Moses Hart

Moses Hart was born in Newport, the first of Jacob and Esther LevyHart’s three children. His parents had only recently arrived,having spent the past few years living in Stamford, Connecticut,where they may well have been the only Jews. Esther was the daughterMoses Raphael Levy and his second wifeGrace Mears Levy (and the half-sister ofBilhah Levy Franks). In Newport, Jacoband Esther became involved in the comparatively large Jewishcommunity, which included Jacob’s brothers, Naphtali, Samuel,Abraham and Isaac, and their families. The Hart family played aprominent role in Newport’s Jewish community: Naphtali served asparnas of B’nai Jeshurun in 1759, while Isaac,that same year, joined Jacob Rodrigues deRivera and Moses Levy as thethree trustees who acquired the plot of land on which to build asynagogue.

Moses was soonjoined by a couple of siblings, Samueland Miriam. He would go into business with his brother. Like theother men in the family, they became merchants. With outbreak of theRevolution, however, their thriving business came to an abrupt halt.

The Hart family,all Loyalists, fled Newport after of the evacuation of the Britisharmy in 1779. In 1780, Samuel, Moses and their father were identifiedalong with a dozen others as traitors to the American cause in an actof banishment by the Rhode Island legislature. The act recorded thatthe Harts had willingly given comfort to the British and that they“had left this State and joined the enemies thereof,” settling onLong Island. In November of that year, Samuel’s uncle Isaac waskilled during an attack on the settlement at Smith’s Point, LongIsland, carried out by a band of Patriots from Connecticut. TheRivington’s Gazette, a Loyalist newspaper, reported, “Mr.Isaac Hart, of Newport in Rhode Island, formerly an eminent merchant,and ever a loyal subject, was inhumanly fired upon and bayoneted,wounded in fifteen different parts of his body, and beat with theirmuskets in the most shocking manner in the very act of imploringquarter, and died of his wounds a few hours after, universallyregretted by every true lover of his King and country.”

Moses, his parentsand his siblings next moved to New York, but when that city fell tothe Patriots, the family fled to England, where all would remain butSamuel, who soon left for Nova Scotia. Not much is none of Moses’slife after this point. It seems he and his brother engaged in someamount of transatlantic trade. Lore has it that when Samuel wasvisiting England in 1795, he asked his brother to raise his son, alsonamed Moses, for Samuel had converted to Anglicanism in order to holdoffice in Canada.

Moses Hart

1795