The patronym Belilios belongs to that constellation of Sephardic names which, borne by the descendants of Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula, spread across the eastern Mediterranean, Italy, and then, by the trade routes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as far as the trading posts of British India and coastal China. The name, whose spelling varies according to the records (Belilios, Belillos, Bel-Ilios, Belilio), is generally traced to Judeo-Iberian and Italian onomastics, where it appears from the early modern period in the communities of Venice and Livorno, two ports that offered Sephardic Jews both refuge and a commercial platform of the first order.
The history of the Belilios lineage is exemplary of a broader phenomenon: the circulation of Jewish merchant families from the Mediterranean basin toward Asia, along the networks linking Aleppo, Baghdad, Basra, Bombay, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Within this "commercial diaspora," of which the Sassoon remain the most illustrious name, the Belilios occupy a singular place: that of a family which, without possessing the immense fortune of the great clans, nonetheless left a durable mark on colonial Memory, particularly in Hong Kong, where the name survives in the city's toponymy and in its educational institutions.
The present work sets out to reconstruct, with the caution imposed by the scarcity of archives, the successive strata of this lineage: its presumed Sephardic roots, its Venetian and Italian anchorage, its Indian branch connected to the Jews of Baghdad and Calcutta, and finally its flourishing in Hong Kong around the figure of Emanuel Raphael Belilios, banker, philanthropist, and notable of the British colony. We shall scrupulously distinguish what belongs to established archival record, what proceeds from probable deduction, and what belongs to transmitted tradition.
The origin of the name Belilios remains, strictly speaking, uncertain, and belongs as much to transmitted tradition as to linguistic analysis. Several hypotheses coexist. The first, most widespread in family memory and communal tradition, links the name to the Iberian Séfarade sphere — that is, to the Jews of Sefarad (Spain and Portugal) forced into exile following the expulsion decrees of 1492 in Castile-Aragon and of 1496–1497 in Portugal.
A second reading, philological in nature, proposes to decompose the name into Hebrew or Judeo-Romance elements. Some have seen in it a form derived from Beli associated with a root evoking light — hence the occasional spelling Bel-Ilios, playing on the Greek hêlios, "the sun" — but such an etymology belongs more to learned a posteriori reconstruction than to any documented filiation. Others draw connections between the name and Portuguese and Italian toponyms or patronyms attested in the registers of western Séfarade communities. In the absence of a genealogical source tracing an unbroken line back to the fifteenth century, these proposals must be regarded as reasonable conjectures rather than established facts.
What does appear solidly established, by contrast, is the family's belonging to the "western" Séfarade world — that of the Sephardim of the Italian and Mediterranean diaspora — prior to their migration eastward. This dual identity, Iberian in distant origin and Italian by settlement, is a characteristic trait of many Jewish families of Venice and Livorno, whose members readily described themselves as "Portuguese Jews" or ponentins (from the Italian ponentini, "those of the West"), as opposed to the levantins who came from the Ottoman Empire. It is therefore probable that the Belilios identified with this ponentine identity, even if Memory alone, in the absence of continuous notarial records, bears witness to it for the most distant centuries.
It is in Italy that the Belilios trace becomes historically more substantial. Venice, with its Ghetto established in 1516 — the first in history to bear that name —, and Livorno, granted by the Livornine of the Grand Duke of Tuscany (1591 and 1593) an exceptionally favorable status for Jewish merchants, were the two great poles of western Sephardic life. Families prospered there through maritime trade, banking, and commerce in coral, precious stones, and textiles with the Levant and, later, with India.
Tradition connects the eastern branch of the Belilios to a Venetian ancestor. This Venetian lineage, transmitted through family memory and cited in several nineteenth-century biographical notices relating to Emanuel Raphael Belilios — whom his contemporaries described as descended from an old Jewish family of Venice long established in Italy — is corroborated by historical plausibility: Venice was indeed, until the fall of the Republic in 1797, a natural crossroads for Jewish families trading toward the Orient. Here, the intersection between transmitted tradition and established historical context renders the hypothesis highly probable, even if it cannot always be supported by an unbroken chain of documentary records.
The role of Italian Jews in the great trade between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean is, for its part, a well-established fact in the historiographical record. Livorno, in particular, was in the eighteenth century a hub through which Mediterranean coral exported to India and Indian diamonds imported into Europe regularly passed. Italian Jewish families, many of them Sephardic, thus wove networks that prefigured, a generation later, the settlement of Jewish merchants in the ports of British India. The migration of the Belilios toward the Orient belongs to this broader movement, at the hinge between the decline of the great Italian ports and the rise of the British commercial empire in Asia.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Belilios were among those Jewish families who made their way to India, where the so-called "Baghdadi" community took shape — a network of Arabic-speaking Jews from Baghdad, Basra, Aleppo and the Mediterranean, who spread to Bombay, Calcutta, Rangoon and as far as the Far East under the protection of the Pax Britannica. Calcutta, in particular, became from the early decades of the nineteenth century one of the major centers of this diaspora, whose central institution was the synagogue and whose communal organization was structured around great merchant families.
It was in this milieu that Emanuel Raphael Belilios was born, in Calcutta in 1837 — the figure around whom the documented Memory of the lineage crystallizes. His father, Raphael Emanuel Belilios, was a merchant in Calcutta's Jewish community; the family thus combined the Italian-Sephardic heritage with integration into the Baghdadi world of British India. This dual belonging — Sephardic through Venetian ancestry, "Baghdadi" through the environment of settlement — was by no means exceptional: the Jewish community of Calcutta welcomed families from Mesopotamia as readily as Jews of Mediterranean origin, united by the language of commerce, religious practice and matrimonial alliances.
