The number of believers in Amsterdam increased daily among the Portuguese no less than among the Germans, and numbers of educated people set the example; the rabbis Isaac Aboab and Raphael Moses D'Aguilar, Spinoza's fellow-student Isaac Naar, and Abraham Pereira, one of the capitalists of Amsterdam and a writer on morals in Spanish, all became believers. Even the semi-Spinozist Dionysius Musaphia became a zealous adherent of the new Messiah. In Amsterdam devotion to the new faith expressed itself in contradictory ways--by noisy music and dancing in the houses of prayer, and by gloomy, monkish self-mortification. The printing presses could not supply enough copies of special prayer-books in Hebrew, Portuguese and Spanish, for the multitude of believers. In these books penances and formulas were given by which men hoped to become partakers in the kingdom of the Messiah. Many Sabbatian prayer-books (Tikkunim) printed Sabbataï's likeness together with that of King David, also the emblems of his dominion, and select sentences from the Bible. In confident expectation of speedy return to the Holy Land, the elders of one synagogue introduced the custom of pronouncing the priestly blessing every Sabbath. At Hamburg, the Jews went to still greater lengths of folly, because they wished to make a demonstration against the bigoted Christians, who in many ways tormented them with vexatious restrictions, and when possible compelled them to listen to Christian sermons. Whoever entered the synagogue, and saw the Jewish worshipers hop, jump, and dance about with the roll of the Law in their arms, serious, respectable men withal, of Spanish stateliness, had to take them for madmen. In fact, a mental disease prevailed, which made men childish; even the most distinguished in the community succumbed to it.