Mordecai was born on December 2, 1735, to Perla and Benjamin Sheftall. When he was three years old, his mother died. His father remarried within a year to Hannah Sheftall (née Solomons). His half-brother Levi was born in 1739, with another half-brother, Solomon, being born in 1741. However, he died in 1743, at just two years of age. Mordecai left school at the age of eleven, as there was a severe lack of schools, with his father continuing his
Jewish education. Upon his
bar mitzvah, he ordered
tefillin and
s'farim for his son from England. The order arrived slightly late, and his father became worried that the ship holding the tefillin and s'farim got lost at sea or was captured by an "enemy" vessel. England was in middle of King George's war at the time, so he was probably talking about the French when he referred to an "enemy." Sheftall went into business by the time he was seventeen, and was making a nice profit buying, tanning, and then selling deerskin. When he was eighteen, he had made enough money to purchase fifty acres of land near Savannah. By his mid twenties, he was doing business with companies from the
Caribbean,
Charleston, and
Philadelphia, making substantial sums of money. In 1761, when he was twenty-six, Sheftall married Frances Fannie (Freidel) (née Hart, (1740–1820). Together, they had six children: Sheftall, Benjamin, Elias, Moses, Perla and Esther. Elias died as a baby. Major General
Robert Howe gave him the rank of colonel as a result. Sheftall appointed his son
Sheftall as his assistant. When British forces
attacked Savannah in late 1778, Sheftall not only took an active part in its defense, but he also advanced considerable sums of money (including loans) for the Patriot cause. After the city was occupied, he and his son were captured by the British. As a consequence of refusing to renounce his loyalty to the Patriot cause, the British took him to the
prison ship Nancy with his son Sheftall and kept him there as a
prisoner of war. ==Religious life==