The mystical and sectarian tendencies which were in vogue among the masses of Polish Jewry were the outcome of the Messianic movement, which, originated by Sabbatai Zevi in 1648, spread like wildfire throughout the whole Jewish world. The movement made a particularly deep impression in Poland, where the mystical frame of mind of the Polish-Jewish masses offered a favorable soil for it. It was more than a mere coincidence that one and the same year, 1648, was marked by the wholesale murder of the Jews of the Ukraina and the first public appearance of Sabbatai Zevi in Smyrna. The thousands of Jewish captives, who in the summer of that terrible year had been carried to Turkey by the Tatar allies of Khmelnitzki and ransomed there by their coreligionists, conveyed to the minds of the Oriental Jews an appalling impression of the destruction of the great Jewish center in Poland. There can be no doubt that the descriptions of this catastrophe deeply affected the impressionable mind of Sabbatai, and prepared the soil for the success of the propaganda he carried on during his wanderings in Turkey, Palestine, and Egypt. When, in the year 1666, the whole Jewish world resounded with the fame of Sabbatai Zevi as the Messianic liberator of the Jewish people, the Jews of Poland responded with particularly keen, almost morbid sensitiveness. The Jews--says the contemporary Ukrainian writer Galatovski--triumphed. Some abandoned their houses and property, refusing to do any work and claiming that the Messiah would soon arrive and carry them on a cloud to Jerusalem. Others fasted for days, denying food even to their little ones, and during that severe winter bathed in ice-holes, at the same time reciting a recently-composed prayer. Faint-hearted and destitute Christians, hearing the stories of the miracles performed by the false Messiah and beholding the boundless arrogance of the Jews, began to doubt Christ. From the South, the Sabbatian agitation penetrated to the North, to distant White Russia. We are informed by a contemporary monastic chronicler, that on the walls of the churches in Moghilev on the Dnieper mysterious inscriptions appeared proclaiming the Jewish Messiah "Sapsai." In the course of the eventful year in which the whole Jewish world raved about the coming of the Messiah and deputations arrived from all over the Jewish world at the "Castle of Splendor," Sabbatai's residence in Abydos, near Constantinople, a delegation was also dispatched by the Jews of Poland. In this delegation were included Isaiah, the son of David Halevi, the famous rabbi of Lemberg, author of the Taz,[189] and the grandson of another celebrity, Joel Sirkis.[190] The Polish delegates were sent, as it were, on a scouting expedition, being instructed to investigate on the spot the correctness of the rumors concerning the Messianic claims of Sabbatai.