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. 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 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. Belilios gained his reputation as a philanthropist. In the years 1887 and 1888, Belilios gave out 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 perished 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 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