Entire communities celebrated.
Among early Jewish accounts of the 1759 conversion, only one departed from the prevailing triumphant mood and expressed radically different sentiments. Israel Ba’al Shem Tov, known as the BeSh”T (1698–1760), who was the founder of Hasidism, the most important spiritual movement in Judaism of the period, was said to have bemoaned the Lwów mass apostasy or even to have died of pain caused by it.4 According to the story recorded in the hagiographic collection Shivhe ha-BeSh”T, the Ba’al Shem Tov laid the blame for the eruption of the entire affair on the Jewish establishment; he was “very angry with the rabbis and said that it was because of them, since they invented lies of their own.”5 The leader of Hasidism saw Frank and his group as part of the mystical body of Israel and presented their baptism as the amputation of a limb from the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence on earth: “I heard from the rabbi of our community that concerning those who converted [in Lwów], the Besht said: As long as the member is connected, there is some hope that it will recover, but when the member is cut off, there is no repair possible. Each person of Israel is a member of the Shekhinah.”6
The Ba’al Shem Tov died in 1760, a year after the Lwów apostasy. Some 150 years later, in Berlin, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, an aspiring writer who was later to become the State of Israel’s most celebrated author and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote a short essay on Frank. He juxtaposed various Jewish accounts of the 1759 conversion, ending his piece with the testimony concerning the BeSh”T’s words. He concluded:
We are only dust under the feet of this holy man, yet we dare to be of another opinion. Frank and his gang were not a limb of the body of Israel; rather, they were a [pathological] excrescence. Praise and thanks to our doctors, who cut it off in time, before it took root in the body! . . . Undoubtedly, Frank and his group were descendants of the foreign rabble, which tacked itself onto Israel during the Exodus from Egypt, and followed it thereafter. In the desert, in the Land of Israel, and later in the Exile, this multitude defiled the purity of Israel and defiled its holiness. May we be freed from them forever!7
In recounting the BeSh”T’s reaction to Frank’s conversion, Agnon alluded to the symbolism of the “mixed rabble” or “mixed multitude,” the erev rav. The concept appears in the Hebrew Bible in the narrative account of the Exodus (Exod. 12:37–38): “And the People of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand on foot, who were men, beside children. And a mixed multitude [erev rav] went up also with them; and flocks, and herds, and very many cattle.” Jewish tradition interpreted the phrase erev rav as denoting a group of foreigners who joined the Israelites following Moses from Egypt. While some midrashim understood it as a reference to the “righteous among the Egyptians, who celebrated Passover together with Israel,”8 a prototype for future converts to Judaism, the majority of rabbinic exegetes saw in the mixed multitude the source of corruption, sin, and discord: accustomed to idolatry, the erev rav enticed Israelites to make the Golden Calf9 and angered God by demanding the abolition of the prohibition of incest.10 Thus, the emblem of the erev rav came to evoke the image of unwelcome strangers present in the very midst of the Holy People; the mixed multitude were not true “children of Abraham”11 but Egyptian rabble who mingled with Israelites, contaminated their purity, incited them to sin, and caused them to stray from the right path in the wilderness. It was because of them that the generation of the Exodus lost the right path on the desert and Moses did not enter the Land of Israel.
In the Middle Ages, the symbolism established by the ancient midrash was taken up and developed by kabbalah, particularly the book of the Zohar. The Zohar universalized the midrashic image by removing it from its original place in the sequence of biblical narrative: the presence and activity of the mixed multitude were not restricted to the generation of the Exodus but extended over the entire history of humanity. The erev rav were the impurity that the serpent injected into Eve;12 they were the descendants of Cain;13 the nefilim, “sons of God” who procreated with the daughters of men (Gen. 6:2–4);14 the wicked ones who survived the deluge.15 They were progeny of the demonic rulers, Samael and Lilith.16 They contributed to the building of the Tower of Babel17 and caused the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.18 They practiced incest, idolatry, and witchcraft.19 They were the cause of the imprisonment of the Divine Presence in the demonic realm of the “husks” (kelippot) and, likewise, the exile of Israel among the nations.20
In the Zohar’s narrative, the activity of the mixed multitude was by no means restricted to the past. Rather, the erev rav represented the ever-present force of destruction, whose aim was to bring the world back to the state of biblical “waste and void,” the primordial chaos (tohu va-vohu).21 And, it should be noted, this force was located within the Jewish people. As the mixed multitude mingled with Israelites in the desert, their descendants became outwardly undistinguishable from other Jews and existed in every generation: in accordance with its wider mythology of metempsychosis, the Zohar depicted present-day Jewish sinners as Jews the “roots of whose souls” originated among the erev rav.
The topos of the mixed multitude thus became the figure of the ultimate enemy within, as opposed to Gentile haters of Israel. As Yitzhak Baer has demonstrated, in its original Zoharic setting, this motif had already been employed as a vehicle of a powerful social critique directed against the contemporary Jewish establishment, which was said to oppress scholars and abuse the poor. The rabbis and parnassim (lay leaders), who “studied Torah not for its own sake,” “erected synagogues not for the glory of God but rather to make a name for themselves,” and turned into “false shepherds of Israel,” were surely not “true children of Israel” but the descendants of the Egyptian hangers-on who had joined Moses in the wilderness.22 Thus, the rich, powerful, materialistic rabbinic and secular powers were contrasted with holy spiritualists lacking riches or high social position and extolling poverty for the sake of God. In the eyes of kabbalists, only the latter formed the true congregation of Israel.23
The Jews who converted in Lwów in 1759 were Sabbatians—followers of a religious movement triggered by messianic claims of the Ottoman Jew Sabbatai Tsevi (1626–76). Sabbatai first voiced his pretensions to the messiah-ship in 1648, but the movement that formed around him began to gain momentum only in 1665, when a young kabbalist, Nathan of Gaza (1643–80), “recognized” the truth of his mandate in an ecstatic vision.24 Shortly after proclaiming Sabbatai as the messiah, Nathan—who was soon to become “at once the John the Baptist and the Paul of the new messiah”25— composed a commentary on an ancient apocalyptic text that he had supposedly discovered in an old synagogue’s storage room. In order to counter rabbinic opposition to the budding messianic upheaval, he invoked the symbolism of the mixed multitude: the messiah’s contemporaries “shall rise against him with reproaches and blasphemies—they are the ‘mixed multitude,’ the sons of Lilith, the ‘caul above the liver’ [Lev. 3:4], the leaders and rabbis of the generation.”26
In his subsequent writings, Nathan developed a doctrine of salvation attainable by messianic belief alone (as opposed to the observance of commandments) and extended his use of the motif of the erev rav claiming that all Jews who fully observed the Law but denied Sabbatai’s mandate had souls of the mixed multitude.27 As Gershom Scholem observed, by linking the symbolism of the mixed multitude with eschatology and messianic mysteries, Nathan combined two distinct motifs that function separately in the Zohar. For the Sabbatians, the litmus test of what was the root of one’s soul became not, as in the Zohar, spiritual piety and “observance of the Torah for its own sake” but faith in the messiah Sabbatai Tsevi (or lack thereof): the sectarians “increasingly felt themselves to be the true Israel, harassed by the ‘mixed multitude’ because of their faith.”28
The radical dichotomy between the messianic believers and the rabbinic skeptics was further elaborated in the Commentary on the Midnight-Vigil Liturgy,29
