Ezekiel Hart

Origins and early life

Ezekiel Hart was born in Trois-Rivières on 15 May 1770, the son of Aaron Hart, who had come to Canada with the British army in 1760 and was the first Jew to settle in the country, and of Dorothea Judah; the Harts were an observant Jewish family, members of the Shearith Israel congregation of Montreal, and Ezekiel, a merchant, brewer and seigneur of Bécancour, was one of the leading men of his town.

Work and career

In April 1807 the electors of Trois-Rivières sent him to the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada — the first Jew elected to any legislature in the British Empire, half a century before a Jew could sit in the House of Commons at Westminster. When he came to take his seat in January 1808 he swore the oath on the Hebrew Bible, with his head covered, and omitted the words 'on the true faith of a Christian'; the Assembly, by the votes of the Parti canadien majority, expelled him as a Jew.

Trois-Rivières re-elected him the same year, and in 1809 the Assembly expelled him again, until the governor dissolved it; the affair became a constitutional scandal in the colony and in London. Hart returned to business and served as a militia officer in the War of 1812, and in 1832 the Assembly he had been thrown out of, on a bill sponsored by Louis-Joseph Papineau, granted the Jews of Lower Canada the same political rights as Christians — the first such law in the Empire, twenty-six years before Britain's own. He died in Trois-Rivières on 16 September 1843, and Canada has named him a person of national historic significance.