Jacob Rodrigues Pereira

Jacob Rodrigues Pereira came from a Portuguese Marrano family that fled the Inquisition to Bordeaux, where its members returned openly to Judaism; he later served as agent of the Portuguese Jewish communities of France at court. Working first with his deaf sister, he built a teaching method combining a one-handed manual alphabet, lip-reading and the training of residual hearing, and in 1749 demonstrated a deaf pupil's speech before the Académie royale des sciences, which reported favourably. He was the first person to teach deaf pupils in France and was granted a royal pension for the work, a generation before the Abbé de l'Épée opened his school.