On display at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan through August 13, The Sassoons draws from the collection of the titular family, whose 19th-century commercial ventures won them great wealth, first in India and later in London. Ari Hoffman writes:

To walk into The Sassoons at the Jewish Museum is to time travel to an age when Jews from Baghdad traded opium at Beijing and bolts of cotton from Mumbai. . . . Outside of the Sassoon vault you are unlikely to see paintings by John Singer Sargent and Winston Churchill cohabitate with Karaite prayer books and Samaritan calendars, which in turn share space with Yuan-dynasty scrolls. This is eclecticism, and, it must be acknowledged, empire, at its most exquisite.

The story of the Sassoons begins in earnest with David, who served as Baghdad’s treasurer before leading the family to India when the tolerance of the pashas for Jews wore thin. He is captured in a luminous portrait attributed to William Melville, who worked in the 1840s. He wears a beige turban and robe, striped with reds and blues. This is an eminence, a 19th-century Moses who has led his family to safe harbor at Mumbai, here a peek of azure background.

Sargent, whose portraits structure the show like a spine, does painterly justice to Aline de Rothschild, Lady Sassoon. . . . Sargent also painted Sybil Sassoon, the countess of Rocksavage and Aline’s daughter. Charcoal sketches trace him finding his form before executing an oil portrait for her marriage. . . . The painting marks a contrast with, and a journey from, the k’tubot—marriage contracts—and Torah scrolls from old Baghdad. Those are just one room, and a world, away.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.