Ellis Stanley Joseph

Ellis Stanley Joseph (also known as Ellis Joseph or Ellis S. Joseph) was a collector and trader in wildlife in the early part of the 20th century. He also trained some of his captured wildlife, exhibiting them to the public in order to fund his other activities. Much of what is known of Ellis Joseph's childhood and early adult years comes from three lengthy interviews that he gave to newspapers—the Barrier Miner in April 1910, the Sunday Times (Perth) in July 1912, and the Sun (Sydney) in September 1912. In the interview for The Barrier Miner in April 1910, Ellis Joseph said that he was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India to Welsh parents of Jewish religion. Joseph is a Jewish surname—although not exclusively so and, amongst others, it is a Welsh name—and he was recognised as being Jewish in the U.S. Despite Joseph's own statement on his Welsh ethnicity, it is very likely that he actually was of Indian-Jewish origin but hid that Indian origin due to the then prevailing racial policies in Australia. Evidence supporting this is that his surname 'Joseph' was common in some Indian communities (particularly the Baghdadi Sephardic Jewish community but also the Syriac Christians), he was born at Bombay in India (a city with a significant Jewish population), he was described as having "dark-tanned skin" and his physical appearance in newspaper photographs. By the time that Ellis Joseph was born, many Baghdadi Jews were engaged in colonial commerce, were western-educated, and used English first names or English variants of Jewish first names. 'Ellis' may have been an anglicized version of Elias / Elijah, derived from the Hebrew name Eliyahu; Elis is its Welsh form. Ellis Joseph said that the family moved to San Francisco in the United States when he was nine months old. In 1912, he said that he had lived near Van Ness Avenue and attended the Geary-street Public School. An obituary—published in the U.S. after his death in 1938—stated that he was educated at an English school in Shanghai.