Siegfried Sassoon

English poet of the First World War whose father came from the Baghdadi Jewish Sassoon family. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the war's fiercest critics, and his poems and memoirs are classics of English literature.

Who was Siegfried Sassoon?

Siegfried Sassoon was one of the great English poets of the First World War. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the war’s most powerful critics, and his poems and memoirs are classics of English literature. Through his father he belonged to the Sassoon family, the Baghdadi Jewish merchant dynasty that had spread from Iraq to India and England.

A Baghdadi heritage

Siegfried Loraine Sassoon was born on 8 September 1886 in Matfield, Kent. His father, Alfred Ezra Sassoon, was a grandson of David Sassoon, the Baghdadi Jewish merchant who founded the family’s fortune in Bombay. Alfred was disinherited by his mother for marrying outside the faith: Siegfried’s mother, Theresa Thornycroft, came from a family of English artists. His parents separated when he was young, and his father died in 1895.

Siegfried was raised in England, away from the Jewish world of his father’s family, but the Sassoon name and its history remained part of his identity. In his poem “Ancestors,” published in The Old Huntsman, he imagined the Eastern merchants from whom he descended.

The war poet

When war broke out in 1914, Sassoon enlisted. He served as an officer with the Royal Welch Fusiliers in France, where his courage earned him the Military Cross and the nickname “Mad Jack.” He was wounded more than once.

The horror of the trenches transformed his poetry. His war poems, many of them collected in The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918), described the suffering of ordinary soldiers with stark realism and bitter irony, and attacked the generals and the comfortable civilians at home who prolonged the war.

In 1917 he published a public statement against the continuation of the war. Rather than court-martial him, the army sent him to Craiglockhart, a military hospital in Scotland, where he met and encouraged the young poet Wilfred Owen. He later returned to the front.

Later life

After the war Sassoon became literary editor of a London newspaper and continued to write. His semi-autobiographical trilogy, beginning with Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), and his later volumes of autobiography made him one of the best-known writers of his generation. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1951, and in 1957 he became a Roman Catholic. He died on 1 September 1967 in Heytesbury, Wiltshire.

Legacy

Siegfried Sassoon is remembered as one of the voices who changed the way the world sees war. His Baghdadi Jewish ancestry is a reminder of how far the descendants of the Jews of Iraq traveled, and how deeply the Sassoon family, from Baghdad to Bombay to England, came to shape the worlds of commerce, scholarship and literature.