page_title: Emanuel Raphael Belilios
section_title: Family history
hierarchical_section_title: Emanuel Raphael Belilios / Family history
caption_attribution_description: Caricature of Raphael Emanuel Belilios. Caption read "Billy". Accompanying biography read "With a varied and complete mental outfit, arranged with legal precision and orderliness, Mr. Belilios gives the impression of being untroubled with doubts and uncertainties. He knows his subjects as a good scholar knows a geometrical proposition, logically and absolutely, but with none of the nuances and half-lights which trouble less gifted men". Raphael Emanuel Belilios (or "Billy"), was a barrister in England, son of Emanuel Raphael Belilios the Hong Kong opium dealer and businessman. He was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1900 and called to the Bar in 1903. He occupied chambers at Middle Temple from 1904 to 1922.
context_page_description: Emanuel Raphael Belilios, CMG, JP was a Hong Kong Italian Jewish banker, opium dealer, philanthropist, and businessman.
  Belilios was born in Calcutta, British India on 14 November 1837. His father was Raphael Emanuel Belilios, member of a Jewish Venetian family. Belilios married Simha Ezra in 1855, and in 1862 he settled in Hong Kong and engaged in trade. His fabulous 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 declined by the prime minister himself. 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 1882, appointed to the Legislative Council of Hong Kong in 1881 and as the Council's Senior Unofficial Member from 1892 to 1900.
context_section_description: The Belilios family originated in the Iberian Peninsula. Research in Jewish communal archives have traced the family to Portugal where they live for severals 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.
  Raphael Belilios, who was known in Portugal as Filipo Terço, fled the inquisition to Venice. Like other families from the generation of refugees the Belilios family strained to pass on objects with a symbolic connection to their former homeland. In 1653 we see Raphael Belilios is recorded in Venice as leaving to his two daughters the silverware that had come with him from Lisbon to Venice.
  The Belilios having settled in Venice in the early seventieth century regained their previous commercial success and within a century the family firm operated in Venice, Livorno and Aleppo. Jewish merchants engaged in Mediterranean trade at the time was conducted business through tight familial alliances with the Sepahrdic 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. The Belilios and Carvaglio families intermarried for at least three generations establishing two prosperous merchants dynasties.
  Family documents such as wills speak of the Belilios family belonging to "the Jewish nation, of Spanish and Portuguese descent" and "established in Livorno, Venice, London, Amsterdam and Aleppo." This mapped the business interests and offices of the Belilios family partnerships which leveraged intense ethnic networking and marriage ties into lasting trading relationships. Trading documents show the Belilios family in the seventeenth and eighteenth century also intensely trading with Catholic and even Hindu merchants in Goa.
  Historians have identified the Belilios family as culturally a type known as Port Jews a concept formulated by Lois Dubin and David Sorkin as a social type that engaged in seafaring and maritime economy of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. 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." Families such as the Belilios have been described as "the earliest modern Jews" and offering an "alternative path" to Jewish modernity from the Court Jews and the Ashkenazi centred Haskalah.
  The Belilios family, like many other Sepahrdic Jews operating out of Livorno, positioned themselves as central merchants and brokers in the booming trade of coral and diamonds coming from the Indian Ocean. Not traveling to India themselves they ran a family partnership in Aleppo and from there relied on a chain of mostly Mizrahi Jewish brokers and caravan traders through Syria, Iraq and Persia to connect them to their distant Hindu trading partners in the far off Portuguese colony.
  The Belilios were not only traders but also Rabbis. Rabbi Jacob Belilios served the community of Venice in the early eighteenth century. Rabbi Jacob Belilios was one of the main Rabbinical voices in Italy who sought to suppress the mystical visionary and kabbalist Moshe Chaim Luzzato, for fear he was of a renewed outbreak of messianism less than a century since the crisis wrought by the heretical claims of Shabbatai Zvi.
  The 1730s saw the Venetian Jewish community afflicted by a profound financial crisis and records show Rabbi Jacob Belilios 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 fa
caption: Raphael Emanuel Belilios Vanity Fair 6 January 1910
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