Emanuel Raphael Belilios

Emanuel Raphael Belilios, (14 November 1837 – 11 November 1905) was a banker, opium dealer, philanthropist and businessman, born in Calcutta, British India and active in Hong Kong. His father, Raphael Emanuel Belilios, was a member of a Jewish Venetian family of Sephardic origin. Belilios married Simha Ezra in 1855, and in 1862 he settled in Hong Kong and engaged in trade. His success saw him described in the British press at the time as "one of the merchant princes of the colony."

In the 1870s, Belilios was chairman of the Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, Limited.

He tried to establish relations with the then British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli by proposing a marble and bronze statue of Disraeli, which was rejected by the prime minister. Belilios erected the Beaconsfield Arcade, a reference to Disraeli title Lord Beaconsfield, in Hong Kong instead. However until his death Bellios would annually send a wreath to decorate the statue of Benjamin Disraeli on Parliament Square.

He became Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Chairman from 1876 to 1877, appointed to the Legislative Council of Hong Kong in 1881 and as the Council's Senior Unofficial Member from 1892 to 1900.

Belilios gained his reputation as a philanthropist. In the years 1887 and 1888, Belilios gave two annual scholarships valued at $60, to the students of the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese and studying at the Alice Memorial Hospital. Later in 1888, Belilios was a Director of the Hong Kong, Canton & Macao Steamboat Company In August 1889, Belilios donated $25,000 to set up a girls' government school. The Belilios Public School was renamed from Central School for Girls in honour of Belilios.

His first son David Belilios died in the plague of 1898.

Regarding the Chinese population Belilios observed favourably that: “The native Chinese make no difference between a Jew and Christian. Both are foreigners in their eyes, but, if anything they are better affected towards the Jew who they regard as Asiatic like themselves.”

Belilios died in London on 11 November 1905 and was buried at Golders Green Jewish Cemetery. On his death he bequeathed a £250,000 to found a free college for Jewish children in Calcutta.

Family history

The Belilios family originated in the Iberian Peninsula. Research in Jewish communal archives have traced the family to Portugal where they live for several generations as New Christians. The Belilios family was forcibly converted in 1497 to Christianity along with the entire Jewish community of Portugal. In all likelihood the Belilios family remained ethnically apart and practiced crypto-Judaism as marranos until a wave of persecution targeted the elite Portuguese New Christian merchant families in the early seventeenth century. Jewish merchants engaged in Mediterranean trade at the time was conducted business through tight familial alliances with the Sephardic community. As a result, during the 18th century the Belilios family were the business partners of the Ergas, Baruch Carvaglio and Silvera families of Livorno. Port Jews according to Lois Dubin were marked by a flexibility towards religion, an engagement with European culture and "a reluctant cosmopolitanism that was alien to both traditional and 'enlightened' Jewish identities."

The Belilios were not only traders but also rabbis. Rabbi Jacob Belilios served the community of Venice in the early eighteenth century.

The 1730s the Venetian Jewish community were afflicted by a profound financial crisis and records show in 1737–1738 was sent on a mission with a fellow member of the community to seek assistance from the flourishing Spanish and Portuguese Jews congregations in London and Amsterdam.

This downturn in Venetian affairs may have encouraged members of the family to settle permanently on Aleppo. The branch of the Belilios family which established itself and a branch of the family firm in Aleppo was one a clutch of Sephardic families known as the Livornese Jews under the protection of the French crown.

By the early nineteenth century the Belilios no longer operated as a united family and those established in the Far East were more modest merchants.

The success of Belilios in Hong Kong catapulted the family to wealth and then to Great Britain. His son, Raphael Emanuel Belilios, was a barrister in England. He was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1900 and called to the Bar in 1903.

In the same year, Raphael had an arranged marriage to Vera Charlotte Hart, the only daughter of Sir Israel Hart of Holland Park and Lady Charlotte Victoria of Knighton, Leicester Raphael was admitted to the Bar on 16 May 1903. He occupied chambers at Middle Temple from 1904 to 1922. The death of Raphael Emmanuel Bellios meant unlike other Baghdadi Jewish families such as the Sassoons the fortune of Emanuel Raphael Belilios did not establish a dynasty.

Plaques on the wall of the Spanish Synagogue in Venice record that many of the last members of the Belilios family established in Venice perished in the Holocaust.