According to the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia entry on David Sassoon: “his business, which included a monopoly of the opium-trade, extended as far as Yokohama, Nagasaki, and other cities in Japan. Sassoon attributed his great success to the employment of his sons as his agents and to his strict observance of the law of tithe.”
According to Wikipedia:
When the Treaty of Nanking opened up China to British traders, Sassoon developed his textile operations into a profitable triangular trade: Indian yarn and opium were carried to China, where he bought goods which were sold in Britain, from where he obtained Lancashire cotton products. He sent his son Elias David Sassoon to Canton, where he was the first Jewish trader (with 24 Parsi rivals). In 1845 David Sassoon & Sons opened an office in what would soon become Shanghai’s British concession, and it became the firm’s second hub of operations.
In 1844, he set up a branch in Hong Kong, and a year later, he set up his Shanghai branch on the Bund to cash in on the opium trade.
From Geni.com:
The migration of Jews from the Baghdadi community in the 18th and 19th century was known as the Baghdadi Trade Diaspora. It was a migration that surged in 1817 when the cruel Ottoman governor Daud Pasha came to power in Baghdad and for 15 years of his rule, persecuted the Jews. He replaced the Nasi (prince) of Baghdad, a member of the Sassoon family, Sheik Sallah Sassoon. David Sassoon his son, was one of the many Jews driven from their homes by Daud’s oppression in Baghdad.
Sheik Sallih Sassoon (1750 – 1830)
David Sassoon (1792 – 1864)
Daud Pasha (took power 1817)
The other force was the British East India Company which expanded its markets into the Middle and Far East. As the British moved into India, Jewish traders, still adhering to their religious rituals and rites of their faith, followed, landing in Singapore.
The Baghdad Trade Diaspora includes not only those from the Ottoman Empire, but also the Arab speaking Syrian Jews , as well as those from Aden, Yemen, even Persia and Afghanistan, most of whom spoke Persian.
The first Jews to live in Singapore came from the Baghdadi community in Calcutta.
The British East India Company expanded into India in 1608, and then moved the Indian capital from Bombay in 1668 to Calcutta in 1772. Baghdad followed. The company administered the Straits Settlements of Singapore, Malucca and Penang from Calcutta, and designated Singapore as the capital of those settlements in 1826. As a result of lively trade developing between Calcutta and Singapore, some of the Baghdadi traders began moving to Singapore where they would eventually form a Jewish community.
The Baghdadi Jewish community is the youngest of the Indian Jewish communities and was founded in early 18th century in the west coast port of Surat. Due to major trade between the Persian Gulf and India, many Jews of Arab descent coming from the Ottoman Empire, Aden, Yemen, and Syria were drawn to the vast commercial opportunities and religious freedoms of India.
The Baghdadi Jews settled in both Bombay and Calcutta. Early merchants in Surat, Bombay and Calcutta, Poone (India) and Rangoon traded a variety of materials including gems, Arabian horses, rose water, spices, silk and gold based yarn.
The Bombay community was initiated primarily by David Sassoon, a chief treasurer to the governor of Baghdad and an influential businessman. Sassoon was considered the most prosperous of the Baghdadi Jewish Traders in the Diaspora, he and his family single-handedly shaped the Jewish community, building the Magen David synagogue in 1861 which contained a hostel and Talmudic school, hospitals, and employed many Ottoman Jews in his vast textile industry.
The Calcutta community led by Moses Dwek ha-Cohen, was also a center of industry, and depended on the leadership of a few very wealthy families including the Ezras and the Elias, who funded the schools, jobs, and organized worship of the Jewish community.
David Sassoon
The most successful Jewish trader of the 19th century Baghdadi Trade Diaspora. His father Sheik Sallah Sassoon became the nasi of Baghdad’s Jewish Community. He was distrusted by Daud and fled Baghdad to go to Basra then to the Port of Bushire on the Persian Gulf, leaving behind generations of culture and his family’s riches.
He started business again with the help of other Baghdadi traders and after moving to Bombay in 1832 created David Sassoon and Sons. He spoke Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Hindi and learned some English. He provided work, food and shelter for those who had fled from Baghdad to join him and his sons on the condition that they remain strict adherents to their Orthodox religious life.
Thus he created a Baghdadi community in Bombay, trading extensively in wool, cotton and yarn, and diversified into wheat, silks and spices. He encouraged cultivation of local tea for export to England.
