In the early eighteenth century there existed in America one Edward Pinckney, eldest son of Joseph Pinckney, a Virginia planter. Edward differed from other eldest sons of the time and place in two respects: he had an unconventional taste for scholarship; and he was crazy. These attributes influenced and played against one another. As he was crazy, his scholarly interests were unsystematic and diffuse, his reading sporadic and without perceptible direction. As he was given to reading, his fantasies and delusions had a certain richness which set them apart from the imaginings of other loonies of the colony, who tended to specialize in paranoid delusions of the ordinary sort--demonic possession, knowledge of secret plots, private instructions from God--and among the ordinary folk, a certain amount of public idiocy, gibbering, playing with filth, conversing with inanimate objects, and the like.

Young Pinckney, was not much different in his outward behavior from the other young men of property, and while his contemporaries were acquainted with the fact that he held strange notions, they found him an acceptable companion. He participated in the pastimes of his social set, namely gaming, whoring, sporting, and drunkenness.

As to his intellectual inclinations--and here Pinckney's two distinctions of character come close together--they were largely of what we would today call an Ethnological and Sociological nature, with an emphasis on History and the study of Comparative Religions. Had Pinckney been sane, or had he been thought sane, he might have been the father of Anthropology. He corresponded with booksellers in Europe, and built an extensive library consisting of practically every obscure, esoteric and crackpot book published in the preceding couple of centuries. After he left the colony, many of his books came into the hands of Thomas Jefferson, and ultimately became part of the foundation of the Library of Congress.

His reading of these books was generally sporadic and incomplete. As his preoccupation with the religion of the Hebrews became dominant, he initiated the practice of reading many books from back to front. Also, having read references to it, he undertook to fabricate and teach himself what he took to be Yiddish. This he did by learning the Hebrew alphabet, and laboriously transcribing German texts into that character. The result was not unlike Yiddish--and he was possibly the only person on the North American continent to have even heard of that tongue, all of the colonial Jews at the time being Ladino-speaking Sephardim.

Pinckney confounded the Jews of Charleston on several occasions by visiting them and speaking in what he insisted was their native language. Pinckney concluded that the Charleston Jews were imposters, most probably Papists masquerading as Hebrews, and quit visiting them. Instead he practiced his "Jewdish," (as he styled it in his journals) on the local aborigines, who, he had concluded were a lost tribe of Israel. This was more satisfactory for Pinckney, as the Indians believed all Europeans were crazy, and tolerated his harangues in the interest of politeness. Some of the red men even learned a phrase or two of Pinckney's synthetic Yiddish, and would greet him by saying "Zei gezint, Squire," and similar pleasantries. Later, Pinckney fell out with the Indians over a dispute about the kosher laws.

Joseph Pinckney died, and Edward acceded to the head of the family. He managed the plantations well, and was generally tolerated by the community, although his practice of observing the sabbath on Saturday led to a certain amount of argument, which he enjoyed. He married Briget Cobbet, the daughter of indentured servants, and appears to have had no particular problems with her. Briget bore him two sons, Solomon and Samuel, and a daughter, Sarah, all of whom survived. Edward Pinckney continued to appear at horse races, gaming tables, brothels, and taverns and was even considered at one time as a candidate for the House of Burgesses.

It was in the winter of 1743 that the singular thing happened to Edward Pinckney. Records show that it was a particularly severe winter. The temperature was well below freezing throughout the months of January and February, and there was a good deal of snow. On the 21st of February, Pinckney was carousing with friends at a tavern known as the Monck's Head, and had occasion to go out back. The night was moonless and overcast, and apparently Pinckney, at a particular moment, stumbled against a tree stump some three feet high into the top of which an axe had been stuck earlier in the evening, when the innkeeper's son had finished chopping firewood. Had he not been crazy to begin with, he might have put a different interpretation on an event which any man would find singular. As things were, Edward Pinckney, planter of Virginia, knew in a moment that there had been an angelic visitation, and that Almighty God had directed him to turn, to spin around, to leave behind him the signs of the profane life, and to return to the faith of Abraham.

In April of that same year, Pinckney, with his disconsolate wife and children, three servants, two thoroughbred horses, five prize foxhounds, selected books and various household impedimenta, took ship for Europe. Nothing further is recorded of him on this side of the Atlantic. There are, however, stories of an eccentric who attached himself to the Jewish community of Wilno in 1750, speaking a barely intelligible patois, and conducting himself in a manner never seen before in those parts. The man's name was Eleazer Pinchas-Wasser or Pinkuswasser, and he professed to be a Jew, although nothing about his manner, conduct or ideas were in the least recognizable to the people who lived there.

This man was undoubtedly Edward Pinckney. He had wandered among the comparatively emancipated Jews of northern and western Europe and found them lacking in zeal, or possibly had annoyed them past the point of endurance, and had found his way to the ignorant and wretched Ashkenazic Jews of Russia-Poland. The comparison must be taken in the context of the time: Maria Theresa, for example, had offered to expel the Jews from Bohemia in 1744, but had retracted the order, and instead levied an additional tax of 3,000,000 florins per year on those who stayed. However, there was something in the wind in many parts of Europe. In England the Naturalization Act of 1753 was passed--and then immediately repealed. By 1760 Maria Theresa had thought up the yellow armband. Conditions got better--conditions got worse, but none of this amounted to anything in light of the ghastliness of the everyday life of Jews in what was to become the pale.

Eleazer Pinkuswasser turned up in Wilno, prayer book in one hand and silver snuff box in the other, complete with household retinue, a preeminently goyishe wife, and children whose insanity might have been hereditary, or the result of the profound confusion visited upon them by their father. He divided his time between the tavern where he drank excessively and behaved in an arrogant manner toward the gentiles, and the house of prayer where he antagonized the Jews. Both communities feared him as a maniac, and the Jews, having never seen a convert before, tolerated him as best they could. Eleazer lived out his life among the Jews of Wilno, and when he died, his sons embarrassed and upbraided them in his stead.

The line of Eleazer continued, providing each generation with at least one deranged individual. The community discovered that the Pinkuswassers had a certain utility in that they provided mates for the afflicted and unfortunate offspring of other families. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the family had lost all trace of foreign ways--and by the beginning of the twentieth century, a descendant of Pinckney/Pinkuswasser, one Felix Pinkuswasser had arrived in Norfolk Virginia to begin another onslaught on North America.