Intent on persecuting the Jewish community in his land, the new Turkish Pasha of Baghdad imprisoned David Sassoon, son of the minister of finance, Saleh Sassoon, demanding outrageous amounts of ransom money. Rescued out of jail and sent on his way through Basra, onward to Bushire and eventually, Bombay, David Sassoon, heir of a wealthy banker and chief treasurer, landed on our shores in 1832 and changed the face of his adopted homeland.

“Although David Sassoon was accepted as a British citizen by the British Empire, he never spoke English,” says Dr Shaul Sapir, senior lecturer at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in the city on a continuing quest to document Mumbai’s Baghdadi Jew heritage, before it all but disappears. Sapir spent the first eight years of his childhood around Byculla’s Jewish neighbourhood, before his family moved to Israel. “When I returned with my wife to Mumbai 45 years later, to explore my roots, the larger-than-life bust of David Sassoon at the David Sassoon library inspired me to do something for the community,” says Sapir.

The 54-year-old lecturer told his wife that he was “picking up the glove”, a phrase she did not quite understand. Since then, Sapir has taken two sabbaticals from work, researching the British Library, libraries in Israel and spends two-and-a-half weeks in Mumbai each year, for the past four years. His book, he promises, as and when it is released, will be a masterpiece.

Rattling off a list of the Sassoons’ contribution is an interesting exercise to put their philanthropy and enterprise into perspective: the Jacob Sassoon Mill (largest mill in India, besides 25 other textile mills), the Sassoon Docks, handsome donations towards the construction of the Gateway of India, the Kala Ghoda, the tower at Victoria Zoo, the Police Club, the first silk mill, the Bank of India (where David Sassoon was chairman for 20 years), the Messina hospital and a host of contributions to centres of learning and charity.

“Like the Parsis, the Jews were outsiders who felt strongly about their Indian identity and wanted to contribute to the city where they were never persecuted,” says Sapir. The success of the Sassoons invited waves of migration from in and around Iraq, at one point, numbering close to 2,000. Today, there are only fragments of a community, a few families scattered across the city. “Victor Sassoon was an army guy, injured in WWI and spent a lot of time abroad. They were rarely active after him, and later, the creation of Israel spurred migration,” says Sapir.

Sapir has fond memories of the time he spent at the E E E Sassoon School in the Magen David synagogue compound, of the trams that circled Victoria Terminus and children screaming their lungs out at the Gateway of India. “There were no barricades then to keep anyone out,” he says.

So why aren’t the Baghdadi Jews mentioned in the same breath as Cochin or Bene-Israeli Jews? Sapir feels that in the 1920s, the chroniclers of Mumbai’s history sought out the exotic-traditional headgear, customs and the like.