Baghdadi Jews (; ) is an umbrella term which covers the former communities of Jewish migrants who emigrated from various parts of the Middle East to India in the 18th and 19th century, up until the Second World War. Beginning under the Mughal Empire, they settled primarily in the ports and along the trade routes around the Indian Ocean. While the main representatives of the community were Iraqi Jews, the Baghdadi Jewish community of India attracted a modest flow of Jewish emigrants from Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Iran, Central Asia and Turkey. They flourished under the British Empire in the 19th century, growing to be English-speaking and British oriented.
These Jewish groups grew into a tight trading and kinship network across Asia with smaller Baghdadi communities being established beyond India in the mid-nineteenth century in Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai."Calcutta", Jewish Virtual LibraryMuzeon, Yisrael (1995). The Jews of India: A Story of Three Communities. University Press of New England. p.74. Baghdadi trading outposts were established further across Asia, and into Southeast Asia and Oceania, with families settling in Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Australia.
The Second World War brought strife to India, the Japanese occupation of Burma, Hong Kong and Shanghai, then swiftly the end of the British Empire in Asia. Dislocated by war, the violence of the Indian Partition, rising nationalism and the uncertainty of independence in both India and Burma, an exodus began to the newly founded state of Israel, the United Kingdom and Australia. Their old trade routes severed by first Communist victory in China, the ocean trade stifled in India and Burma by postcolonial nationalizations and trade restrictions, the Baghdadi Jews had emigrated almost in their entirety by the 1970s."The Rise and Fall of Calcutta Jews", The Forward Families of Baghdadi Jewish descent continue to play a major role in Jewish life, especially in Great Britain where families such as the Sassoons and Reubens have enjoyed great prominence in business and politics.
Precolonial origins Though Jewish traders from the Middle East had crossed the Indian Ocean since ancient Rome, sources from the Mughal Empire first mention Jewish merchants from Baghdad trading with India in the 17th century."Jewish Merchants in the Mughal Empire", Ishrat Ilam, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress Vol. 65 (2004), pp. 267–276
India was far from unknown to the Jewish merchants of the Middle East. Since ancient Rome the caravan route from India had ended in Aleppo and the spice trade had tied Basra, Yemen and Cairo to the Malabar Coast.In Antique Land, Amitav Ghosh, 1992, p.19. However, it was Persian-speaking Jewish merchants, close trading allies of the Jews of Baghdad, Basra and Aleppo Jews who first struck into the Indian heartland.
As adventurers, mystics and merchants, they had been venturing to India since the Middle Ages on the back of invasions of the subcontinent launched by Persian speaking rulers from what is now Iran and Afghanistan. Both Persian and Mughal sources record Jewish traders following the 16th century Mughal invasion of India launched by Emperor Babur.
They rose to be traders and courtiers of the Mughals. Jewish advisors at the Court of Akbar the Great in Agra played a significant role in Akbar's liberal religious policies. In Delhi, the syncretic Jewish mystic Sarmad Khasani was tutor to the Crown Prince Dara Shikoh before both were executed by Aurangzeb. There were sufficient Jews in Mughal lands for British travelers to report that synagogues had been established there, but of which no trace or Jewish record remains. These handful of Jews never established a permanent community but left legends and pathways for future settlers from Arabic speaking lands.
Records of Jewish tradesmen traveling from Baghdad can be found from the early 17th century. These trading outposts and emerging migrant communities also saw Jews become courtiers to Mughal rulers. These merchants wandered widely across the subcontinent. Shalom Cohen, who would found the Calcutta community, was the court jeweller to the Nawab of Awadh and travelled to Punjab where he held the same title at the court of Ranjit Singh the leader of the Sikh Empire. Cohen, the Calcutta community would later recall, was even given the honour of riding with the Nawab of Awadh on his personal elephant.
The first permanent Baghdadi merchant colony in India was established in 1730 in Surat, after the British East India Company had begun trading with Basra in 1723. In the early 18th century, trade between Basra and Surat grew whilst the Indian port was the main base of the British East India Company until it decamped to Bombay. Joseph Seemah from Baghdad opened the Surat synagogue and cemetery in 1730. The Baghdadi community in Surat grew and by the end of the 18th century, as many as 100 Jews from Baghdad, Aleppo and Basra made up the Judeo-Arabic speaking merchant colony of Surat. This was to become the first of a string of Baghdadi communities stretching from Bombay to Kobe be established in Asia.
But it was around the early 19th century, in response to the tyrannical rule of Dawud Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Baghdad, who persecuted, extorted and imprisoned the leading Jewish families of the city, that whole clans started crossing the Indian Ocean to seek safety and fortune in Asia. Dawud Pasha's misrule was when Baghdadi immigration towards Bombay and Calcutta became strong with the leading Sassoon, Ezra and Judah families departing for India. This episode of persecution was the beginning of the Baghdadi Jewish diaspora with records of whole clans departing the city for Bombay, Calcutta, Aleppo, Alexandria and Sydney.
