Hebrew scholar, writer, and teacher. Abraham was born in Borisoglebsk, Tambov, a southern province of Russia. He was an author, and an artist with considerable talent. He was a professor of Hebrew literature and history in the city of Borisglebsk. Abraham made his house an active center for artists and intellectuals. His children grew up in a cultivated, liberal, artistic household. He placed much emphasis on academic and artistic pursuits. His students often met in the Soyer home to discuss ideas, a phenomenon which began to make the local governmental authorities very nervous; they began to worry that Professor Soyer might be a dangerous radical, for in Tsarist Russia new ideas were looked on with great suspicion by those then in power. There was also a growing climate of anti-Semitism in the provincial city of Borisglebsk. One night, on his way home, Professor Soyer overheard a pair of drunken peasants walking behind him. "There goes a Jew," one said. "Let's beat him up." His political views were "social democratic," rather than as radical or as a Communist. Abraham was an ardent Zionist (who longed for a Jewish state). Due to Russian oppression, and the fact they were Jews, the family was deported in 1913. They first went to Great Britain, then came to America, landing in Philadelphia. They made their home in New York City. They arrived in New York in search of religious and intellectual freedom. The family settled in the Lower East side of New York city, in the Bronx. This is where Raphael and his twin brother Moses, depicted the life that they saw around them. Moses described his father as a remarkable man who had toiled hard all his life without deviating from his youthful ideals — he was "self-taught and self-made in the real American sense of the phrase" and adored by contemporaries and colleagues as a brilliant teacher and scholar.