Sassoon Eskell

Origins and early life

Sassoon Eskell was born in Baghdad on 17 March 1860 into an established Jewish family, the son of a chief rabbi of the city, and he remained a Jew all his life.

Work and career

He was educated in Baghdad, then in Istanbul and in Vienna and London, and he spoke Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, French, German and English. Under the Ottoman Empire he represented Baghdad in the parliament that met after the Young Turk revolution of 1908 and served as the Ottoman minister of trade and agriculture. After the British occupation and the creation of the Kingdom of Iraq he was appointed the country's first minister of finance in 1920, holding the post until 1925, and he sat continuously in parliament until his death, being called the father of the Iraqi parliament.

He wrote the kingdom's first budget and its earliest tax and customs legislation, insisted that the state's oil royalties be paid in gold rather than in paper currency, a stipulation that proved worth a great deal to Iraq, and negotiated the terms of the oil concession with Britain. He worked alongside Gertrude Bell and T. E. Lawrence in the founding of the modern Iraqi state, and King Faisal I made him a knight. He belonged to a Baghdadi Jewish community that then formed roughly a third of the city's population and that was largely driven out in the following generation. He died in Paris on 31 August 1932.