page_title: Baghdadi Jews
section_title: Baghdadi culture
hierarchical_section_title: Baghdadi Jews / Baghdadi culture
caption_attribution_description: Caricature of Raphael Emanuel Belilios. Caption read "Billy". Accompanying biography read "With a varied and complete mental outfit, arranged with legal precision and orderliness, Mr. Belilios gives the impression of being untroubled with doubts and uncertainties. He knows his subjects as a good scholar knows a geometrical proposition, logically and absolutely, but with none of the nuances and half-lights which trouble less gifted men". Raphael Emanuel Belilios (or "Billy"), was a barrister in England, son of Emanuel Raphael Belilios the Hong Kong opium dealer and businessman. He was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1900 and called to the Bar in 1903. He occupied chambers at Middle Temple from 1904 to 1922.
context_page_description: The former communities of Jewish migrants and their descendants from Baghdad and elsewhere in the Middle East are traditionally called Baghdadi Jews or Indo-Iraqi Jews. They settled primarily in the ports and along the trade routes around the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
  Beginning under the Mughal Empire in the 18th century, merchant traders from Baghdad and Aleppo established originally Judeo-Arabic speaking Jewish communities in India, then in a trading network across Asia, following Mizrahi Jewish customs. These flourished under the British Empire in the 19th century, growing to be English-speaking and British oriented.
  These grew into a tight trading and kinship network across Asia with smaller Baghdadi communities being established beyond India in the mid-nineteenth century in Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Baghdadi trading outposts were established across colonial Asia with families settling in Malaysia, Japan, Indonesia and Australia. Until the Second World War, these communities attracted a modest flow of Jewish emigrants from Iraq, with smaller numbers hailing from Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Iran, and Turkey.
context_section_description: The Baghdadi Jews, whilst spread across continents, operated a network of kinship and trust throughout the trading posts of the Indian Ocean. They were closely united by religious, language and family ties. Marriage, in particular, tied the Baghdadi communities together. Brides, and occasionally grooms, would be sent from one community to another. Business would often overlap with family ties, creating strong alliances. Synagogues, schools, and special funds, fastened a support networks sponsored by wealthy merchants. This kinship network meant Judeo-Arabic communities, typically established by fellow Jewish migrants from the same families and clans the Middle East, which sprang up in Burma, Singapore, Malaysia and China, were tightly woven into the Baghdadi community.
  The life of the Baghdadi kinship network on the opium route is best seen in the case of Sir Manasseh Meyer. He was born in Baghdad in 1846 and received his primary education of Calcutta, his secondary education in Singapore, before returning to Calcutta to learn bookkeeping and then moving to Rangoon, Burma, to established a small business. From there he returned to Singapore, established an import-export business, based on an opium monopoly with India. He was knighted in 1906 for his services to Singapore having sponsored the building of two synagogues and large scale real estate construction. However, throughout all his movement, he remained firmly within a Judeo-Arabic speaking Baghdadi network.
  Within these Baghdadi communities, the majority were of Iraqi Jewish origin, but families from Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iran and a handful of Sephardic Jews from Italy and Turkey joined and assimilated into the Baghdadi community. For most, it was simply as eastern expansion to closely bound patterns of transnational Jewish kinship, trade and exchange that had existed for centuries, moved out of the Middle East and the Mediterranean into colonial Asia. Within the Middle Eastern Jewish world, the Baghdadi Jews were considered adventurers and entrepreneurs.
  Quite unlike Ashkenazi Jews departing for America, who were typically poor and scored by their religious elders for doing so, the Middle Eastern Jews who departed for India included some the leading Jewish families of Baghdad, and were looked up as admired figures, patrons, and sponsors of religious life back in Iraq. Both the Sassoon family, which settled in Bombay no later than 1832, and the Judah family, which left for Calcutta in 1825, were seen as the leading Jewish families of Baghdad. Ezekiel Judah, who founded two synagogues in Calcutta, was a descendant of Solomon Ma'tuk.
  These great Baghdadi Jewish fortunes are deceptive, however, when it comes to what life was like for the overwhelming majority of the community. Far from wealthy, they lived on the edge of poverty, as peddlers, stall holders, mill workers, rickshaw men and other such jobs. The middle class Jews speculated in opium and acted as brokers. Great distance existed between the leading Baghdadi Jewish families, such as the Ezra family and the Sassoon family, who grew ever richer and more British-oriented during this period, and the rest of the community. Politically, the Baghdadi Jewish resembled an oligarchy, with all power and authority to represent the community towards colonial authorities being vested in the leading families, as it had been traditionally in the Middle East.
  Initially the Baghdadi Jewish communities that developed in India retained close cultural and religious links to Baghdad. Intellectual life was strong enough in the mid to late-19th century to sustain a printed press in India of the Baghdad Jewish dialect of Judeo-Arabic. Centered on Calcutta small Baghdadi Jewish publishing houses translated literary, historical, religious and anti-missionary tracts into Judeo-Arabic whilst religious texts were also printed in Hebrew. Baghdadi newspapers and periodicals in Judeo-Arabic, with some Hebrew portions, were also published in India. This Baghdadi printed press began in 1855: with the support of David Sassoon a peri
caption: Raphael Emanuel Belilios, born in Hong Kong and later established in Britain, 1881–1922.
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