It`s almost impossible sometimes to create a portrait of a person, whose life story has been written and retold differently throughout history. Author Joseph Sassoon, a professor of history and political economy and director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, experienced a similar challenge, when researching the story of David Sassoon, one of the most prominent merchants and philanthropists from 19th century Bombay, who hailed from the Baghdadi Jewish community. One theory claimed that David Sassoon and his father Sheikh Sassoon ben Saleh Sassoon, the former chief treasurer of Baghdad, fled from Baghdad for Bushir in Iran due to the fear of the plague and floods. David’s own grandson, Edward Sassoon MP, in a lecture given in late 1907, erroneously said that David was “chief treasurer”, and “fled the scene”, perhaps because he was “too honest in his dealings with the Pashas” due to which “energetic measures were being hatched against him”. There were other anti-Semitic theories that were floated as well, with one publication in London claiming it was 
because of a pogrom.

These theories disturbed Joseph no end. “The claim that they fled because of the cholera [outbreak] didn’t make any sense, because it’s impossible that a father would take only one son [David] with him and leave his other children behind. Same is with the pogrom theory. Why did nothing happen to any of David’s other brothers and sisters [in Baghdad]? In fact, I am a descendent of one of them,” he says in a telephone interview.