 Although an earlier, little known attempt at scientific writing was made when Israel Wolf Sperling translated Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" and "Journey to the Center of the Earth" in 1877 and 1878, this barrier was breached with more lasting effect in the 1880s by a writer named Mendele Mocher Sfarim.Another difficulty faced by Haskalah Hebrew writers was that the audience was exclusively male with profound study background, which meant that women and the less educated men were pushed against reading Hebrew by reading Yiddish literature, which led a number of writers to write in Yiddish to find audiences.Ya'akov Abramovitch (1846–1917), is often known by the name of his main character, "Mendele Mocher Sfarim" (מוכר ספרים), meaning "bookseller."