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 where he became a defender of the Jewish Sabbath through 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.

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 Oswald Glait (d. 1546), one of Hubmaier's students and a former Nikolsburg preacher.

They had caught the attention of Martin Luther by 1532.

They had grown enough to caught 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."