Jewish life in the ancient communities of the Middle East, had taken a turn for the worse in the mid-19th century. The pogrom and forced conversion of the Jews of Mashhad in 1839, the fear sown by three blood libels in Aleppo between 1841 and 1860, and the outbreak of plague, first striking Baghdad in 1831, then returning with vengeance to Basra and Baghdad in 1841, encouraged Jewish clans in the declining Ottoman Empire to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
Colonial Asia As Jews, primarily from Baghdad, Aleppo and Basra came to India as traders in the wake of the Portuguese, Dutch and British what became known as the Baghdadi communities (a name that masks their diverse roots in Baghdad, Aleppo, Damascus, Basra, Yemen and elsewhere) grew fast. By the middle of the 19th century, trade between Baghdad and India was said to be entirely in Jewish hands.Benjamin, J. (1859). Eight Years in Asia and Africa: From 1846 to 1855. Published by the Author. p.118. Within a generation Baghdadi Jews had established manufacturing and commercial houses of fabulous wealth, most notably the Sassoon, Ezra, Elias, Belilios, Judah and Meyer families.
With the rise of British power in India, Surat declined in importance as British-controlled Calcutta and Bombay became more important in trade. Baghdadi settlement shifted first to Bombay and then principally to Calcutta, then the capital of British India and the centre of the jute, muslin, and opium trades. Jewish merchants from Aleppo, traditionally the end of the historic caravan route from India, played an important role in founding the Calcutta Jewish cemetery, which was opened in 1812."Jewish Cemetery in Kolkata/Calcutta", Rangandatta blog
Spurred by the immigration of some the leading Jewish families of Baghdad fleeing the persecution of Dawud Pasha, the first synagogue, replacing a small prayer room, was opened in 1823, and with the community expanding quickly a second followed in 1856. By the end of the 19th century, more than 1,800 Baghdadi Jews were living in Calcutta. In 1884, a third synagogue, which was to be the largest in Asia, was dedicated in Calcutta. Baghdadi Jews were also living and trading in Chinsura and Chandernagore outside Calcutta.
The rise in prominence of Calcutta during the colonial era coincided with the rise of opium trade with China. The East India Company established a monopoly over the sale of Indian opium in 1773, actively promoting the export of opium to China, defying prohibitory legislation from the Qing government. Baghdadi Jewish merchants dominated the opium trade with a majority of opium chests auctioned from the colonial authorities being exported to China by Baghdadi Jewish merchants, who competed with Marwari and Parsee merchants for the trade. The Sassoon family eventually controlled 70 percent of the opium trade from India. Great fortunes were also made in the indigo, silk and muslin trade with Dhaka where Baghdadi Jews partnered with Bengali Muslim merchants.
Around these booming concerns, the Baghdadi Jewish communities of India began to take shape, both seeking and attracting Jewish immigrants from across the Middle East to work for them. Following the shift in the centre of British rule from Bombay to Bengal the Baghdadi community of Bombay initially lagged that emerging in Calcutta. This fortunes of the community were reversed when David Sassoon and his family arrived in 1833.
Sponsored by the Sassoon family, the first synagogue opened in 1861 and the second in 1888. Distinct from Calcutta, whose settlement was principally Iraqi Jews and Syrian Jews, the Baghdadi Jewish community in Bombay drew significant Jewish immigration from Persian-speaking communities in Afghanistan, Bukhara and Iran as well Jewish families from Yemen. Jewish migrant were attracted from across the Middle East to work in the factories and business concerns of the Sassoon family. Outside Bombay a Baghdadi community was established in Poona where a synagogue, a school and hospital was established by David Sassoon and a Hebrew printing press was in operation. A Baghdadi presence is also recorded in Madras.
From India, the community expanded to Burma, and the ports of Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai. These were established along the opium route that ran between India and China. In Singapore the elders of the community were initially the sons of Ezekiel Judah of Calcutta. Meanwhile, the earliest Baghdadi Jew to settle in Burma was Azariah Samuel who arrived in the port of Sittwe on the Bay of Bengal in 1841. Around the same time two brothers Judah and Abraham Raphael Ezekiel settled in Mandalay and worked as bookkeepers for the Burmese royal court. From 1880 the community was permanently established, the trading success of other Baghdadi Jews in opium, teak, jute, and trading shops, attracted other Baghdadi Jews to Mandalay and communities sprang up in Rangoon and Pathein.
Following the ban on the opium trade in the early twentieth century Baghdadi Jewish merchants invested in cotton and jute products as staple exports. The sudden spike in demand for jute sandbags, building blocks for the trenches on the Western Front (World War I), made great fortunes amongst the Jewish merchants of Calcutta.
At their heights, the communities of Bombay and Calcutta were at the heart of a communal kinship network linked by the ports of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. One observer described the Baghdadi Jews communities as being "almost as familiar with each other as the Jews of Manchester are with Liverpool." The engines of the Baghdadi Jewish trading network were tightly knit family firms such as David Sassoon and Co or the Meyer Brothers, founded by Sir Manasseh Meyer, with offices and agents established by family members in the each port of the network.