Moses Michael Hays, a colonial Jewish merchant born in New York on May 9, 1739, was the fifth child of Judah Hays, a Dutch trader who had crossed from The Hague a generation before, and of Rebecca Michaels. His father kept a store dealing in broadcloth, velvets, and linens, and the son learned commerce at its counter, returning from a voyage to London in 1760 to take his place in the family enterprise. The congregation Shearith Israel shaped those years with equal force: he signed its rolls as a full member at twenty and served as its parnas, a chief lay officer, from 1767 to 1769. In 1766 he married Rachel Myers, sister of the celebrated silversmith Myer Myers, uniting two respected mercantile houses of the city. Three years afterward New York admitted him as a freeman, the civic seal of an established man of business. From this beginning he carried the traits that would mark every chapter that followed: industry, fidelity to his faith, and an exacting sense of personal honor.
Freemasonry entered his life in the same seasons that drew him toward Rhode Island. In December 1768 Henry Andrew Francken appointed him Deputy Inspector General of Masonry for North America, charging him with planting the higher degrees of what became the Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite in the New World, and within months he held the warrant of King David’s Lodge in New York as its first Master. By the close of that decade his ventures centered on Newport, then among the busiest harbors on the continent, where he kept a shop on the Point and dealt in goods from bar iron to brandy. When rebellion came he declared himself without hedging: in July 1775 he subscribed an oath affirming that the American war against Great Britain was “just and necessary.” A year later, after Rhode Island’s General Assembly singled him out on an anonymous suspicion of disloyalty, he answered with a petition of striking boldness, avowing his zealous attachment to the colonial cause while demanding, as an Israelite denied the vote, “the Rights & Privileges due other free citizens.” The Assembly never troubled him again. He backed the struggle with his purse as well as his pen, outfitting privateers against British shipping, and when royal forces closed on Newport in 1776 he removed his household to Boston, seat of the Revolution he had embraced, and bound his fortunes to the new republic for good.
Boston rewarded the choice. On December 24, 1781, Hays announced the opening of an office in the American Coffee House on State Street, steps from the Old State House, offering insurance of every kind, bills of exchange, the purchase and charter of vessels, and commercial intelligence foreign and domestic, all pledged to “profound and strict integrity.” As an underwriter he conducted on his private account the business that incorporated companies would later transact, and his ledgers for 1790 to 1793 alone record 122 separate accounts, a measure of the confidence the town’s merchants placed in his word. He helped draft the plan for the Massachusetts Bank announced in December 1783, then proved his faith in the venture as its first depositor, entering more than ten thousand dollars within a month of its opening; the institution endures through its corporate successors to the present day. In 1798 the legislature incorporated the Massachusetts Mutual Fire Insurance Company with Hays first among the named incorporators and Paul Revere beside him on the roll. Civic recognition followed the commercial kind: the Boston Marine Society chose him an honorary member in 1789, the town accepted him as surety for its newly elected treasurer in 1790, he was one of the five men composing Boston’s Chamber of Commerce in 1796, and in 1798 voters put his name forward for state senator from Suffolk County.
His Masonic ascent in Massachusetts proved swift and, in its outcome, historic. The Massachusetts Lodge of Boston received him in 1782 and named him its Master before the year closed, an office he filled through 1785 and commemorated with the gift of three silver-mounted truncheons. The Grand Lodge then advanced him through its chairs, Junior Grand Warden in 1785, Senior Grand Warden in 1786, and Grand Master by 1788, returning him to that station at each annual election through 1792, with Paul Revere serving beneath him as Deputy Grand Master. The minutes of his term portray an exacting presiding officer who praised good work, urged caution in the admission of candidates, insisted upon faithful record keeping, and granted charters to new lodges across the Commonwealth and neighboring states. He appointed a committee of conference in 1791 to heal the long division between the two rival grand bodies of Massachusetts, and in March 1792 the union was consummated in the Grand Lodge of the Most Ancient and Honorable Society of Free and Accepted Masons for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which recorded a vote of thanks to Hays for his distinguished attention to the interests of the craft. Beyond New England, the Francken patent bore continental fruit: the deputies he commissioned spread the Sublime degrees to Philadelphia, Charleston, and beyond, the Supreme Council organized at Charleston in 1801 enrolled him as an honorary member, and the Scottish Rite in America traces its title through his hand.
At home on Middle Street, later Hanover, the Hays household became a Boston institution in its own right. The Unitarian minister Samuel Joseph May, a frequent childhood guest, remembered a man “much respected” for his wealth, his personal virtues, and the refinement of his wife and children, and a table where indigent families were fed as regularly as invited company; the house, May wrote, was “the abode of hospitality.” Hays gave with the same breadth he traded: his name stands on Harvard College’s benefactor rolls from about 1780, among the subscribers to the improvement of the Boston Common in 1785, at the head of Boston’s relief fund for Philadelphia’s yellow fever sufferers in 1793, and among the steady supporters of the synagogues of New York and Newport. Within his walls he and Rachel reared their six children alongside his sister Reyna’s sons, Judah and Abraham Touro, whom he trained in his counting house and who repaid that formation with two of the most celebrated philanthropic careers of nineteenth-century America. The counsel he set down for his son Judah in 1796, to keep company with none but “persons of honour and reputation,” so distilled the father that the son bore the letter in his pocket to his dying day. When Hays died at Boston on May 9, 1805, the Columbian Centinel remembered one who “walked abroad fearing no man but loving all,” the Independent Chronicle pronounced society’s loss of “a most valuable citizen,” Robert Treat Paine Jr. inscribed an elegiac sonnet to his memory, and his remains were borne to Newport for burial in the colonial Jewish cemetery, where Rachel joined him five years afterward.