In this week's letters to the editor: Sassoons are not Sacklers; Proud of Mayor Breed; The perils of adulation; Students show us the way; Weaponizing the Holocaust
The Jewish Museum surveys one of the grandest families of the 19th century: a hemisphere-spanning dynasty of merchants, poets, soldiers and socialites (oh, and also drug lords).
Just before I started to read this book I had been immersed in the letters written by Jewish merchants based in Cairo from the tenth to the 12th centuries describing the trade they conducted across the Indian Ocean all the way to the Malabar coast. These letters are written in a difficult cursive Hebrew script