following was growing, Yehudah Leyb Krysa also joined his group. However, tension between the two never abated, and Krysa challenged Frank’s leadership on several occasions.
Frank’s authority among the Podolian Sabbatians was based on the claim that he had inherited the mantle of Berukhiah and his transmission and dissemination of Turkish Sabbatian teachings and rites in Poland. Baruch me-Erets Yavan, the chief opponent of the Frankists during the early phase of the development of the movement, recorded a prayer introduced by Frank in Podolia; the prayer addressed Berukhiah as God of Israel incarnate and mentioned the abolishment of the torah de-beri’ah and its replacement by the torah de-atsilut.109 In a letter to Emden accompanying the text of the prayer, Yavan claimed that Frank had spread Berukhiah’s teachings in Podolia, advocating abolition of the prohibition of incest and introducing idolatry in the proper sense of the term: worship of a deified human being.110
Indeed, Frankist sources also confirm that during his first months in Poland, Frank recited the Ladino prayer Mi dio barach io (Berukhiah my God),111 and his followers responded with a verse from the “credo” of the Dönmeh: “I believe with perfect faith in the faith of the God of truth . . . the three knots of faith that are one.”112 On the basis of such accounts, Gershom Scholem argued that Frankism was “for generations nothing other than a particularly radical [off]shoot of the Dönmeh, only with a Catholic façade.”113 Scholem’s claim is only partly true: if Frank’s followers were, in some sense, “nothing other than a particularly radical offshoot of the Dönmeh,” this was not for generations but only before they acquired their “Catholic façade”: during the first two months of Frank’s activity in Podolia. Afterward, Frankism became something entirely different.
Sabbatianism, particularly the Turkish variety, is the indispensable context for the study of Frankism. However, I believe that Frank consciously—and, to a large extent, successfully—attempted to discard his Sabbatian legacy and to separate himself from other Sabbatian groups, including (and perhaps particularly) the Dönmeh. Most scholars have tended to treat Frankism as an extension, branch, or late phase of Sabbatianism. Thus Simon Dubnow stated that “Jacob Frank was for the Polish-Russian Jews of the eighteenth century what Sabbatai Tsevi was for entire Jewry of the seventeenth.”114 Scholem argued that “there is no basic difference between the terms Sabbatianism and Frankism.”115 Such an approach oversimplifies the issue. Not all Polish (or even not all Podolian), Czech, or German Sabbatians accepted Frank’s leadership, and some of Frank’s followers did not come from Sabbatian backgrounds. Essential theological differences, as well as dissimilarities between the Frankists and other Sabbatian subsects in their social makeup and political aspirations, will be presented in the following chapters.
Most important, in his later activity Frank did not see himself as a continuator or an incarnation of Sabbatai Tsevi or Berukhiah. As he put it, Sabbatai Tsevi “did not accomplish anything.”116 It was only himself, Frank, who “came to this world to bring forth into the world a new thing of which neither your forefathers nor their forefathers heard.”117
Jacob Frank’s very name indicated his foreignness and showed that he remained an outsider in his milieu: in Salonika, despite his family ties to Tova and his success among local Sabbatians, he was a Pole among the Turks. Upon his arrival in Poland, this perspective was reversed: the term frenk in the Orient denoted a European custom or object or a visitor from Europe; in Yiddish, by a peculiar linguistic inversion, it came to signify a Sephardic, that is, an Oriental, Jew. When two preachers from Podolia, Yiddish speakers, told a story “about how a certain Frenk had come to Poland, and caused there a great uproar,”118 they meant to say that, in the Commonwealth, Jacob Frank was a stranger coming from the East. To my mind, nothing better illustrates Frank’s personality and his fate than this inversion: wherever he went, he remained an outsider, escaping qualifications and provoking contradictory reactions.
Two depictions of Frank were written by eyewitnesses in 1759, the year of his conversion. One, composed by the Jesuit Konstanty Awedyk, described Frank as a man “beautiful, of imposing posture and resounding voice.”119 The other one, Jewish, preserved in Rabbi Jacob Emden’s Sefer shimush, claimed that he was a small man, “incredibly ugly, not resembling a human being, with the face of a demon.”120 Awedyk further marveled at his linguistic capabilities, claiming that Frank fully mastered “Hebrew, Turkish, Wallachian, Italian, German, and Ladino [Frencki]”;121 the Jewish account stated that “Frank had no command at all of any language or speech whatsoever but stammered, whistled, and cried like a rooster so that anyone who was not well accustomed to him could not understand anything.”122
Such contrasting accounts of Frank are many. He was an Ashkenazi among the Sephardim, a Sephardi among the Ashkenazim, a Pole among the Turks, a Turk among the Poles, an unlearned boor among the sages, a sage among the simpletons, a believer among skeptics, a libertine among the pious. Following his conversion in 1759, he continued to be seen as a Jew among the Christians and yet was considered a Christian among the Jews. Heinrich Graetz, the first monographer of Frankism, characterized the founder of the movement as “one of the worst, slyest, and most deceitful villains of the eighteenth century.”123 A Polish Catholic encyclopedia defined him as “the greatest reformer of Polish Jewry.”124 Aleksander Kraushar called Frank’s dicta a “theosophical system arisen in a head of a boor, a teaching lacking any theological background, in which shreds of Christian dogmas are associated in a disorderly manner with concepts from the Zohar, with traces of occultist tenets, and with chaos of incomprehensible tones.”125 Gershom Scholem claimed that they “contained a genuine creed of life.”126 In short, Frank was the most mercurial of all Jewish leaders. In this work, I seek to penetrate his mercuriality and uncover the facts of his astonishing career.
Chapter 1
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In the Shadow of the Herem
The Lanckoronie Affair
Toward the end of January 1756, Jacob Frank and a group of other Sabbatians were discovered conducting a secret ritual in the little town of Lanckoronie, near the Moldavian border. The discovery set a process in motion, which led to the emergence of Frankism as a phenomenon distinct from other branches of the wider Sabbatian movement. The ensuing sequence of events included the arrest of the participants in the ritual, a series of unusually harsh punitive measures by the Jewish authorities, public clashes between Sabbatian and non-Sabbatian Jews in Podolia, the involvement of Christians in what would seem an internal Jewish affair, public disputations between the representatives of the Frankists and of the rabbinate, and, ultimately, the conversion of Frank and his followers to Roman Catholicism.
The Lanckoronie incident is one of the most widely known events from the history of Frankism. The sect’s reputation for orgiastic rites and antinomian ideology is based mainly on the descriptions of the Lanckoronie ritual and the testimony gathered by the authorities in its wake. Indeed, the key concept of mitsvah ha-ba’ah ba-averah (lit., a commandment fulfilled by breaking another commandment), which gave the title to Gershom Scholem’s seminal essay on what he termed “radical Sabbatianism,”1 derives from one item of this testimony and does not appear in any other source. Scholem’s essay—especially after its title’s mistranslation into English as “Redemption through Sin”— became the best-known scholarly account of eighteenth-century Sabbatianism and shaped the perception of the movement among scholars and the wider public alike.
Given the impact of the Lanckoronie affair on the later history of the Frankist movement, surprisingly little is known about the incident itself. The extant sources disagree about almost everything: the exact date and character of the ritual, the manner and circumstances of its discovery, the number and names of the participants, and the nature of the subsequent developments. Scholarly
