Storied Sassoon Clan Stars at the Jewish Museum

An intelligent, sumptuous show takes us to Baghdad, Mumbai, Shanghai, London, and Kent.

O ne of New York’s most erudite and sumptuous museums is the Jewish Museum, located in the old Warburg mansion on Fifth Avenue and 92nd Street. It’s at the northern end of Manhattan’s Museum Mile, which is probably the most impressive concentration of art in the world. It’s also one of my favorite museums. I’m a philosemite, so I tend to be drawn to a place that foregrounds Jewish identity and history and art by Jews or about Jews.

And all the museum’s exhibitions are first-rate, as is its scholarship. Its vibrancy is even more heartening given the rise of antisemitism among left-wingers in America. Antisemitism is part and parcel of the toxic — and fashionable — milieu that divides people into oppressors and victims. It’s the oldest, most insidious kind of hate. Affirmative action’s casualties are Asian Americans and white working-class men, to be sure, but also Jews. If our schools become secular madrasas, teaching children hate, fear, and resentment, we’ll see more antisemitism. It’s inevitable.

The Sassoons is the new exhibition at the Jewish Museum. Many people know the poet and anti-war patriot Siegfried Sassoon, but he’s only one piece — a dissident one — in a peripatetic family of entrepreneurs, collectors, intellectuals, and philanthropists. Showing 120 objects, the museum presents the Sassoons as a dynasty that fell and rose, stood apart and blended, scattered but ultimately coalesced among the British Empire’s ruling class.

The art, photographs, and documents on view take us, via the Sassoons, from Baghdad to Shanghai and Mumbai, and from Park Lane, the family’s London palace, to Port Lympe, their country house in Kent, England. It’s a story about a single family but, more universally, the persistence and durability of the Jewish Diaspora. John Singer Sargent is the big art star in The Sassoons, as is Winston Churchill, but there’s great Judaica, architecture, and furniture linked to the family.

The exhibition starts in Baghdad in the 1830s, with David Sassoon (1792–1864), from a family whose patriarchs served the pashas as court treasurers. A wedding contract signed by David’s grandfather in 1764 is as intricately decorated as a fine carpet. A large portrait of David from the 1850s depicts him as a regal, very cool cat. In 1830, a political pogrom in Baghdad targeted him. David fled — his fortune much reduced — to Mumbai, where a small, tight colony of Baghdadi Jews lived as commodities merchants. David soon developed his own business specializing in the sale of opium though British-run ports in China.

Who knows whether or not David understood that the Devil’s favorite dope wasn’t just another version of a gin and tonic. He never went to China, barely spoke English, and his sons ran the Shanghai opium business. That said, he was fluently entrepreneurial. When the Union blockade of Confederate shipping hit the cotton business, David developed cotton farming in India. By the time he died, the Sassoons were once again very rich. Also by then, so connected was David’s business with British markets that he was granted a coat of arms.

His elegant desk seal is in the show’s displays of the family’s arms. A lion passant, a symbol of Britain, holds a scepter, a reference to the Sassoon family’s new imperial ties but also to a verse from the Book of Genesis. “The scepter shall not depart from Judah” foretells the primacy of King David, said to be a Sassoon ancestor. A palm tree is a reference to one of the Psalms: “The righteous grow like date palms.” A pomegranate refers to a line from the Babylonian Talmud — the Sassoons were “as full of good deeds as a pomegranate is of seeds.”

Thus we learn the Sassoon ethos: close family ties, business savvy, serious religiosity, and just-as-serious philanthropy. Connoisseurship and collecting soon join the mix. David and his father had commissioned Torah scrolls in silver cases for the Great Synagogue of Baghdad. Not embittered by David’s expulsion in 1830, the Sassoon family continued into the 20th century to support the upkeep of the synagogue and other sites, among them the Tomb of Elijah. David’s grandson, David Solomon Sassoon (1880–1942), collected lovely silver-gilt Torah finials and a striking, hand-shaped silver standard. By tradition, Jews in Baghdad carried these standards to Elijah’s grave when a family member was sick.

Flora Sassoon (1856–1936), David’s great-granddaughter, commissioned a pair of giant, ornate silver scroll cases first used at her Mumbai synagogue and, when she moved to London, her synagogue there. They’re in the exhibition and fabulous. They were probably made in China.

Flora ran the Mumbai office of the family business. Though there’s a prominent Sassoon genealogy at the beginning of the exhibition, the family tree bewilders. David had two wives and 14 children. Even before Flora’s time, there were a lot of Sassoons.

It’s best not to wander into the who’s-who bog and enjoy objects such as an ivory casket whose lid is painted with the Bocca Tigris fort, site of the first battle in the First Opium War between China and Britain in 1839. Yes, the casket is for baubles, but it’s also for old times’ sake. It belonged to Victor Sassoon (1881–1961), David’s great-grandson. Victor ran the family business in Mumbai and, later, was a real estate speculator in Shanghai.

