This was Jacob Rodrigues Pereira (born in Spain, 1715; died in Paris, 1780), grandfather of the famous and enterprising Emile and Isaac Pereira, a man of talent and noble character, and an artist of a peculiar kind, who had obtained wide renown. He had invented a sign language for the deaf and dumb, and taught these unfortunate people a means of expressing their thoughts. As a Marrano, he had taught the deaf and dumb in Spain. Love for the religion of his ancestors, or hatred of the bloodthirsty Catholic Church impelled him to leave the land of the Inquisition (about 1734), and, together with his mother and sister, to emigrate to Bordeaux. Here, even before Abbé de l'Epée, he so thoroughly verified his theory for the instruction of those born dumb, in a specially appointed school, that the king conferred a reward, and the first men of science--D'Alembert, Buffon, Diderot, and Rousseau--lavished praises upon him. Pereira afterwards became royal interpreter and member of the Royal Society in London. The Portuguese community of Bordeaux appointed him their representative in Paris, to ventilate their complaints and accomplish their ends. Moved with sympathy for the unfortunate, he was yet so filled with communal egoism, that he did not hesitate to inflict injury upon his German and Avignon co-religionists. The commission to secure from Louis XV the ratification of the proposed statute, he carried out but too conscientiously. But in the disorderly government of this king and his court there was a vast difference between the passing and the administering of a law. The higher officials were able to circumvent any law or defer its execution. The expulsion of the Jews of German and Avignon origin from Bordeaux lay in the hands of the governor, the Duc de Richelieu. Isaac Pinto, who was on intimate terms with him, was able to win his support. Richelieu issued an urgent command (November, 1761) that within two weeks all foreign Jews should be banished from Bordeaux. Exception was made only in favor of two old men and women whom the hardships of the expulsion would have killed, and of a man who had been of service to the town (Jacob de Perpignan). All the rest were plunged into unavoidable distress, as it was forbidden to Jews to settle anywhere in France, and the districts and towns where Jews already dwelt admitted no new-comers. What a difference between the German Jew Moses Mendelssohn and the Portuguese Jews Isaac Pinto and Rodrigues Pereira, who in their time were ranked side by side! The former did not cease his efforts, until by his influence he brought help to his unhappy brethren, or at least offered them comfort. For the Jews in Switzerland, who were tolerated only in two small towns, and even there were so enslaved that they must have died out, Mendelssohn procured some alleviation through his opponent Lavater. Several hundred Jews were about to be expelled from Dresden, because they could not pay the poll-tax laid upon them.