It was then that the excommunicated and persecuted Podolian sectarians, prompted by their leaders, resorted to a counsel of despair. Their representatives appeared in the city of Kamenetz-Podolsk before the Catholic Bishop Dembovski, and declared that the Jewish sect of which they were members rejected the Talmud as a false and harmful work, that they only acknowledged the Zohar, the sacred book of the Cabala, and believed that God was one in three persons, of whom the Messianic Redeemer was one. This declaration aroused in Bishop Dembovski the hope of converting the sectarians to Christianity, notwithstanding the fact that by the "Messianic Redeemer" they understood Sabbatai Zevi, or his reincarnation, Jacob Frank. The Bishop ordered the publication of the ambiguous confession of faith of the "Contra-Talmudists" or "Zoharists"--as the sectarians designated themselves--and decided to arrange a religious disputation between the Frankists and the rabbis. The Podolian rabbis received strict orders from the Bishop to send delegates from their midst to participate in the proposed disputation. Their failure to appear was to be punished by fines and the burning of the Talmud. After considerable preparations, the disputation between the leaders of the Contra-Talmudists and a number of rabbis took place in Kamenetz, in the summer of 1757, in the presence of Bishop Dembovski and representatives of the Catholic clergy. The contest lasted seven days. The discussions centered around certain peculiar utterances in the Talmudic Haggada, which the Frankists cited as evidence of the "blasphemous" character of the Talmud. The rabbis retorted feebly, hampered by their inadequate mastery of the Polish language; moreover, when the dispute turned on the fundamental dogmas of Judaism, they refused to discuss them in the presence of Catholic priests. The Bishop received the impression that the Talmudists had been defeated. In the autumn of 1757 he issued a rescript imposing a fine upon the Talmudists, to be paid out to their opponents, for having insulted them at the fair of Lantzkorona, and ordering that all Talmud copies found in the diocese of Podolia be taken away from their owners and delivered to the flames.