By Victor’s era, the Sassoons were very, very British, but he never forgot either his heritage or the source of his money. He went to Harrow and Cambridge and was a fighter pilot for Britain in the First World War, a talented photographer, and, later, a breeder of thoroughbred horses. He was also the 3rd baronet of Bombay, a title created for his great uncle, Elias. David might have gotten English family arms, but his grandchildren were getting English titles.

And moving to London, lock, stock, and Torah scroll. The Sassoons makes the very good point that early generations of an émigré family might look to the past, but, starting with David’s grandchildren, the present and future seemed more relevant to the Sassoons, and these were English. High culture is a perk of wealth, and for the younger members of the family, this wasn’t to be found in Baghdad. David’s son, Sassoon David Sassoon (1832–1867), was the first in the family to settle in Britain.

The exhibition turns to a new generation of Sassoons and mostly to Sassoon women, who, we learn, drove the making of nice London collections. The English Sassoons continued to be philanthropic, but, more and more, the causes were secular and especially museums. Assimilation was the name of the game.

The art in The Sassoons is good, not great, but it’s attractive and efficient in making three points.

First, what’s best shows that the Anglo Sassoons had good taste. Second, the family speedily connected with the top English political players. Third, Sassoon women were central in turning Baghdadi merchants into English grandees. Rachel Sassoon Beer (1858–1927) was Sassoon David Sassoon’s daughter. Born in Mumbai and educated in England, she became a good friend of Mary Gladstone, the prime minister’s daughter.

Rachel married Frederick Beer, who owned the London newspaper the Observer. Nepotism explains Rachel’s quick ascent to the editor-in-chief position at the Observer, but she was far from incompetent. Rachel’s newspaper exposed the antisemitic foundation of the Dreyfus Affair, using incriminating notes found in the trash and Rachel’s own interviews. Rachel later bought and edited the Sunday Times.

Rachel and her husband liked Corot, Courbet, and Constable. Leontine Sassoon (1864–1955), married to one of David’s grandsons, bought antique French and English furniture. Sassoons, husbands and wives, befriended the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII, and Princess Mary, later George V’s queen.

Of the younger Sassoons, Philip (1888–1939) is the most compelling, as collector, socialite, and politician. Philip’s grandfather was one of David’s sons and the holder of another baronetcy for his Mumbai philanthropy and role in rebuilding the city’s docks. Philip’s mother was a Rothschild. Philip’s father, Edward (1856–1922), was the first Sassoon to sit in the House of Commons. In 1910 and with foresight, he proposed a bill — which failed — making wireless telegraphy compulsory on ocean liners. Opponents argued it would be too expensive. Had the Titanic been fitted with the WiFi of its time, its crew would have been warned that there was a big floating ice cube in the hood.

Philip’s art collection is in two sections of The Sassoons. A couple of Zoffany paintings, among them the grand Family of Sir William Young, from the 1760s, are in a section on old art collected by the Sassoons. The family bought lots of portraits of dead English grandees. Were they after a veneer of English lineage? Possibly. Another section, where Philip and Sargent star, considers the living artists whom the family patronized.

One of the best exhibitions I’ve ever seen, anywhere, was the Jewish Museum’s show of Sargent’s Wertheimer portraits about 20 years ago. A dozen delectable, Grand Manner, London portraits of another prominent Jewish family, expertly arranged and interpreted, was as close to perfection as we’ll see in this earthly life. Philip Sassoon’s Sargent paintings aren’t quite so imposing, but his 1923 portrait, a rare, late portrait by Sargent, shows Philip as Philip was: fastidious, arch, smooth, fey, with an ivory mask.

I wish The Sassoons did more with Philip. He was a member of parliament for 25 years, Lloyd George’s parliamentary private secretary, and an authority on military air power. He was also an amateur art historian who organized public exhibitions from his collection at his Park Lane house in London. Philip was also London’s host with the most — the most style, owning the most opulent homes, and mixing the most genteel with the most famous from the world of music, art, and theater. When he died, Noël Coward called him a “phenomenon who will never recur,” high praise coming from a phenomenon himself.

The catalogue treats Philip’s curatorial work, but why not ditch some of the many Sassoon marriage contracts and ivory smalls and Chinese vases collected by Sassoons and instead give us a taste of Philip’s curating work? The show has a couple of Park Lane interior pictures, but it’s not enough. There are a couple of Winston Churchill paintings of Port Lympne, Philip’s over-the-top house in Kent.

Philip never married, but his sister, Sybil (1894–1989), married the Earl of Rocksavage, later the Marquess of Cholmondelay. That’s near the tippity top of the British aristocracy. She restored the Cholmondelay home, Houghton Hall. It’s England’s peak Palladian house.