The trade that made Sassoon a multi-millionaire was opium, grown in India and shipped east to China. In 1894 he sent his 2nd son Elias to establish a permanent base in Shanghai . In 1861 he built Maghen David, the first Baghdadi synagogue in Bombay, located in nearby Byculla. A great philanthropist Sassoon built and endowed Indian and Jewish hospitals, schools libraries, old age homes, docks, civic statues and buildings, many of which still bear this family name. David Sasson was the Orthodox head of a Baghdadi family dynasty that extended to China, Japan and England.
David Sassoon was married twice, first to Hannah Sassoon, and then to Farha Flora Sassoon. They had fourteen children:
Albert Abdullah David Sassoon, 1st Baronet of Kensington Gore
Elias David
Amam Moses
Mazaltob
Sassoon David
Reuben
Arthur Abraham
Solomon
Aaron
Kate
Rebecca
Simha
Frederick
Mozelle
The brokerage firms of E. Gubbay and D.E.I. Ezra of Calcutta strengthened the family position in the opium market. The Gubbays and Ezra’s became prominent traders and philanthropists in Calcutta. After his death his 8 sons continued the dynasty earning the title “The Rothschilds of the East”. Sassoon’s impact was seen on leaders throughout the Baghdadi Diaspora and helped to inspire:
Ezra of Calcutta and Hong Kong
Elie Kadoorie and Elias Hardoon of Shanghai
Manasseh Meyer of Singapore
Connected to each other
Groups of Jewish traders known as Rhadanites criss crossed the branches of the Silk Road to Asia and China. They traded in spices, silk, cotton and amethysts. They all spoke Hebrew and Arabic and brought the teachings of the Babylonian religious academies to the isolated and distant communities of the growing Diaspora.
Silas Hardoon
Began as an employee of the Shanghai branch and built his own successful business and performed philanthropic deeds in China and India. His grandson Jacob Sassoon built the Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue in Bombay. Many of David Sassoon’s descendents became Knights of the British Empire and a good number took up residence in England.
The Opium trade
Opium was introduced in China as a medical treatment in the 8th century by the Arabs. In 1793 British East India Company secured a monopoly whereby it would be the only company allowed to sell opium produced in India’s fields, most of which was then sold into China.
Opium became the single most valuable commodity of the entire 19th century. This monopoly was broken in the 1830’s when other British companies such as Jardine Matheson as well as Parsi, Arab and Jewish traders were able to get into the opium trade. British firms began to withdraw from the market as competition ate into their profits.
In the 1890’s Singapore’s Jewish merchants began reinvesting their profits in stocks and property. By the end of the 19th century the Jewish merchants had long been well out of the opium business.
The traders were Orthodox Jews, most of whom considered themselves Sephardim. The word Sephard means “Spain” in Hebrew. Baghdadi traders who had traveled as far as Spain centuries earlier called themselves Mizrahi Jews. The origin of European Jews was known as Ashkenazi Jews.
The Jewish leaders kept their faith
In 1841 the government of Singapore recorded the Jewish Synagogue Act, allowing leased property in the town to be used for religious purposes, this rent was known as “popcorn rent”. The act named three of the founding fathers:
Joseph Dwek Cohen
Nassim Joseph Ezra
Ezra Ezekiel
The synagogue was large enough to hold between 30 – 40 men, and no women, who in those days rarely attended synagogue. The rituals of Judaism, and strong family ties made the merchants a close knit group dependent on each other and the network of Jewish communities throughout the Middle East and India, eventually inspiring Baghdadi’s to join them.
For hundreds of years in Baghdad the most powerful man of the Jewish community was its leader, the nasi. Thus Abraham Solomon in Singapore, like David Sassoon in Bombay, became Singapore’s de facto nasi.
When I put in “Jews opium trade”, most of the early Google results come from anti-Jewish websites. Some of these sites list neutral sources of information such as Wikipedia.
According to Wikispooks:
David Sasson has been memorably and accurately described as “the greatest Drugs Kingpin in the history of the world” [1] but official histories do their level best to obfuscate his dominant involvement in the opium trade which was the major source of his wealth. Sassoon was a pivotal figure in both the trading regime of the British Raj and British Subjugation of China in the first “Opium War” of 1839-41, but in spite of this, he does not have an entry in Encyclopedia Britannica. Similarly the Wikipedia entry has been sanitised over the years to remove all reference to his instigation of the “Opium Wars” [2]; the Jewish encyclopedia devotes two thirds of its entry to his philanthropy [3]
He is justifiably best known for monopolizing the opium trade into China and encouraging its use there. He was born in Baghdad into a family of Nasis, traditional leaders of the Jewish community. His father, Saleh Sassoon, was a wealthy banker and chief treasurer to the pashas, the governors of Baghdad, from 1781 to 1817. However, the Jews came under pressure from the Muslim Turkish rulers of Baghdad. Fleeing with his wife and family and a small part of the family’s wealth, Sassoon arrived in Bombay in 1833.
