Sassoon family
political family
The Sassoon family were a wealthy Baghdadi Jewish dynasty, associated with finance, banking, capital markets, the exploration of oil and gas, Judaism, Conservative politics, opium trading and philanthropy. Their principal vehicles, Sassoon & Co. and J. Sassoon Financial Group LLC, are domiciled in Europe, Asia and North America.
The family was known as "the Rothschilds of the East" due to the immense wealth they accumulated in Asia. The family's businesses in China, India, and Hong Kong especially, were built to capitalise on the opium trade. As more family members gravitated toward London, they became prominent in England and were ennobled by Queen Victoria.
Although most biographical data about the Sassoons lists Baghdad, Iraq, as their place of origins, Daniel Gross, an American journalist, has written that the Sassoon family has their origins in Aleppo, Syria. They later moved to Mumbai in India, and then emigrated to China, England, and other countries. From the 18th century, the Sassoons were one of the wealthiest families in the world, with a corporate empire spanning Asia.
Etymology
The Hebrew word sasson (Hebrew: שָׂשׂוֹן) literally means "joy" or "gladness." The name of the family strongly implies a local, Mesopotamian origin.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sassoon family” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.