Moses Hart was born in Newport, the first of Jacob and Esther Levy Hart’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 daughter of Moses Raphael Levy and his second wife Grace Mears Levy (and the half-sister of Bilhah Levy Franks). In Newport, Jacob and Esther became involved in the comparatively large Jewish community, which included Jacob’s brothers, Naphtali, Samuel, Abraham, and Isaac, and their families. The Hart family played a prominent role in Newport’s Jewish community: Naphtali served as parnas of B’nai Jeshurun in 1759, while Isaac, that same year, joined Jacob Rodriguez de Rivera and Moses Levy as the three trustees who acquired the plot of land on which to build a synagogue.

Moses was soon joined by a couple of siblings, Samuel and Miriam. He would go into business with his brother. Like the other men in the family, they became merchants. With outbreak of the Revolution, however, their thriving business came to an abrupt halt.

The Hart family, all Loyalists, fled Newport after of the evacuation of the British army in 1779. In 1780, Samuel, Moses, and their father were identified along with a dozen others as traitors to the American cause in an act of banishment by the Rhode Island legislature. The act recorded that the Harts had willingly given comfort to the British and that they “had left this State and joined the enemies thereof,” settling on Long Island. In November of that year, Samuel’s uncle Isaac was killed during an attack on the settlement at Smith’s Point, Long Island, carried out by a band of Patriots from Connecticut. The Rivington’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 their muskets in the most shocking manner in the very act of imploring quarter, and died of his wounds a few hours after, universally regretted by every true lover of his King and country.”

Moses, his parents, and his siblings next moved to New York, but when that city fell to the Patriots, the family fled to England, where all would remain but Samuel, who soon left for Nova Scotia. Not much is known of Moses’s life after this point. It seems he and his brother engaged in some amount of transatlantic trade. Lore has it that when Samuel was visiting England in 1795, he asked his brother to raise his son, also named Moses, for Samuel had converted to Anglicanism in order to hold office in Canada.