The earliest authentic records of the Jews of Canada go back to the period when England and France were engaged in their final contest for the mastery of the northern part of the continent. Aaron Hart (b. in London, 1724) was Commissary in General Amherst’s army, which invaded Canada from the south, and there were in the same army three more Jewish officers: Emanuel de Cordova, Hananiel Garcia and Isaac Miranda. Hart was later attached to General Haldimond’s command at Three Rivers, and at the close of the war settled in that city and became seignior of Bécancour. There were, of course, no Jews on the other side of the struggle, for France at that time suffered no Jewish inhabitants in her colonies, nor Jewish soldiers in her armies. But it was a Jew, Abraham Gradis (d. 1780), the head of the great French banking house founded by his father, David Gradis (naturalized in Bordeaux, 1731; d. 1751), who furnished money and supplies to the French King to carry on the unsuccessful war with England. Abraham Gradis had founded (in 1748) the Society of Canada, a commercial organization, under the auspices of the French government, and erected magazines in Quebec. Exceptional privileges were later granted to him and his family in the French colonies, and full civil rights were accorded him in Martinique in 1779. But the house of “the Rothschilds of the 18th century” was finally ruined by the insurrections in Santo Domingo and Martinique, combined with the losses which were occasioned at home by the French Revolution. (See Wolf, “_The American Jew ..._” pp. 476–82.)