Journal of the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center
No.16, Spring  2008


 

Yaakov Zamir:

THE SASSON FAMILY'S TORAH LIBRARY

 

 

The Sassoons' Torah Library

The Babylonian Jewry Heritage Library, which just a few months ago moved into its new home in the basement of the Nimrodi Building next to the Babylonian Jewry Museum, has received an important gift, of some eight-hundred books, manuscripts and journals, some quite rare. The contribution, by the well-known Sassoon family, headed by Rabbi David and Rabbi Yitzhak Sassoon of Jerusalem, was initiated by Rabbi David Sassoon’s son, Nathan Sassoon, who came up with the idea to give the Center a part of the large Torah library owned by his grandfather, Rabbi Solomon Sassoon, and his great-grandfather, Rabbi David Sassoon. The Sassoons were one of the most respected families in Babylonia. Its members served as “Sarraf Bashi” (Chief Treasurer) in Baghdad at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Because of persecution by the Turkish Pasha the family’s father, David Sassoon, decided to flee from Baghdad. After some wandering he settled in Bombay (today called Mumbai), where he and his sons contributed greatly to the city’s development under British rule and supported Jewish charitable institutions.

Rabbi Solomon Sassoon, the grandson of the first David Sassoon, was born in Bombay in 1880. As a very young man he already showed a great love for books. During his life, part of which he spent in Bombay and part, after 1911, in London, he systematically collected ancient Hebrew manuscripts, incunabula, and other objects of Jewish culture. In this he was encouraged by his learned mother, Farha Sassoon. His house was a meeting-place for scholars and Torah learning. His son, Rabbi Solomon Sassoon, was born in London in 1915, studied in yeshivas in that city and was ordained as Rabbi by the greatest Rabbis of England. He followed in his father’s footsteps and, after the latter’s death in 1942, took over his philanthropic activities among the communities of the Jewish Diaspora and in the Land of Israel. At the beginning of the 1970s he moved with his family to Jerusalem where he lived in the Bayit Vagan neighborhood. His home, like that of his father’s, was a meeting place for Torah learning until the day he died in 1985.

This impressive collection of books, which has already been catalogued and classified, will enrich the Center’s constantly growing library, which today contains some fifteen-thousand computerized items.