In 2016, Sunday Times ranked David and
Simon Reuben as Britain’s richest people with a net worth of more than GB£13
billion–a fortune made in a variety of business including London property
market and Russian aluminium market. Since mid-nineteenth century, the Reuben
family–like many other rich and enterprising Baghdadi Jews–lived in Bombay,
where the brothers were born in the 1940s. They immigrated to England sometime
in the 1950s and started with metal scrap (David) and Carpet (Simon)
business–eventually making enough money to enter the London commercial market
in a big way. In making this transition from Baghdad to Britain via Bombay,
they were following a well-trodden path, most remarkably marked by the Sassoon
family, the Rothschilds of the East.
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| David Sassoon |
Though the Jews from Persia have been
coming to India regularly at least since the seventeenth century, the last
significant wave of Baghdadi Jews reached Bombay in the first half of the
nineteenth century. David Sassoon (1792-1864) belonged to a distinguished
family of merchants, who were also the treasurers of Pasha of Baghdad. A change
in political atmosphere in Baghdad forced him to flee to Bombay with his large
family. Soon, he built a vast trading business across Asia. The most prominent
opium merchant of his day, he and his eight sons built Asia’s first wet dock in
Bombay, Sassoon Docks and in Shanghai Bund, Sassoon House became a landmark.
Known for his charity across continents, his inheritors became close friends
with the English royal family, became conservative peers, married into the
Rothschild family and supplied one of England’s foremost First World War poets,
Seigfried Sassoon.
Meanwhile, much of Shanghai opium
trade and real estate was dominated by their relative by marriage, Edward Isaac
Ezra. Similarly, David Joseph Ezra had a larger-than-life presence in
commercial and community life in the 19th-century Calcutta. The last
famous Baghdadi Jew of Calcutta was General JFR Jacob, hero of the Bangladesh
War. Nahoum and Sons, the last Jewish bakery of Calcutta–through its
century-old decor, an ambience of fading glory and fabulous food–somehow has an
organic connection with Irani cafes of Bombay, almost similar in appearances.
For more such stories related to Indian
business history, see Laxminama: Monks, Merchants, Money and Mantra by Anshuman
Tiwari and Anindya Sengupta Bloomsbury 2018
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