One of the pitfalls that Jewish journalist must struggle to avoid is the temptation to seek a Jewish angle on absolutely every story, no matter how tenuous. Yet the Jewish angle to the story of the princess of Wales’s mysterious disappearance from the public eye, while hardly a major piece of news, at the very least contains an interesting bit of history. It arose from the rumor—as unfounded as so many others on this subject—that Prince William is having an affair with his wife’s close friend Rose Hanbury. Philissa Cramer writes:
Hanbury’s husband David, the marquess of Cholmondeley, is the grandson of Sybil Sassoon—a member of the influential Baghdadi Jewish family and also a member of the Rothschilds, the prominent Jewish banking family.
Rose and David live in Houghton Hall today, surrounded in part by the design choices made by his grandmother. Sassoon, an avid art collector, was known for restoring the Cholmondeley estate to its former glory. David, too, made headlines more recently by revamping the estate’s public gardens. And this week, with Rose squarely in the Internet’s sights, the interior of the estate returned to public view when royals-watchers discovered photographs from 2013 and 2016 featuring the couple and their lushly decorated home.
The decor, Chinese Internet users quickly realized, includes furniture and art from the Qing Dynasty, China’s last imperial dynasty, which reigned from 1644 to 1912.
The Sassoon family’s ties to China were long and complicated. After Britain forced the flow of opium into China in the 19th century, during what are known as the Opium Wars, the Sassoon family became the dominant trader sending the narcotic from India to China. Victor Sassoon, who lived from 1881 to 1961, shifted much of the family’s wealth to Shanghai, where he was both crucial to the city’s modern development and to its role as a haven for Jews during the Holocaust.
While there is some unclarity about the provenance of Chinese artwork, calling it “an unsavory Jewish secret,” as one headline did, is surely sensational.
Read more on JTA: https://www.jta.org/2024/03/21/global/the-mystery-of-kate-middletons-disappearance-casts-a-spotlight-on-jewish-sassoon-familys-chinese-history