The story of Zalkind Hurwitz (1740-1812), “le fameux,” as he was called 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 parle 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, settled in London before 1750, and became the subject of many wonder stories.  Sussman Shesnovzi, apparently a countryman of his, describes him, in a letter to Jacob Emden, as “standing alone in his generation by reason of his knowledge of holy mysteries.”  That this was the opinion of many and prominent personages may be inferred from the fact that among his callers were such distinguished visitors as the Marchese de Crona, Baron de Neuhoff, Prince Czartorisky, and the Duke of Orleans.  The confidence of such as these brought Falk a considerable fortune, a large part of which he bequeathed to a charity fund, the interest of which the overseers of the United Synagogue still distribute annually among the poor.[34] Shortly before “Doctor” Falk’s death (1782), there settled in London Phinehas Phillips of Krotoschin, the founder of the Phillips family, which has furnished two Lord Mayors to the city of London.