The revolting scenes of the time of Louis IX., of France, and Pope Paul IV. were re-enacted. Thousands of Talmud copies were taken away from the Jews and carried to Kamenetz, where they were publicly burned on the market-place. The sectarians witnessed their revenge on their persecutors and triumphed. It is difficult to say how this triumph would have ended, had not Bishop Dembovski suddenly died, in November, 1757. The sectarians were deprived of their mainstay, and became again the target of the Kahal authorities. In 1758 they finally succeeded in obtaining a safe-conduct from King Augustus III., but even this could not rescue them from the uncomfortable position peculiar to those who, having forfeited the sympathies of their own, have not yet been able to gain the confidence of strangers. At that critical juncture the sectarians decided to recall Jacob Frank, their leader, from Turkey. The latter immediately appeared in Podolia with a new plan, which, he hoped, would at once rid him and his adherents of all opponents. In the discourses delivered before his followers Frank dwelt a great deal on his exalted mission and on the divine revelations which commanded him to follow in the footsteps of Sabbatai Zevi. Just as Sabbatai had been compelled to embrace the Mohammedan faith temporarily, so he and his adherents were predestined from above to adopt the Christian religion as a mere disguise and as a stepping-stone to the "faith of the true Messiah." Filled with thirst for revenge, the sectarians hit upon the fiendish thought of lending the weight of their testimony to the hideous ritual murder accusation, which was agitating the whole of Poland at that time, claiming many a victim in the Jewish ranks. In 1759 the Frankists were busily engaged in negotiations with the highest representatives of the Polish Church concerning their proposed conversion to Christianity. They requested at the same time that they be allowed to hold a public disputation with the rabbis, whom they hoped to expose before the non-Jews. The Primate of the Polish Church Lubinski and the Papal Nuncio Serra received the advances of the Frankists with considerable skepticism. But the temporary administrator of the diocese of Lemberg, Canon Mikolski, insisted that their request be complied with. A second religious disputation between the Talmudists and the Frankists, presided over by Mikolski, was held in Lemberg, and took up eleven sessions (July-August, 1759). At this disputation the Orthodox Jews were represented by a number of Talmudists, headed by the Rabbi of Lemberg, Hayyim Rapoport, while the cause of the sectarians was championed by Solomon Shorr and Leib Krysa, the principal associates of Frank, as well as several learned Catholic theologians.