This year marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of “Evening Service of Rosh Hashanah” by Isaac Pinto.
Pinto immigrated to the American colonies in 1740 and became involved in politics along with his trade. He recognized that American Jews generally could not read Hebrew so he wrote his own English translation of the important parts of the Rosh Hashanah service, and later expanded it with an English-language siddur and Yom Kippur machzor published in 1766 - or, as the book notes, 5526.
I cannot find a copy of the original 1761 work, but this is from the 1766 expanded edition.
The siddur and machzor are highly abridged, with only the highlights translated in its 189 pages.
There were weekly advertisements for this siddur in the Independent Gazetteer of Philadelphia in 1786.
As far as I can tell, this was the first mention of Rosh Hashanah in any American newspaper.
Pinto distinguished himself in other ways. In 1781, the Continental Congress established a Department of Foreign Affairs that was later to become the State Department. The new department needed translators, and Pinto was one of the first three people hired for that job.