He started business in Bombay with a counting house, a small carpet godown, and an opium business. He was soon one of the richest men in Bombay. He chose to follow the market, but he pursued all his enterprises better than his chief rivals, the Parsis. By the end of the 1850s, it was said of him that “silver and gold, silks, gums and spices, opium and cotton, wool and wheat – whatever moves over sea or land feels the hand or bears the mark of Sassoon and Company”…
In Bombay, David Sassoon established the house of David Sassoon & Co., with branches at Calcutta, Shanghai, Canton and Hong Kong. His business, which included a monopoly of the opium trade in China, (even though opium was banned in China) extended as far as Yokohama, Nagasaki, and other cities in Japan.
In 1836, the opium trade reached over 30,000 chests per annum and drug addiction in coastal cities became endemic. In 1839, the Manchu Emperor ordered that the opium smuggling be stopped. He named the Commissioner of Canton, Lin Tse-hsu, to lead a campaign against opium. Lin seized and destroyed 2,000 chests of Sassoon opium. An outraged David Sassoon demanded that China compensate for the seizure or Great Britain retaliate.
…David Sassoon was conscious of his role as a leader of the Jewish community in Bombay. He helped to arouse a sense of Jewish identity amongst the Bene Israeli and Cochin Jewish communities. The Sassoon Docks (built by his son) and the David Sassoon Library are named after him. He also built a synagogue in Byculla.
From The Church of Nobody:
David Sassoon is a most extraordinary character. During the nineteenth century he was the richest man in the world. It was said of him that “whatever moves over sea or land feels the hand or bears the mark of Sassoon and Company”. And when you’re that wealthy and that powerful, if a country like China declares your product of opium illegal then you merely get another country, like Great Britain, to declare war on them. Subsequently, all of that Chinese history: the Opium Wars, the theft of Hong Kong, the rampant looting and destruction of China’s cultural treasures – variously depicted heroically in Hollywood pictures such as 55 Days in Peking and The Sand Pebbles, or through a lens of subjugation and humiliation in Chinese flicks like the Once Upon a Time in China series – all of that may be laid at the feet of the greatest drug kingpin in the history of the world, David Sassoon.
And astoundingly nobody has ever heard of him. He has no listing in Encyclopaedia Britannica at all – nothing, not a sausage. The only Sassoon they acknowledge is anti-war poet Siegfried Sassoon, whose idiot father got himself disinherited by the family for failing to marry a Jewess. Clearly Siegfried’s dad also failed to teach his son the Talmud: “When you go to war do not go as the first, but as the last, so that you may return as the first.” Oh well, never mind.
But it occurs to me that in some ways Sassoon’s non-existence in the official records is par for the course. Fame in inverse proportion to wealth and power are how things are done at that level. Who was it that said, “Give me control over a nation’s currency and I care not who makes its laws”? Who knows? Did anyone say it at all? It’s not in wikiquotes so perhaps it never happened. Unsurprisingly, the Sassoons married into the family of whoever it was that didn’t say that and who certainly don’t control the monetary policy of almost every nation on earth.
Mind you, the from-on-high Britannica is one thing and the democratic Wikipedia is another. There, David Sassoon does have an entry. But the beauty of things democratic is the ease with which they may be subverted. And here (coming to the point at last) you may see that process take place right before your very eyes. The first entry here comes from my hard drive and I have it dated late 2007. This is immediately followed by wikipedia’s current entry. See if you can spot the difference. Sorry, no brownie points because really it’s too goddamn easy. However for those who need a hint – see if you can find the words ‘opium wars’ anywhere in amongst the second entry. NB. The so-called ‘Legacy’ section of each is a) identical, b) predictable, and, c) not worth reading, so feel free not to.*
BTW. Have a look at wikipedia’s entry for the Sassoon family. See if you can spot the inbreeding. It seems the products of this inbreeding are all talmudic rabbis…
*Sure enough, weathy Jews are always described as ‘philanthropists’ in spite of the fact that they only ever give to Jewish charities. The greatest criminal in Australian history, Dick Pratt, owner of packaging mega-corp Visy, was responsible for running a cartel that bilked customers of somewhere in the vicinity of a billion dollars. The corporate fine of $36M was the biggest in Australian history but actually represented 0.75% of Pratt’s personal fortune. What with being terminally ill, all charges against Pratt as an individual were dropped, and that being the case, and he being such a fine contributor to charities (all Jewish) it was fitting and proper that he be publicly rehabilitated, with no less than that shit Johnny Howard donning a yamulka and declaring him the best thing since sliced bagels. No doubt his rehabilitation wasn’t hurt by the the fact that he’d had half a dozen ex-prime-ministers and state premiers on the payroll with one, Bob Hawke (the man who publicly wept for Israel) receiving up to $8333.33 a month as ‘consultation fees’.
