Jules Porgès (25 May 1839 – 20 September 1921) was a
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...
-based financier who played a central role in the rise of the
Randlord
Randlords were the capitalists who controlled the diamond and gold mining industries in South Africa in its pioneer phase from the 1870s up to World War I.
A small number of European financiers, largely of the same generation, gained control of th ...
s who controlled the
diamond
Diamond is a solid form of the element carbon with its atoms arranged in a crystal structure called diamond cubic. Another solid form of carbon known as graphite is the chemically stable form of carbon at room temperature and pressure, ...
and
gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile me ...
mining industries in
South Africa
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the ...
.
He was born Yehuda Porges in
Vienna
en, Viennese
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, registration_plate = W
, postal_code_type = Postal code
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, timezone = CET
, utc_offset = +1
, timezone_DST ...
and raised in
Prague
Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and List of cities in the Czech Republic, largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 milli ...
, where his father was a jeweller. He settled in Paris in the early 1860s and established himself as a diamond trader, through his company Jules Porgès & Cie.
He recognized early the significance of the diamond finds in South Africa and, in 1873, sent two of his younger staff,
Alfred Beit
Alfred Beit (15 February 1853 – 16 July 1906) was a Anglo-German gold and diamond magnate in South Africa, and a major donor and profiteer of infrastructure development on the African continent. He also donated much money to university edu ...
and
Julius Wernher
Sir Julius Charles Wernher, 1st Baronet (9 April 1850 – 21 May 1912) was a German-born Randlord and art collector who became part of the English establishment.
Life history
Born in Darmstadt, Hesse, Wernher was the son of Elisabeth (Weidenbu ...
, to South Africa as his firm's representatives. He arrived in Kimberley himself in 1876 and continued their work in consolidating claims, financing deals and marketing stones, so that his firm Compagnie Française de Diamant du Cap de Bonne Espérance gained a significant portion of the Kimberley mine.
He saw the benefit of Cecil Rhodes's attempt to consolidate the disparate mining holdings, and sold the Compagnie Française to
De Beers Consolidated Mines
De Beers Group is an international corporation that specializes in diamond mining, diamond exploitation, diamond retail, diamond trading and industrial diamond manufacturing sectors. The company is active in open-pit, large-scale alluvial and ...
in 1887. He was also instrumental in the negotiations that led to Rhodes buying the Kimberley Central Mining Company (the stake of Barney Barnato).
With the discovery of gold in South Africa, at Barberton and then
Witwatersrand
The Witwatersrand () (locally the Rand or, less commonly, the Reef) is a , north-facing scarp in South Africa. It consists of a hard, erosion-resistant quartzite metamorphic rock, over which several north-flowing rivers form waterfalls, which ...
he turned his attention to gold mining and acquired stakes in many mining claims in and around
Johannesburg
Johannesburg ( , , ; Zulu and xh, eGoli ), colloquially known as Jozi, Joburg, or "The City of Gold", is the largest city in South Africa, classified as a megacity, and is one of the 100 largest urban areas in the world. According to Dem ...
and developed the financial structures that enabled their exploitation. With Beit and Wernher, and other partners including Hermann Eckstein and Eduard Lippert he was the founder of the mining and financial group known as the "Corner House" whose offices were on a corner at the site of Market Square in Johannesburg and whose name was also a pun on "Eckstein", "cornerstone" in German.
In 1890, he largely retired from South African business, and his interests were taken over by the firm of Wernher, Beit & Co.
He built a large château at