 — the daughter of the man the Farhud would kill. In 1925 they married and came to England on their honeymoon — he already minded to settle in London, she glad of a chance to leave Baghdad behind — and never went back. It left this line safely in England sixteen years before the Farhud reached the family they had left behind. They made their home on Lordship Park in Stoke Newington, the spelling settling into its English form along the way, and both are buried at Hoop Lane in Golders Green, half a world from the Tigris. Their line runs down through my grandfather and my father to me — which is why a website about a family from Edgware, by way of Breslau and Riga and Radom, is signed with a name from Baghdad.

In London Shaul set up as an importer — a one-man business off Liverpool Street in the City, his daughter keeping the books. He dealt in vegetable gums, gum tragacanth above all, the kind still used to bind pharmaceuticals, brought in along the connections he kept in Persia. He wrote every letter himself: to his Muslim shippers in Persian in Arabic script, and to his fellow Jewish merchants in Persian written in Hebrew letters — a private trade hand they called Ebrani — pressed out of a tissue-paper copybook in the years before carbon paper. At home he kept a garden he tended himself, half of it vegetables, and in summer rented a house at Westcliff-on-Sea so he could still commute to the City. He had carried the Iraqi Hebrew with him too — an intonation his son would still call 'the real tune' seventy years on. He died in 1955.

His son — my grandfather — was born in Worthing in 1929, four years after the honeymoon. His was a childhood spent in transit: evacuated out of London in 1939, through billets in Hertfordshire and a year near Torquay, and in 1940 to Llandudno in North Wales, where a small colony of Iraqi-Jewish families from Manchester had gathered by the sea. He had his bar mitzvah there in 1942, in a Masonic hall, reading his portion learned by ear. Then came RAF national service — a keen plane-spotter too short-sighted to fly, posted instead to Hong Kong — and an engineering degree cut short, in 1955, to take over his father's business when he died. He carried the Persian trade on, moving from gums to almonds, nuts and dried fruit, and spent fifteen happy years among the date brokers of the London trade. Much of what this page knows about his father, it knows because he sat down late in life and recorded it for a Jewish oral-history project — the kind of thing that keeps a line like this from going quiet.