From BibleBelievers.org.au:
Sassoon’s sons were busy pushing this mind-destroying drug in Canton, China. Between 1830 and 1831 they trafficked 18,956 chests of opium, earning millions of dollars. Part of the profits went to Queen Victoria and the British government. In the year 1836 the trade increased to over 30,000 chests and drug addiction became endemic in coastal cities.
In 1839, the Manchu Emperor ordered it stopped and named Commissioner of Canton, Lin Tse-hsu, to lead a campaign against opium. Lin seized 2,000 chests of Sassoon opium and threw it into the river. An outraged David Sassoon demanded that Great Britain retaliate. Thus, the Opium Wars began with the British Army fighting as mercenaries of the Sassoons. They attacked cities and blockaded ports. The Chinese Army, decimated by 10 years of rampant opium addiction, proved no match for the British Army. The war ended in 1839 with the signing of “The Treaty of Nanking.” This included provisions especially designed to guarantee the Sassoons the right to enslave an entire population with opium. The “peace treaty” included the following provisions:-
Full legalization of the opium trade in China,
Compensation from the opium stockpiles confiscated by Lin of 2 million pounds,
Territorial sovereignty for the British Crown over two hundred offshore islands.
Sassoon’s use the British Army to Drug an entire Nation
British Prime Minister Palmerston wrote Crown Commissiner Captain Charles Elliot that the treaty didn’t go far enough. He said it should have been rejected out of hand because: “After all, our naval power is so strong that we can tell the Emperor what we mean to hold rather than what he would cede. We must demand the admission of opium into interior China as an article of lawful commerce and increase the indemnity payments and British access to several additional Chinese ports.” Thus, China not only had to reimburse Sassoon the value of his dumped opium but to pay England the sum of 21 million pounds for the cost of the war!
This gave the Sassoon’s monopoly rights to distribute opium in port cities. However, even did not satisfy him and Sassoon demanded the right to sell opium throughout the nation. The Manchus resisted and the British Army again attacked in the “Second Opium War” fought 1858 – 1860. Palmerston declared that all of interior China must be open for uninterrupted opium traffic. The British suffered a defeat at the Taku Forts in June 1859, when sailors, ordered to seize the forts, were run aground in the mud-choked harbor and several hundred killed or captured. An enraged Palmerston said: “We shall teach such a lesson to these perfidious hordes that the name of Europe will hereeafter be a passport of fear.”
Andrew Kwong is a Chinese man living in Vancouver. He’s set up a website to ask for reparations from Jews for all the Chinese who got addicted to their opium:
Justice For Chinese (JFC) is the brainchild of Andrew Kwong (鄺安柱) also known as (aka) Joe Canuck, aka The People’s Artist. The main objective of JFC is to seek legal redress and monetary compensation for all Chinese peoples from the Rothschild Jews who destroyed China and the lives of an estimated 600 million Chinese who were addicted to their deadly opium.
The Rothschild Jews have a fortune estimated at 500 trillion U.S. dollars and much of that originally came from the sale of their deadly opium in China 200 years ago. Jews are masters of deception and genocides and I would be dead if not for the grace of God. I have already been harassed by the police and received death threats.
Like most people, I would have preferred a peaceful if boring life. But since I have been threatened, my best defense is an offense. If the Jews want to kill me, then they will have to do it with me screaming and kicking. I will not go down in silence. I will not die without a fight.
According to Andrew Kwong:
Two hundred years ago, the opium was produced in India and shipped to China on Rothschild-owned ships via their East India Company. David Sassoon was the Jew who pushed the opium in China. Sassoon employed his sons and only fellow Jews. He would not allow any other races to be engaged in the ‘Jews’ business.’
It was the Jews not the British who produced and imported and sold and profited from the opium. The opium trade was strictly and entirely a Jewish enterprise! It was a Jewish monopoly!
