For a significant part of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Sassoon family directed a sprawling business concern, trading in opium, cotton, tea, and silk—and, eventually, much else besides—that shaped the history of Britain, India, and China. Various members of the family would rub elbows with the House of Windsor and are even mentioned in Queen Victoria’s diaries. Robert Philpot reviews a recent book about the so-called “Rothschilds of the East.”

The story begins with David, the dynasty’s founding father, escaping Ottoman Baghdad for Iran in the late 1820s. The son of Sheikh Sassoon ben Saleh, a long-serving former chief treasurer to the city’s pashas, David had been threatened and held hostage by Baghdad’s notoriously greedy and rapacious governor. When the aging sheikh, once “the most eminent Jew in Baghdad,” joined him soon after, it capped a remarkable fall from grace for the family.

The sheikh’s death in 1830 hastened the departure of David and his young family for Bombay where British rule provided safety and the administration adopted a liberal posture towards the city’s Jewish community.

In the First Opium War of 1839-42, Britain quashed China’s effort to stem the flow of the powerful narcotic into the country. David saw the opportunity, dispatching [his son], the “energetic and tenacious” twenty-four-year-old Elias, to scout the lay of the land and seek out new customers. The die was cast. Over the following decades, the Sassoons supplanted bigger traders to become the dominant player in the export of opium from India to China.

Business acumen was combined with epic levels of philanthropic giving: one-quarter percent of each trade, whether profitable or not, was recorded as a charitable surcharge, or ts’dakah, in branch ledgers. In Bombay, David established a school for boys, one for girls, and a third for underprivileged juveniles. Later, hospitals, libraries, and the renowned Sassoon Mechanics’ Institute would follow.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.