Sybil is buried in an Anglican church. I wish she had a bigger role in the show, aside from her two Sargent portraits. Rachel Beer and her husband were Anglican converts, for which Rachel was shunned by older Sassoons. Philip considered himself a very secular Jew, but a Jew nonetheless.

Churchill, one of Philip’s close friends, was a philosemite for many reasons, an early and ardent backer of Zionist causes. And, like many affluent British Jews, he was both a deep insider and an outsider. A half-American contrarian, with a scandal for a father, he was tossed from the ruling class in the early ’30s over India and looked at British elites with a gimlet eye, as many Jews did. Philip and he backed Edward VIII’s fight to stay on the throne. They differed — seriously — on the threat of Hitler. Churchill painted Port Lympne’s terrace and parlor.

The wonderful catalogue by the two curators, Esther da Costa Meyer from Princeton, and Claudia Nahson from the Jewish Museum, has a great chapter on the Sassoons’ architectural patronage that barely makes it into the exhibition. David’s mansion in Mumbai, built after he became very rich again, was a showplace. Called Sans Souci after Frederick the Great’s country house in Potsdam, it’s the first hint at the Sassoon clan’s European assimilation.

The houses, synagogues, and schools that the family commissioned in Mumbai, Shanghai, and London are in high-empire styles. They’re not run-of-the-mill piles. Port Lympne is, at points, Philip’s version of the Alhambra and, at other points, his Versailles. The Jewish Museum’s galleries are what they are. They’re spacious but not football-field size. Still, Sassoon architecture over the generations is part of their story of assimilation and difference.

The Sassoons ends as it should: with World War I, Siegfried (1886–1967), and refugee calamities during World War II. Siegfried’s father was the son of Sassoon David Sassoon. His mother was an Anglo-Catholic, and his parents’ marriage led to his father’s disinheritance. Siegfried, however, became rich when his aunt, Rachel Beer, also disinherited, left him a big chunk of her money. A photograph of young Siegfried modeling an Observer banner shows how close he was to his aunt.

Siegfried had a very English, upper-class upbringing and was, at the start of the war in 1914, a well-known poet working in the sweet style of John Masefield, but mostly a fox-hunting dude and a dandy. His war service was exceptionally brave, even ruthless, as his poetry grew angrier and more graphic.

Siegfried’s “Soldier’s Declaration,” an open letter he wrote to his commanding officer in 1917 and read aloud in the House of Commons, is short and serrated. “I believe this War, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation,” he wrote, “has now become a war of aggression and conquest.” He didn’t protest the conduct of the war but the “political errors and insincerities” and “callous complacence” of those at home.

Sassoon’s letter caused a furor but changed little — it describes a zeitgeist we all recognize in the wars of our era, commanded from Washington by dopes. This section’s got some good Sargent watercolors from his time as a war artist as well as his American Troops Going up the Line, an oil painting I’d never seen. The picture developed into Gassed, Sargent’s poignant depiction of soldiers blinded by mustard gas.

A draft of Siegfried’s declaration is very moving, as is his drawing from his journal, The Soul of an Officer, from 1916. He draws a stick figure of a uniformed officer divided in three parts. “Eating and drinking” is one part, “complaining and chattering about the war” is another, and “girls and silly, second rate profanity” is a third. Figures of death and fear flank the officer.

Philip had a better war. He was Field Marshall Haig’s assistant and, fluent in French, an essential liaison to Britain’s ally. Sybil, then still a countess, commissioned miniature Korans to be given to Muslim soldiers fighting for the British. One of them is in the show and makes the heart ache for the sweetness of her gesture. During the Second World War and in the years after, Jews in China and Baghdad — some in Baghdad were Sassoons — faced expulsion, with London Sassoons facilitating their exits. With India’s independence in 1947, most Sassoons in Mumbai left for the U.K. A new Diaspora was born.

I have no idea what the Sassoon trajectories are these days. I remember when Sybil died in 1989. I happened to be in London, and she got a lavish send-off. Siegfried, who was gay, managed to marry and produce a son, George. George died a few years ago and seemed very eccentric, writing books on extraterrestrials. Vidal Sassoon, the hairdresser and inventor of the pixie cut, wasn’t a relative, in case you’re wondering.

It’s a great exhibition, fascinating and educational. My few quibbles might relate to loans that the Jewish Museum wanted but didn’t get. I harp whenever I can about exhibition catalogues that have very little to do with what the public sees in the galleries. I’m certain that curators and directors think people are too dumb and lazy to absorb serious scholarship, but they’re dead wrong. The Sassoons, I’m happy to say, covers most of the book’s content in the galleries. That’s good curating.

The catalogue is handsomely designed, thorough, and lavishly illustrated. Meyer, a co-author, was one of my Yale professors. Her “Art of Modern Vienna” course, about the Secession movement, was one of the two or three best classes I’ve taken in my life. I haven’t seen her in 20 years, so it was nice to reconnect at least through her scholarship. It’s a small world.