According to Radio Islam:
The Jewish Monopoly on Opium Still Fuels Chinese Resentment Today
The 99 year British lease on Hong Kong expired in July, 1997, allowing China to take over its land once again.
Hundreds of newspaper stories and TV reports covered that event but not one revealed how England first gained control of Hong Kong.
The truth lies buried in the family line of David Sassoon, “The Rothschilds of The Far East,” and their monopoly over the opium trade.
Britain won Hong Kong by launching the opium Wars to give the Sassoons exclusive rights to drug an entire nation.
David Sassoon was born in Baghdad, Iran in 1792. His father, Saleh Sassoon, was a wealthy banker and the treasurer to Ahmet Pasha, the governor of Baghdad (Thus making him the “court Jew” – a highly influential position)
In 1829 Ahmet was overthrown due to corruption and the Sassoon family fled to Bombay, India.
This was the strategic trade route to India’s interior and the gateway to the Far East.
In a brief time the British government granted Sassoon monopoly rights to all manufactured cotton goods, silk and most important of all – Opium – then the most addictive drug in the world.
According to WideAwakeGentile:
India has had many famous and infamous criminals and crooks but one of the most underreported and devious of them is not even Indian He was a Bhagdadi Jew called David Sassoon
David Sassoon was born in Baghdad, Iran in 1792. His father, Saleh Sassoon, was a wealthy banker and the treasurer to Ahmet Pasha, the governor of Baghdad (Thus making him the “court Jew” – a highly influential position) In 1829 Ahmet was overthrown due to corruption and the Sassoon family fled to Bombay(Mumbai), India.
In Mumbai, David Sassoon did a Rothschild and sent his eight sons all over India Indo China and China He built the international business called David S. Sassoon, with the policy of staffing it with people brought from Baghdad. They filled the functions of the various branches of his business in India, Burma, Malaya, and east Asia. In each branch, he maintained a rabbi.
In the beginning, David Sassoon wanted to trade cotton cloth with China in exchange for tea, but the Chinese did not want the cotton that Sassoon wanted to trade.At the same time, Britain had an insatiable appetite for Chinese tea, but the Qing Dynasty and its subjects did not want to buy anything that the British produced.
The Chinese were, however, willing to trade tea for silver, since at that time China had a currency fully backed by silver. But the government of Queen Victoria did not want to use up the country’s reserves of gold or silver in buying tea.However, Sassoon considered that the Chinese might be susceptible to opium, which could then be exchanged for tea.
Armed with this knowledge, he sailed back to England to make a new proposition to the Queen. And, on the advice of David Sassoon, Queen Victoria decided to export opium from the Indian Subcontinent to China where her military would enforce its importation and use.
In Order to boost the trade David Sassoon forced the farmers in Bengal to stop farming food and turn to growing opium poppies. This change in cropping patterns was to have disastrous consequences later for Bihar Bengal and Uttar Pradesh The climate in Bengal was very good for growing opium and Sassoon’s business flourished. He became a MEMBER OF THE EAST INDIA COMPANY, A FIRM OWNED AND RUN BY JEWS(a fact few Indians know even now ) out of the City of London. So successful was the opium business that the tax the East Indian Company paid to England paid for all English wars between 1831 and 1905.
Sassoon’s sons were busy pushing this mind-destroying drug in Canton, China, and their trade expanded alarmingly. Between 1830 – 1831 they trafficked 18,956 chests of opium earning millions of dollars. Part of the profits went to Queen Victoria and the British government. In the year 1836 the trade increased to over 30,000 chests and drug addiction in coastal cities became endemic.
By 1880 it had skyrocketed to 105,508 chests, making the Sassoons the richest Jews in the world next to the Rothschild’s.The Sassoons were now licensing opium dens in each British occupied area with large fees being collected by their Jewish agents.Pretty soon the Rothschild’s and Sassoons were tied in marriage when one of Davids many grandsons Sir Edward Albert Sassoon (1856 – 1912), the son of Albert, married Aline Caroline de Rothschild,And many of these Jewish agents were the Chinese Jews of Kaifeng.These Jews had immigrated to China along the Silk Road hundreds of years ago and had so intermarried with the Chinese that they looked entirely Chinese.But they still were practicing Jews and were thus the perfect Chinese agents for the Sassoons.The entire trade was controlled by Jewish families only. Sassoon would not allow any other race to engage in “the Jews’ business” of importing and selling opium.Opium was strictly a Jewish monopoly, but these Jews were working under British passports.