The young Emanuel Raphael received an education that prepared him for international trade: commercial training, command of several languages, knowledge of the opium, indigo, cotton and currency exchange markets linking India to China. Like many of his coreligionists, he turned toward trade with the Far East, then in full expansion following the forced opening of Chinese ports. It was this movement that was to lead him, in the 1860s, to the young colony of Hong Kong, where he would build his fortune and his renown. The Indian branch of the Belilios thus appears as the decisive link between the family's Mediterranean roots and its Asian destiny.
The figure of Emanuel Raphael Belilios (1837–1905) is the best-documented of the entire lineage, and it is in Hong Kong that he inscribed himself in colonial history. Having arrived in the British colony in the 1860s, he first made his fortune in trade, notably in the opium commerce with India and China — an activity then entirely lawful and central to the region's economy — before turning to finance and insurance.
His consecration came through banking. Belilios became one of the principal shareholders of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (the future HSBC), founded in 1865, and he chaired its board of directors in the late 1870s and through the 1880s, during a decisive period for the institution's consolidation. This leading role in the colony's emblematic financial institution made him one of the most influential businessmen in Hong Kong, where he was readily nicknamed the "merchant prince" or the "king of banking" of the exchange.
His fortune was matched by civic and political engagement. Belilios sat on the Legislative Council of Hong Kong, where he served, for several years from the 1880s onward, as the representative of the merchant community's interests, contributing to debates on the colony's administration, education, and infrastructure. A colorful personality, he was notably a source of sensation by keeping a camel and other animals at his residence in the heights of the island — a detail that Hong Kong's local memory long preserved. His trajectory illustrates the rise of a Jewish notable within the British colonial establishment of the Far East, at a time when very few non-Britons attained such positions of responsibility.
Beyond business, it is through his philanthropy that Emanuel Raphael Belilios left the most enduring mark, to the point that his name remains inscribed today in the institutional and toponymic fabric of Hong Kong. Convinced of the importance of education, he generously funded several teaching establishments in the colony, at a time when public instruction, particularly that of girls, was in its infancy.
His most celebrated gesture was the endowment that enabled the creation of a school for the education of young girls, which bore his name: the Belilios Public School, one of the first public establishments dedicated to female education in Hong Kong. The institution, born of his generosity at the end of the nineteenth century, has endured across the decades, and its name perpetuates to this day the memory of its benefactor. The family's Memory thus passed from the world of finance to that of the school — a remarkable transformation that ensured the survival of the family name long after the extinction of its Hong Kong branch.
Belilios also contributed to numerous charitable, hospital, and community works, both in favour of the Chinese and European populations of the colony and of the small Jewish community of Hong Kong, then forming around other Baghdadi families such as the Sassoon and the Kadoorie. His name was likewise given to streets and places in the colony, bearing witness to the public recognition he enjoyed. Acknowledged by the British authorities, he was honoured for his services and his philanthropic action. At his death, which came at the beginning of the twentieth century following a return to Europe, he left the image of a man whose wealth had been put, in considerable part, at the service of the common good of his adopted city.
Like many families of the Jewish merchant diaspora of the Far East, the Belilios experienced, in the twentieth century, a dispersal that accompanied the decline of the great trading posts and the political upheavals of Asia. The Baghdadi community of Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Calcutta, prosperous at the height of the colonial era, gradually diminished under the effect of successive emigrations — toward Great Britain, North America, Australia, and, after 1948, the State of Israel — and the seismic shocks of history: world wars, Japanese occupation, decolonization, and, in mainland China, the advent of the communist regime.
The direct Hong Kong branch descended from Emanuel Raphael Belilios did not perpetuate itself in place; it is through the school institution and toponymy that his name survived, more so than through a local line of descendants. This paradox — a family whose public Memory is more vivid than its biological lineage — is not uncommon among the great philanthropists of the diaspora: the founding gesture inscribed the patronym in duration where genealogy has been extinguished or dispersed. Here, tradition (the memory of a great family) and the archive (the founding acts, the colonial registers) answer and confirm one another, while leaving in shadow the precise fate of the collateral branches.
Bearers of the name Belilios are found, in various Sephardic and Baghdadi collections and registers, in Calcutta, in London, and elsewhere, which suggests an extended line of descendants that specialized genealogical research — notably that devoted to Sephardic and Baghdadi communities — continues to document. The complete reconstruction of the family tree nonetheless remains an open undertaking, dependent on access to the community archives of Venice, Calcutta, and Hong Kong. As it stands, the Belilios lineage presents itself as an exemplary diasporic trajectory, linking, in three or four generations, the Venetian ghetto to the skyscrapers of the Hong Kong bay.
The history of the Belilios family condenses, within a single lineage, the great movements of the Jewish diaspora of the modern era: the original Iberian exile, the Italian refuge of Venice and Livorno, the migration to British India and the integration into the Baghdadi world of Calcutta, and finally the flourishing in Chinese ports under the banner of the British Empire. At each stage, the family knew how to convert the constraints of exile into commercial opportunities, making trade and finance the instruments of a remarkable ascent.
The figure of Emanuel Raphael Belilios represents its documented summit: a leading banker, member of the legislative council of Hong Kong, a philanthropist whose name remains attached to the education of young girls in the colony. Around him, the older strata of the lineage — Séfarade roots, Venetian anchoring, Calcuttan branch — belong to a partially transmitted knowledge, which the archive corroborates through plausibility without always establishing it in detail. This is why the present Great Book has endeavored to distinguish, section by section, what is established from what is probable or transmitted.
It remains that, beyond the genealogical uncertainties, the Belilios lineage bears witness to a solid historical truth: that of those Jewish families who, from the Mediterranean to the China Sea, carried with them an identity, a faith, and a commercial expertise whose trace persists to this day, engraved in the name of a school in Hong Kong and in the Memory of a diaspora.
