that the sectarians had completely taken over some communities: Rabbi Jacob Emden lamented that “in a town called Nadworna, the entire community turned to heresy, following Sabbatai Tsevi.”65
Indeed, Nadworna seemed to be particularly notorious for the open practice of Sabbatianism. Ber Birkenthal of Bolechów reported that in 1742, a known Sabbatian from Nadworna stayed at his father’s inn. Those present were told a story about how, on the fast day of the Ninth of Av (the fast commemorating the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans, abolished and turned into a feast day by Sabbatai Tsevi),66 the people of Nadworna went to the surrounding fields and stole a sheep. They slaughtered it without observing the requirements regarding ritual slaughter, cooked it in milk (thereby breaking another dietary prohibition), and celebrated merrily, hoping for Sabbatai’s second coming and expecting imminent liberation from exile.67 In the years directly preceding Frank’s appearance in Podolia, the most prominent Sabbatian from Nadworna was Leyb son of Nata, called Leyb Krysa. Ber Birkenthal, who met him in Lwów in 1752, recounts that Krysa was known as a kabbalist and came to Ber’s house to study the Zohar from the Amsterdam edition, which Birkenthal owned. He used to “wander through all the towns of Podolia in order to deceive and incite the people of Israel . . . to accept the faith of Sabbatai Tsevi,”68 and he established a Sabbatian house of study in Lwów.69 Insofar as we can judge from the few existing sources, in the year or so preceding Frank’s appearance, Krysa gained a substantial following and was singularly successful in uniting Podolian Sabbatian groups under his leadership; it seems that many of the later “Frankists” were initially the “Krysists.” But suddenly, Frank showed up and stole the show.
Frank’s Beginnings
According to the Frankist chronicle, Pan (“the Lord”), Ya’akov ben Leyb, later known as Jacob Frank, was born in 1726 in Berczanie, a small village in Podolia.70 Other sources give other Podolian locations, Korolowka71 or Buczacz,72 as the place of his birth. The family had strong Sabbatian connections: his father, Leyb Buchbinder, was a brother of Moses Meir Kamenker, the Sabbatian emissary detained in Mannheim while distributing Va-avo ha-yom el haayyin (Kamenker was a brother-in-law of Fishel of Złoczów);73 Jacob Frank’s mother, Rachel Hirschl of Rzeszów, was a sister of Löbl, father of Schöndl Dobruschka, the spiritus movens of Sabbatianism in Moravia.74 When Frank was only a few months old, his family left Poland and moved to the Ottoman Empire; it is likely that the move was connected to the affair that erupted after the detention of his uncle Moses Meir Kamenker a year earlier.
Young Jacob grew up in the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, spending extended periods in the Ottoman territories proper; he lived in Czernowitz, Smyrna, Bucharest, Sofia, and Constantinople. At some point during his stay in Turkey, he acquired the nickname “Frank” or “Frenk.” The word is a Turkish equivalent of the Arabic ifrandj or firandj, referring initially to the Franks, inhabitants of the empire of Charlemagne and then, by extension, to the Crusaders. By the sixteenth century, in many oriental languages (for example, Persian, farangi; Armenian, frank), the term had become a common appellation for Europeans in general as well as for “various things believed to have been introduced by the Franks, such as syphilis, cannon, European dress, and modern civilization.”75 In Jacob Frank’s milieu, his nickname betrayed his foreign European origins, identifying him as a Polish Ashkenazic Jew, a native Yiddish speaker who found himself among the Ladino-speaking Turkish Sephardim.
