August 16: The Father of Canadian Jewry

Aaron Hart, a wealthy landowner and businessman who was a founding member of the Quebec province’s oldest synagogue, Montreal’s Shearith Israel, and is widely referred to as the “father of Canadian Jewry,” was born in London on this date in 1724. His parents were from Bavaria and Anglicized their name, Hirsh, to Hart. In 1756, Hart emigrated to New York City, where he became one of the first Jews in North America to become a Freemason. He settled in Trois-Rivières in 1761 and served as commissary officer for British troops engaged in a seven-year war with the French. Following the British victory in 1763, he was appointed postmaster of the town. Hart also took an active role in British military operations against the American Revolution. He was an Ashkenazi Jew who spoke fluent Yiddish, but most of his Jewish community were Sephardim. Hart became wealthy through the fur trade, land purchase, money-lending and store ownership, and left fortunes and estates for his four sons (his four daughters received only small portions), among whom was Ezekiel Hart, the first Jew elected to public office in the British Empire.
“Gradually Aaron Hart’s descendants would blend into the French-speaking and Catholic population of Trois-Rivières . . . They chose to remain there, though threatened with slow but inexorable assimilation by the local majority. Today some of them jealously guard the secret of their origins and of their relative prosperity; many others are completely ignorant of them.”—Denis Vaugeois, Dictionary of Canadian Biography