Jacob Rodrigues Pereira

For Jacob Rodrigues Pereira (Austin, Tx) see https://technology.ihs.com/Biographies/463313/jacob-pereira).

Jacob Rodrigues Pereira or Jacob Rodrigue Pereire (April 11, 1715 – September 15, 1780) was an academic and the first teacher of deaf-mutes in France.

Jacob Rodrigues Pereira was born in Berlanga, Spain, he was a descendant of a Portuguese Crypto-Jews family from Chacim, Tras-os-Montes. His baptism name was Francisco Antonio Rodrigues, and his parents were Joao Lopes Dias and Leonor Rodrigues Pereira. In about 1741 he and his mother and siblings moved to Bordeaux and returned to Judaism, he adopted the name Jacob and his mother Abigail Rivka Rodrigues.

Jacob Rodrigue Pereire formulated signs for numbers and punctuation and adapted Juan Pablo Bonet's manual alphabet by adding 30 handshapes each corresponding to a sound instead of to a letter. He is therefore seen as one of the inventors of manual language for the deaf and is credited with being the first person to teach a non-verbal deaf person to speak. In 1759, he was made a member of the Royal Society of London.

A lifelong devotee to the well-being of the Jews of southern France, Portugal, and Spain, beginning in 1749 he was a volunteer agent for the Portuguese Jews at Paris. In 1777, his efforts led to Jews from Portugal receiving the right to settle in France.

In 1876 Pereira's remains were transferred from the Cimetiere de la Villette (where he had been buried the year in which that cemetery was opened) to that of the Cimetiere de Montmartre.

In Bordeaux the street "Rodrigues-Pereire" was named in his honor.

His grandsons, the Pereire brothers, Emile Pereire (1800–75) and Isaac Pereire (1806–80), were well-known French financiers and bankers during the second empire who encouraged the construction of the first railway in France in 1835. In 1852, they founded the Societe Generale du Credit Mobilier.