Raphael Suares

Origins and early life

Raphael Suares was born in Cairo in 1846, the son of Isaac Suares, a Sephardic Jew of Livorno who had settled in Egypt under Muhammad Ali, and with his brothers Joseph, born in 1837, and Félix, born in 1844, he built the house of Suarès Frères et Cie into the principal channel of European capital into Egypt in the last quarter of the nineteenth century — a Jewish family whose synagogue, cemetery and community offices were those of the Sephardim of Cairo.

Work and career

The brothers financed the Egyptian state through the crisis of the khedive's debts, and Raphael, the financier of the three, sat on the boards of the companies that modernized the country: in 1898 he co-founded, with Ernest Cassel and the Cattaui family, the National Bank of Egypt, which became the country's central bank, and the Daira Sanieh Company that bought the khedivial estates; he financed the first Aswan dam, completed in 1902, the railway from Cairo to Helwan, the Kom Ombo sugar plantations and the Crédit Foncier Égyptien.

Above all he gave Cairo its public transport: the horse-drawn omnibus company he founded in the 1890s was so much his that Egyptians called any omnibus a 'suarès', a word that lived on in Arabic for half a century, and the electric tramway followed. A square in the new quarter of Cairo bore his name, Midan Suarès, until it was renamed after Mustafa Kamil. He died in 1902; the house declined after Félix's death in 1906, and the Suares family, like the rest of Egypt's Jews, left the country in the 1950s.