The Frankist chronicle informs us that in 1752, in Nikopol (present-day Bulgaria), Frank married Hana, the daughter of a certain Rabbi Tova; the rite was conducted according to the “Jewish-Turkish religion,” and his groomsmen were Rabbi Mordechai and Rabbi Nahman.76 Another source adds that on the night of his wedding, the groomsmen disclosed “the mystery of faith” to him, and one of them told the bridegroom that “there was a messiah in Salonika.”77 The practice of initiating new members of the sect on their wedding nights is known from Sabbatian rituals, and the “mystery of faith” was the final revelation of Sabbatai Tsevi, which he divulged only to those of his disciples who converted to Islam; its content was transferred orally among the sectarian elite.78 It is a matter of conjecture, but there is reason to believe that Frank’s father-in-law, called by the chronicle “Rabbi Tova,” was one of the most important Turkish Sabbatian leaders, Yehudah Levi Tova (Frank’s first biographer, the Jesuit Father Awedyk, confirms that Tova, father of Frank’s wife, was a Levite).79 The “Jewish-Turkish” religion was nothing other than the faith of the Muslim-Sabbatian group known as the Dönmeh.
After the death of Sabbatai Tsevi (1676), his last wife, Jocheved, proclaimed that the soul of the messiah had not left the earthly world but had reincarnated in her brother, Jacob Querido. Shortly thereafter, Querido received a series of revelations urging him to continue upon the path of Sabbatai and apostatize. Following these revelations, a group of some three hundred Jewish families converted to Islam in 1683 in the city of Salonika, thus founding the Sabbatian-Muslim sect of the Dönmeh.80 The Turkish word dönmeh signifies a recent convert, a neophyte, and has strong negative connotations; in modern Turkish, it might also be used as a slur against a male-to-female transsexual. It was intended as a term of abuse heaped upon the Salonika apostates by their enemies; the group’s own term was ma’aminim (“believers”; the standard Sabbatian self-designation) or sazanikos. Sazan is Turkish for carp, a fish that lives both in fresh- and in seawater. Thus the converts conducted their double lives under Judaism and under Islam; and just as the carp seems to change color, so they changed external appearances in accordance with changing needs and circumstances.81
The Dönmeh formed a close-knit group shunning exogamous marriage with either Jews or Muslims, and they developed their own version of Sabbatian theology, focusing on the radical duality between the Torah of the Created World (torah de-beri’ah) and the new spiritual Torah known as the Torah of Emanation (torah de-atsilut). With the coming of the messiah, the former—identified with the commandments of Judaism—was replaced with the latter, and Sabbatai Tsevi’s “strange deeds” provided a pattern for normative behavior. Accordingly, the Dönmeh’s brand of Sabbatianism acquired a very pronounced antinomian tendency, whereby ritual violations of the principles and rites of Jewish religion became a significant part of religious practice. Since the advent of redemption signified liberation from the yoke of the commandments, their further observance would be not only senseless, but blasphemous. Conversely, almost the only way to demonstrate that the redemption had arrived was to break the laws and statutes of the unredeemed world. In the words of Rabbi Moses Hagiz: “It is their custom to argue that with the arrival of Sabbatai Zevi, the sin of Adam has already been corrected and the good selected out of the evil and the ‘dross.’ Since that time, according to them, a new Torah has become law under which all manner of things formerly prohibited are now permitted, not least the categories of sexual intercourse hitherto prohibited. For since everything is pure, there is no sin or harm in these things.”82
Jacob Querido died during a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1690. As the principle of leadership among the Dönmeh was based on the idea of reincarnation of Sabbatai Tsevi’s soul into a new leader, several pretenders appeared, each claiming to be the new abode of the soul of the messiah. The Salonika group splintered into three principal branches—the Kavalieros, the Jakubis, and the Koniosos; the most important one for the present discussion is the last, led by Berukhiah Russo (in Islam: Osman Baba; 1677–1720).83 Berukhiah’s group was the most radical among the Dönmeh subsects: not only did he believe that the traditional laws of Judaism had been abrogated, but he claimed that, with the arrival of the messianic era, the thirty-six most serious transgressions punishable by the ultimate punishment of karet84 had turned into positive commandments (the category includes all sexual prohibitions, mainly various forms of incest). In 1716, Berukhiah’s followers declared him the incarnation not merely of the soul of the human messiah Sabbatai, but also of the God of Israel (the idea of the divinity of the messiah or some form of the doctrine of divine incarnation had appeared in earlier Sabbatian
