and covered the windows with carpets to avoid being disturbed by people coming to the market the following day. Long into the night, they devoted themselves to the “reading of the Scriptures and singing of the Psalms.”15 A local arendator, one Gershon, summoned a few Jews, who, accompanied by the magistrate’s attendants, broke into the house, arrested the participants in the ritual, beat them, and confiscated their property, including books and manuscripts. A boy (in Kleyn’s account, he is one of the participants in the ritual, not the rabbi’s servant) was brought before the town governor, Romanowski, flogged, and compelled to describe the ritual and repeat the chants. Those arrested were forced to do menial labor. Romanowski feared that Gershon was trying to implicate him in a scandalous legal case and tried to restrain the arendator, stating that “he found no cause in these Jews.”16
Yet Gershon paid no heed to Romanowski and sued the arrested Jews in the municipal court of Lanckoronie. Parallel to the proceedings of the magistrates, the Jews initiated their own case before the gathering of the elders of the Lanckoronie, Satanów, and Smotrycz communities. The arrested parties were shackled by their necks and interrogated under coercion; one of them was beaten “almost to death” by the beadle of the Lanckoronie synagogue.17 Their houses were broken into, their property looted, and their books and manuscripts confiscated. The participants in the ritual whom Kleyn mentioned by name were Frank, Woł (the rabbi of Krzywcze), and Leyb Aaron of Lanckoronie (owner of the house).
On the basis of the extant sources, a few basic facts can be established. Following Kleyn’s protocol, we can date the Lanckoronie incident to the night of 27–28 January 1756. The Frankist chronicle (often inaccurate in matters of chronology) shifted it by a few days; Abraham of Szarogród, who dated it to May or June of the same year, confused the timing of the event itself with that of the conclusion of the rabbinic investigation and the issuing of the excommunications. (Abraham’s moving the event from Lanckoronie to Szarogród, an attempt to give himself extra credibility as an eyewitness, can be discounted.) About a dozen men and women participated in the ritual; the list certainly includes Frank and the owner of the house, Leyb of Lanckoronie. Most reports also attest to the participation of one or more communal rabbis: the Frankist chronicle mentions Nahman of Busk (Jakubowski); Kleyn Woł of Krzywcze, and Emden the unnamed rabbi of Lanckoronie.18 A few participants were arrested by local Polish authorities. Frank, a Turkish subject, was released almost immediately; the Polish Jews were jailed for a longer period of time.
Following the discovery and the arrest, there was some physical violence, and books were confiscated. The exact character of the Frankists’ actions is more difficult to determine: the only element on which all sources agree is that the Lanckoronie celebrations involved singing and dancing. Information about the particulars of the ritual can be found only in Jewish anti-Frankist accounts. Whereas it is impossible to verify the accuracy of every detail, I am inclined to accept the basic veracity of Emden’s description: while extremely tendentious in his judgments and interpretations, on many occasions Emden has been proved to be careful and trustworthy with regard to facts,19 and there is no reason to assume that he invented an entire ritual in this particular instance; his account therefore will provide a point of departure for an interpretation of the theological meaning of the ceremony.
Emden’s description of the Lanckoronie incident suggests that Frank and his followers performed a rite based on Jewish rituals of the adulation of or the mystical marriage with the Torah. For instance, the festival of Simhat Torah, which concludes the annual cycle of the public reading of the Law, includes carrying the Torah scrolls around the synagogue accompanied by singing and dancing. When the scrolls are carried through the congregation, it is customary for men to touch the edge of their prayer shawl to them and then kiss the prayer shawl as a sign of respect and veneration. The Simhat Torah rite also includes a great deal of marriage symbolism: the person who completes the reading of the Torah is called hatan Torah— bridegroom of the Torah—and in some communities, he is placed, together with the scroll, under the bridal canopy.20 Also, kabbalistic tradition interpreted the festival as a marriage between Israel and the Torah.21
While these customs and interpretations belong to the perfectly normative Jewish practice, in Sabbatianism the mystical marriage with the Torah acquired a special significance: in 1648, Sabbatai Tsevi, having invited the most prominent rabbis to a banquet, erected a bridal canopy, had a Torah scroll brought in, and performed the marriage ceremony between himself and the Torah.22 He signed his letters “the bridegroom coming out from under the canopy, the husband of the dearly beloved Torah, who is the most beauteous and lovely lady” and was fond of singing his favorite song, the Spanish romanza “Meliselda,” while hugging a Torah scroll in his arms.23
Sabbatai was severely censured by the rabbis for his performances; still, the concept of the mystical marriage of a Jew and the Torah was deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition, and his action only stretched the boundaries of mainstream Judaism. The Lanckoronie rite, however, seemed to go far beyond Sabbatai’s stretching the boundaries of the acceptable: it turned the acceptable upside down. Sabbatai replaced the human bride with the Torah; participants in the Lanckoronie ritual replaced the Torah with a naked woman. In imitation of Simhat Torah observances, the wife of the Lanckoronie rabbi was adorned with typical ornaments of the Torah scroll (the Crown of the Law), seated under the canopy like a bride, and kissed and hugged in veneration. This first account of a Frankist rite encapsulated the relationship between Frankism and Sabbatianism sensu largo. While Sabbatai Tsevi—the “true” messiah—ascended to the status of the bridegroom of the true word of God, in Frankism the true word of God descended into palpably material female flesh.
The idea of systematically turning everything spiritual into material, voiced by Frank for the first time at the grave of Nathan of Gaza, was put into practice. Aside from its heavily transgressive nature, this trope also encompassed the seeds of Frankism’s romance with Christianity and anticipated its later acceptance of the concept of incarnation (as opposed to the deification expounded by the sect of Berukhiah) and the eventual appropriation of elements of Catholic Mariology. This sheds special light on Emden’s otherwise obscure remark that the ritual involved celebrations with the “bread and wine of the condemned.”
The phrase “wine of the condemned” (yein anushim) appears in the Hebrew Bible only once, in the prophet Amos’s description of Israel’s transgressions and its backsliding into idol worship (Amos 2:9). Taken in itself, Emden’s statement could have been understood as a merely formulaic emphasis on the transgressive and idolatrous character of the Frankist rite. Yet juxtaposed with other accounts, it might hint that the Lanckoronie ritual entailed some form of imitation (or parody) of the Christian Eucharist. This impression is strengthened by Abraham of Szarogród’s mention that participants in the ritual wore crosses on their necks. Whereas, as we have seen, Abraham’s account is unreliable when it comes to the date and the place of the event (and many other things as well), I am prepared to take his word on this particular detail: Kleyn’s Coram iudicio mentions that, after the discovery of the ritual, one of the anti-Sabbatian Jews “burned the cross”24— an act otherwise inexplicable—and Frankist sources confirm that Frank and his followers used crucifixes in other ceremonies.25
The Investigations
All the sources agree that non-Jews were involved in the Lanckoronie case from the very outset: on the request of their Jewish opponents, participants in the ritual were apprehended by magistrates and brought before the town’s governor. By the standards of eighteenth-century Poland, there was nothing unusual about this request: both the official Jewish leadership and individual Jews often called upon Polish authorities in internal Jewish matters, and sometimes they even had recourse to non-Jewish courts as an arbiter in conflicts among Jews.26 What happened next, however, was highly unusual: the case became a matter of interest for not only the town governor and the magistrates but for the Catholic ecclesiastical authorities.
Only four days after the Lanckoronie incident, on 1 February 1756, the bishop’s consistory
