by a French writer, is interesting. Starting, as usual, by going to
Berlin, and succeeding, as usual, in gaining the friendship of
Mendelssohn, he then visited Nancy, Metz, and Strasburg, and finally
settled in Paris. Like Doctor Behr, he had to resort to peddling as a
means for a livelihood. The rudiments of French he acquired from any
book he chanced to obtain. Nevertheless, he soon became proficient in
the language of his adopted country, and wrote his excellent _Apologie
des juifs_, which, crowned by the Academy of Metz and quoted by
Mirabeau, was largely instrumental in removing the disabilities of the
Jews in France. Clermont-Tonnerre, the advocate of Jewish emancipation,
said of him, _Le juif polonais seul avait parlé en philosophe_. He was
suggested as a member of the Sanhedrin convoked by Napoleon in 1807.
Though for some reason he never enjoyed the honor of membership in it,
he was, nevertheless, the ruling spirit in the august assembly, and
later generations have paid him the homage he deserves.[33]

Where Hurwitz failed, another of his countrymen was to succeed. Judah
Litvack (1776-1836) removed from Berlin to Amsterdam, became prominent
among the Dutch mathematicians, and wrote a Dutch work, _Verhandeling
over de Profgetallen Gen. ii_ (Amsterdam, 1817), which appeared in a
second edition four years after the first. The author was elected a
member of the Mathesis Artium Genetrix Society, and appointed one of the
deputation sent to the Sanhedrin (February 12, 1807), before which he
delivered a discourse in the German language.

The "distant isles of the sea," the British Islands, Russo-Polish Jews
seem to have frequented ever since the Restoration, probably
contemporaneously with the settlement of the Spanish Jews. The famous
mystic Hayyim Samuel Jacob Falk, one of the many Baal-Shems who
flourished in Podolia at the beginning of the eighteenth century,