The Last Kings of Shanghai

Jonathan Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who has written and reported on China for thirty years for The Boston Globe, where he covered the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square; The Wall Street Journal, where he served as China bureau chief from 2002 to 2005; and Bloomberg News. He is the author of A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe and Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. He is director of the School of Journalism at Northeastern University in Boston.

1

The Patriarch

Through the darkened streets, the richest man in Baghdad fled for his life.

Just hours earlier, David Sassoon's father had ransomed him from the jail where Baghdad's Turkish rulers had imprisoned him, threatening to hang him if the family did not pay an exorbitant tax bill. Now a boat lay waiting to take thirty-seven-year-old David to safety. He tied a money belt around his waist and donned a cloak. Servants had sewn pearls inside the lining. "Only his eyes showed between the turban and a high-muffled cloak as he slipped through the gates of the city where generations of his kin had once been honored," a family historian wrote. It was 1829. His family had lived in Baghdad as virtual royalty for more than eight hundred years.

Jews fleeing oppressive rulers was a common historical theme even by the nineteenth century. Jews had been expelled from Britain in 1290, from Spain in 1492. Venice had ordered them confined to ghettos starting in 1516. The horrors of the Holocaust were yet to come.

The flight of David Sassoon was different. Jews had always lived at the margins of society in Europe. But for more than a thousand years, Jews had flourished in Baghdad, known in the Bible as Babylon. More than any city in Europe, more than Jerusalem, Baghdad was a crossroads of cultures from a.d. 70 to the 1400s. When Europe was mired in the darkness of the Middle Ages, Baghdad was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. It was home to some of the world's leading mathematicians, theologians, poets, and doctors. Raw wool, copper, and spices traveled along caravan routes across the desert. Pearls and silverware filled the bazaars. Merchants, doctors, and artists gathered in Baghdad's coffeehouses. The ruler's palace sat surrounded by three square miles of wooded parkland, with fountains and lakes stocked with fish.

Within this world, Jews flourished. They first arrived in 587 b.c., when Babylon's King Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Jerusalem, and upon victory carried 10,000 Jewish artisans, scholars, and leaders-Judaism's best and brightest-to Baghdad into what the Bible dubbed "the Babylonian Captivity." The book of Psalms famously documented the despair of these displaced Jews:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down

Yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

In fact, "the Babylonian Captivity" changed the course of Jewish history. Jewish learning and religious innovation blossomed, giving Jews the religious, political, and economic tools-and a way of thinking-they would use to survive and thrive around the world over the next millennia and through to today. It marked the start of the Jewish diaspora: the dispersal-and survival-of Jews around the world, even when they made up just a small sliver of the population. Rabbis modified Jewish ritual practices to accommodate Judaism to modern life and enable Jews to participate in business. Though he had kidnapped the Jews into captivity, Nebuchadnezzar didn't treat them as slaves. He turned to the Jews to strengthen Baghdad's economy. He encouraged them to become merchants and trade between the different parts of his sprawling kingdom. So important were Jews to Baghdad's business life that many non-Jews working in trade and finance didn't go to the office on Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath. When the Persians conquered Baghdad and offered the Jews the chance to return to Jerusalem, only a few accepted. Most decided to stay. Baghdad's Jews considered themselves the Jewish aristocracy. Like Jews in London and New York centuries later, Baghdad's Jews may have yearned to return to Jerusalem in their Saturday prayers at their local synagogue, but the other six days a week, they grasped the opportunities around them and built a thriving metropolis.

Presiding over this dynamic, self-confident com