Following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, a Jewish family from the Yemeni port city of Aden, the Messas, parlayed its newfound patronage by the British into a vast mercantile empire that linked that Arabian port to a wide network of satellite communities in Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, and the Indian subcontinent. While amassing and expanding their family fortune, the Messa patres familias carefully crafted a distinctive Adeni Jewish identity that was keenly attuned to contemporary ideas governing bourgeois respectability, to colonial constructions of race and class, and to debates over modernity within the wider Jewish world. With Aden's pivot from being administered from Bombay to direct administration by the Colonial Office in 1937, the UN vote to partition Palestine in 1947, and the intense litigation among the heirs to the family fortune, the “Rothschilds of Arabia and Africa,” as one contemporary writer dubbed them, faded into obscurity. Their balancing act, like other ethnic and religious minority communities in the developing world that had wedded their cause to that of European empires, failed when faced with the rise of ethnic nationalism.