Gradually they passed to read only the Old Testament and to celebrate Torah's feasts, follow dietary laws, and a strict observance of seventh-day Sabbath, but not circumcision.
Thirteen years later, on May 13, 1635, the Diet set the explicit deadline of Christmas Day 1635 for the Sabbatarians to convert to one of the four accepted Christian religions of the Principality.
The believers had to practice their religion in secret for the next 230 years, while pretending to be Catholic or Unitarian, so their numbers were in the hundreds only when their conversion to Judaism was allowed from 1868 to 1874.
At the insistence of Dr. Beck, the Bucharest rabbi, József Bánóczi and Prof. Wilhelm Bacher took the necessary steps to save from ruin the last Sabbatarian congregation in Bözödújfalu (Bezidu Nou in Romanian) and set up schools.
[citation needed] The Magyar writer Zsigmond Kemény wrote about the sect leader, Simon Pechi, in his A rajongók, "The Devoted" (1858).