In all this it is impossible to follow any consecutive political plan; the rôle of the Jews seems to have been to support no cause consistently but to obtain a footing in every camp, to back any venture that offered a chance of profit. Yet mingled with these material designs were still their ancient Messianic dreams. It is curious to note that the same Messianic idea pervaded the Levellers, the rebels of the Commonwealth; such phrases as "Let Israel go free," "Israel's restoration is now beginning," recur frequently in the literature of the sect. Gerard Winstanley, one of the two principal leaders, addressed an epistle to "the Twelve Tribes of Israel that are circumcised in heart and scattered through all the Nations of the Earth," and promised them "David their King that they have been waiting for." The other leader of the movement, by name Everard, in fact declared, when summoned before the Lord Fairfax at Whitehall, that "he was of the race of the Jews."[464] It is true that the Levellers were by profession Christian, but after the manner of the Bavarian Illuminati and of the Christian Socialists two centuries later, claiming Christ as the author of their Communistic and equalitarian doctrines: "For Jesus Christ, the Saviour of all Men, is the greatest, first, and truest Leveller that ever was spoken of in the world." The Levellers are said to have derived originally from the German Anabaptists; but Claudio Jannet, quoting German authorities, shows that there were Jews amongst the Anabaptists. "They were carried away by their hatred of the name of Christian and imagined that their dreams of the restoration of the kingdom of Israel would be realized amidst the conflagration."[465] Whether this was so or not, it is clear that by the middle of the seventeenth century the mystical ideas of Judaism had penetrated into all parts of Europe. Was there then some Cabalistic centre from which they radiated? Let us turn our eyes eastward and we shall see. Since the sixteenth century the great mass of Jewry had settled in Poland, and a succession of miracle-workers known by the name of Zaddikim or Ba'al Shems had arisen. The latter word, which signifies "Master of the Name," originated with the German Polish Jews and was derived from the Cabalistic belief in the miraculous use of the sacred name of Jehovah, known as the Tetragrammaton.