Through Mendelssohn's intercession with one of his numerous admirers, Cabinet Councilor Von Ferber, the unfortunate people obtained permission to remain in Dresden. To a Jewish Talmudical scholar unjustly suspected of theft and imprisoned in Leipsic, Mendelssohn cleverly contrived to send a letter of consolation, whereby he gained his freedom. Isaac Pinto and Jacob Pereira, on the other hand, were zealous in bringing about the expulsion of their brethren by race and religion, which Mendelssohn considered the hardest punishment of the Jews, "equal to annihilation from the face of God's earth, where armed prejudice repulses them at every frontier." The cruel proceedings of the Portuguese Jews against their brethren in Bordeaux made a great stir. If Jews might not tarry in France, why should those of Portuguese tongue be tolerated? The latter, therefore, saw themselves compelled to put themselves in a favorable light, and requested Isaac Pinto, who had already appeared in public, and possessed literary culture, to write a sort of vindication for them, and make clear the wide difference between Jews of Portuguese descent and those of other lands. Pinto consented, or rather followed his own inclination, and prepared the "Reflections" upon Voltaire's defamation of Judaism (1762). He told this reckless calumniator that the crime of libeling single individuals was increased when the false accusations affected a whole nation, and reached its highest degree when directed against a people insulted by all men, and when the responsibility for the misdeeds of a few is laid upon the whole body, whose members, moreover, widely scattered, have assumed the character of the inhabitants of the country in which they live. An English Jew as little resembles his co-religionist of Constantinople, as the latter does a Chinese mandarin; the Jew of Bordeaux and he of Metz are two utterly different beings. Nevertheless, Voltaire had indiscriminately condemned them, and his sketch of them was as absurd as untrue. Voltaire, who felt called upon to extirpate prejudices, had in fact lent his pen to the greatest of them. He does not indeed wish them to be burnt, but a number of Jews would rather be burnt than so calumniated. "The Jews are not more ignorant, more barbarous, or superstitious than other nations, least of all do they merit the accusation of avarice." Voltaire owed a duty to the Jews, to truth, to his century, and to posterity, which would justly appeal to his authority when abusing and trying to crush an exceedingly unhappy people.