[2] 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.

[5] 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.

[6] The Second World War brought strife to India, the Japanese occupation of Burma, Hong Kong and Shanghai, then swiftly the end of the British Empire in Asia.

Dislocated by war, the violence of the Indian Partition, rising nationalism and the uncertainty of independence in both India and Burma, an exodus began to the newly founded state of Israel, United Kingdom and Australia.

Since ancient Rome the caravan route from India had ended in Aleppo and the spice trade had tied Basra, Yemen and Cairo to the Malabar Coast.

[12] As adventurers, mystics and merchants, they had been venturing to India since the Middle Ages on the back of invasions of the subcontinent launched by Persian speaking rulers from what is now Iran and Afghanistan.

[12] These handful of Jews never established a permanent community but left legends and pathways for future settlers from Arabic speaking lands.

[18] In the early 18th century, trade between Basra and Surat grew whilst the Indian port was the main base of the British East India Company until it decamped to Bombay.

But it was around the early 19th century, in response to the tyrannical rule of Dawud Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Baghdad, who persecuted, extorted and imprisoned the leading Jewish families of the city, that whole clans started crossing the Indian Ocean to seek safety and fortune in Asia.

[21] Dawud Pasha's misrule was when Baghdadi immigration towards Bombay and Calcutta became strong with the leading Sassoon, Ezra and Judah families departing for India.

[5] This episode of persecution was the beginning of the Baghdadi Jewish diaspora with records of whole clans departing the city for Bombay, Calcutta, Aleppo, Alexandria and Sydney.

[23][24][25][26] As Jews, primarily from Baghdad, Basra and Aleppo came to India as traders in the wake of the Portuguese, Dutch and British what became known as the Baghdadi communities grew fast.

[27] Within a generation Baghdadi Jews had established manufacturing and commercial houses of fabulous wealth, most notably the Sassoon, Ezra, Elias, Belilios, Judah and Meyer families.

[20] Baghdadi settlement shifted first to Bombay and then principally to Calcutta, then the capital of British India and the centre of the jute, muslin, and opium trades.

Spurred by the immigration of some the leading Jewish families of Baghdad fleeing the persecution of Dawud Pasha, the first synagogue, replacing a small prayer room, was opened in 1823, and with the community expanding quickly a second followed in 1856.

[26] Great fortunes were also made in the indigo, silk and muslin trade with Dhaka where Baghdadi Jews partnered with Bengali Muslim merchants.

[36] Following the ban on the opium trade in the early twentieth century Baghdadi Jewish merchants invested in cotton and jute products as staple exports.

[31] The sudden spike in demand for jute sandbags, building blocks for the trenches on the Western Front (World War I), made great fortunes amongst the Jewish merchants of Calcutta.

[37] At their heights, the communities of Bombay and Calcutta were at the heart of a communal kinship network linked by the ports of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea.

[41] On the route between India and Singapore, a tiny Baghdadi community was in Penang, with a synagogue and Jewish cemetery, was established in the 1870s, but for most of its history never exceeded 50 families.

[42] Further south from Singapore, in Indonesia, then the Dutch East Indies, a tiny Baghdadi community of spice merchants was established in Surabaya in Java in the 1880s.

Baghdadi Jews from Iraq, Syria and Egypt, initially drawn to man the concessions of David Sassoon established tiny footholds in Nagasaki, Yokohama and Kobe.

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.

[56] This Baghdadi printed press began in 1855: with the support of David Sassoon a periodical started in Bombay catering to the merchant elite of the community.

[55] Whilst many of the wealthiest Baghdadi families remained aloof from Zionism in the late 19th and early 20th century, the community's middle class established Zionist associations in Bombay and Calcutta.

[50] Struggling communities across the Middle East sought the support of patrons in Asia such as when Moise Sassoon of Calcutta was called upon to by Lebanese Jews to sponsor the construction of the Magen Avraham Synagogue of Beirut.

Even some of the leading Baghdadi Jewish families who had settled in Britain chose to return to India as the Holocaust began the slaughter of European Jews.

The wealthier followed the path of the Sassoon family to Britain, whilst the poorer were drawn to the new state of Israel or the easing of immigration restrictions in Australia.

Nationalizations of legacy firms established during the colonial rule and currency restrictions saw a choking of economic life and the Baghdadi community shrink from 500 to under 100 by the 1970s.

Memoirs written by Baghdadi Jewish authors spoke fondly Burma, Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong and of the fact in India they had never experienced antisemitism, which was viewed as a unique treasure.