It was the right word in the right time and place.  In Zaslav, Volhynia, this monstrous libel had been revived, and popular fury rose to a high pitch.  Several years later the Damascus Affair stirred the Jewish world to determined action, designed to stamp it out once for all.  To wage war against this superstitious belief seems to have fallen to the lot of several of Levinsohn’s family.  In 1757, when it asserted itself in Yampoly, Volhynia, his great-uncle, by the unanimous consent of the Council of the Four Countries, was sent to Rome to intercede with the Pope.  After six years of pleading, he returned to his native land with a signed statement addressed to the Polish king and nobles, which declared the accusation to be utterly false.  Another uncle of his had performed a similar task in 1749.  True scion of a noble family, Levinsohn followed in their wake, and his effort was declared to be a “sharp sword forged by a master, to fight for our honor.”

Everything was against Levinsohn when he started on his third great work, The House of Judah (Bet Yehudah).  He found himself poor, sick, and alone, and deprived of his fine library.  In those days, and for a long time before and afterwards, Hebrew authors were paid in kind.  In return for their copyright they received a number of copies of their books, which they were at liberty to dispose of as best they could.  Now, while Levinsohn’s copies of his Bet Yehudah were still at the publisher’s, a fire broke out, and most of them were consumed.

The Te’udah be-Yisrael had been prompted by a desire to prove the compatibility of modern civilization with Judaism.  Levinsohn’s object in writing his Bet Yehudah was the reverse.  The impetus came from without the Jewish camp.  The book represents the author’s views on certain Jewish problems propounded by his Christian friend, Prince Emanuel Lieven, just as Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem was written at the instigation of Lavater.  Though there is a similarity in the causes that produced the two books, there is a marked difference in their methods.  Mendelssohn treats his subject as an impartial non-Jewish philosopher might have done.  He is frequently too reserved, for fear of offending.  Levinsohn, in Greek-Catholic Russia, is strictly frank.  He is conscious of the difficulties under which he is laboring.  To discuss religion in Russia is far from agreeable.  “It is,” he says, “as if a master, pretending to exhibit his skill in racing, were to enter into competition publicly with his slave ... and at the same time wink at him to slacken his speed.”  Of one thing he is certain:  Judaism is a progressive religion.  It had been and might be reformed from time to time, but this can and must be only along the lines of its own genius.  To improve the moral and material condition of the Jews by weaning them away from the faith of their fathers (as was tried by Nicholas) will not do.  On the contrary, make them better Jews, and they will be better citizens.