French Israelism (also called Franco-Israelism) is the pseudohistorical belief that people of Frankish descent are also the direct lineal descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and it is often accompanied by the belief that the Merovingian dynasty is directly descended from the line of King David. One of the earliest scholars to claim that he could trace the ten lost tribes of Israel to France was the French Huguenot writer, Jacques Abbadie, who fled French Roman Catholic persecution and later settled in London, England. In his important 1723 work, The Triumph Of Providence, he wrote: