Bathasar Hubmaier was an ex violently Antisemitic Catholic alongside Erasmus and Zwingli but who rejected his colleagues and repented his entire past by adopting Anabaptist pacifism in April 1525. After his conversion he was arrested but managed to escape long enough to move to ניקאלשפורג in Moravia in 1526. After his arrest in 1527 he promoted the Jewish Sabbath in response to a legalistic trap set by Joannes Fabri. This continued through his congregation especially his Silesian students Oswald Glait and Andreas Fischer organizing the Moravian Anabaptists from the remnant of utraquist Bohemian reformers. He was burned at the stake by the Western Church in 1528. His wife was executed with a stone tied around her neck to drown her at the bottom of Danube 3 years later. The Jewish-Sabbath keepers of Hubmaier's students fled Nikolsburg but did not give up.

Legacy

A Sabbathist preacher was noticed moving to Austerlitz as early as 1529, 2 years before Hubmaier's wife was drowned. In the same year another Sabbathist preacher, Johannes Balbus was arrested for preaching Sabbathism in Prague.

In the first half of November 1531 both Wolfgang Capito, a Strasbourg preacher, and Caspar Schwenckfeld, a Silesian reformer and Spirituralist who was then living in exile in Strasbourg, received a request from Lord Leonhard von Liechtenstein (1482-1534) for their opinions on a book, Vom Sabbat, written by one of Hubmaier's students Oswald Glait (d. 1546) who had been a Nikolsburg preacher.

Since 1532 Martin Luther had known that there were Christians in Moravia who observed the Sabbath. In the following years he expressed his suspicion ever more clearly that Christian observance of the Sabbath in Moravia was the result of Jewish influence, or even a Jewish mission.

They had grown enough to catch the attention of the Catholic Church by June 30, 1533 when Pier Paolo Vergerio, the papal nuncio, wrote from Wiener Neustadt to Rome saying:

"in Moravia ... they have begun to celebrate the Sabbath in the Jewish manner."

Erasmus also commented on them in July of the same year.

"The news has now reached us that a new kind of Jew has arisen m Bohemia. They are called Sabbatarians. The superstition with which they observe the Sabbath goes so far that they will not even wash out their eye if something gets into it on this day. For them replacing Sunday with the Sabbath is not sufficient, although it was sacred to the apostles--as if Christ did not explain sufficiently how the Sabbath is to be understood."