David Blackwood

Dr. Blackwood was born to a wealthy Ladino family Savannah, Muscogee, in 1890. As a young man he distinguished himself as a scholar of Mesoamerican History, particularly languages and religion. He received his PhD from Nantahala University in Sequoyah in 1915. In 1917 he left a position at Nantahala to serve as a code-breaker and signals intelligence officer with the Allied Intelligence Executive, where he met longtime friend and partner Radovan Savatier.

After the war and a brief return to Nantahala, he and Savatier had a series of international escapades.

Returning to the academy in 1925, he met graduate student Marian Walshe Prideaux and became her mentor. They had a falling out after her graduation and her acceptance of a position at Robicheaux Women's College in Louisiana.

In 1930, Blackwood was called before the Board of Governors of Nantahala to answer for "increasingly erratic" behavior and irregular attendance to his teaching responsibilities, as well as for several questionable publications. In December of that year, while his tenure was under review, Blackwood apparently left the university somewhat abruptly, leaving no indication of his whereabouts or intentions. Police investigations proving inconclusive, he was declared legally dead in 1933 and his possessions turned over to Dr. Walshe Prideaux, his legal heir.

Family
"Blackwood" is a translation of the family’s original Spanish last name, adopted when the Blackwoods were driven out of southern Spain in 1492 by the Inquisition, and fled to England, where they lived in secret until the 1655 council allowing Jews “back into” England. The Blackwoods started a small clothing store in London, which eventually developed into a thriving cloth wholesale business until Jonathan Blackwood’s involvement in radical Republican circles brought him under suspicion of treason and sedition following the passage of the Six Acts in 1819, and the family abruptly decided to decamp to Savannah, then still in the United States. There, they managed to rebuild the cloth business and became an integrated part of Savannah’s Sephardi community.

Blackwood is related through his father to Benjamin Disraeli, two-term Conservative Prime Minister of Great Britain, and through his mother to the French branch of the Rothschild banking family. His second cousin, Charles Sheftall, The Right Honorable The Lord Sheftall, was a Member of Parliament from 1880-1902, while another second cousin, Yaakov ben Mordechai (formerly The Right Honorable James Edward de Lacy Sheftall) was a noted Orthodox cantor.