Raphael was the son of a Frankfurt currency broker, Löb Moses, later named Ludwig Moritz Erlanger (1780–1857).

Just prior the birth of his oldest child Susanne Adolphine (1829–1873), Raphael Erlanger converted from Judaism to Christianity for his wife's sake.

As the eldest son, Friedrich Emil Erlanger became involved in extensive banking and bill transactions early in life.

By age 19, he was so successful with his father in the brokerage business that he was appointed Consul General and fiscal agent at Paris by the Greek Government under Otto I.

Ferdinand II of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, as a ruler for his son King Pedro of Portugal, ennobled his father Raphael as a hereditary Portuguese Baron in order to thank Friedrich Emil, who would eventually inherit the title, for his services.

Raphael was subsequently granted titles by the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen and the Austrian Empire, who named him a hereditary baron and awarded him the Grand Cross of the Order of Franz Joseph.

On 30 June 1858, Friedrich Emil Erlanger married a young Parisian socialite, Florence Louise Odette Lafitte (1840–1931).

His wife, Maria Mathilde Deslonde, was from an influential Creole family whose ancestors emigrated from Brest, France, in the seventeenth century.

François Rodolphe d'Erlanger (1872–1932) was a musicologist and painter whose palace, Ennejma Ezzahra in Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia, now houses the Centre des Musiques Arabes et Méditerranéennes.

Baron d'Erlanger was one of the leading bankers of Paris, the dominant financial center of continental Europe in the second half of the 19th Century.

In 1889, during an inspection tour of their American railroad investments, the couple created the d'Erlanger Grant for start-up capital to build a hospital in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

D'Erlanger also donated several art works, including the seventeenth-century allegorical tapestries depicting the Duke of Alba to the Hampton Court Palace of the British crown.

In 1866, Baron d'Erlanger and M. Armand Lalande purchased Château Léoville-Poyferré in Bordeaux for one million Francs and ran it successfully until the 1890s.

In Italy, the d'Erlangers leased Villa Foscari, the famous mansion built in the seventeenth century by Andrea Palladio, and commissioned restoration work.