In order to clarify some ingrained misunderstandings (and to avoid exacerbating the existing confusion), I shall first lay out the available primary evidence, juxtapose the contradictory statements in it, and then try to establish the basic outline of what happened. On that basis, I shall offer suggestions as to the nature and the theological significance of the ritual.
Frankist sources (written twenty to thirty years after the incident) give only brief accounts of the Lanckoronie affair. Thus, the Frankist chronicle states: “[Frank] traveled from Lwów to Kopyczyńce. On 21 January, after having stayed there for only one night, the Lord traveled on the 25th [sic] to Lanckoronie with Jakubowski and Jacob Lwowski. In Lanckoronie, all the True Believers sang, danced, and then they were jailed together with the Lord. On the third day, Turks came from no one knows where and why and ordered to set the Lord alone free.”3
The muddled chronology of the account does not allow us to date the ritual with precision, though it evidently took place during the last week of January 1756, and Frank arrived in Lanckoronie only a day or a few days before its commencement. “Jakubowski” was the Christian name taken later by Frank’s groomsman and teacher-turned-disciple, Nahman ben Samuel, then rabbi of Busk; Jacob Lwowski, otherwise hardly mentioned in Frankist documents, was the stepson of Frank’s other teacher and patron Mordechai ben Elias of Prague. The identities and number of other Sabbatians are not known; also unclear is the character of the ceremony, except that it involved singing and dancing.
The only mention of the Lanckoronie affair in The Words of the Lord is even more cursory: “When I came to Lanckoronie and you were singing songs, having covered the windows during the night, I went out and opened the window so that everything would inevitably be heard.”4 Again, the only thing we know about the character of the ceremony is that the participants sang songs. However, the text does present an interesting and important piece of information: the disclosure of the secret ritual was an intentional provocation on Frank’s part, and the Sabbatians were revealed because he opened the windows to let the town’s inhabitants hear them singing during the night.
Jewish sources contain more detailed accounts of the Lanckoronie ritual. The earliest of these comes from Rabbi Jacob Emden’s Sefer shimush (1760):
And they took the wife of the local rabbi (who also belonged to the sect), a woman beautiful but lacking discretion,5 they undressed her naked and placed the Crown of the Torah on her head, sat her under the canopy like a bride, and danced a dance around her. They celebrated with bread and wine of the condemned,6 and they pleased their hearts with music like King David . . . and in dance they fell upon her kissing her, and called her ‘mezuzah,’ as if they were kissing a mezuzah.7
Emden supplemented this report by telling how a few local Jews wanted to purchase a drink in a house adjacent to the place where the rite took place. They heard the sounds of singing, burst into the house, and severely beat up those present; only after calling for help from Gentile neighbors were the Frankists left alone. The following day, a message was sent to the nearby communities. Rabbinic courts gathered testimony from witnesses and pronounced a herem (ban of excommunication) against the participants in the ritual. Emden named Frank as leader of the group and stated that he had come to Lanckoronie “for he knew that the sect of Sabbatai Tsevi would gather there.”8 Aside from Frank, the only participants in the ritual identified by Emden were the rabbi of Lanckoronie and his wife. No information was given about the other participants, the date of the event, or the exact character of the non-Jewish neighbors’ intervention.
Another Jewish account appeared in Abraham of Szarogród’s “Ma’aseh nora be-Podolia”, first published in 1769.9 According to the author (who claimed to be an eyewitness of the affair), the incident took place not in Lanckoronie but in his hometown of Szarogród. A group of visitors led by Frank came to this town a few days before the festival of Shavuot (in early June) and stayed in the house of a certain Rabbi Hayyim Maggid. The community offered the visitors bread and meat; Frank, however, refused to have any dealings with local Jews, whom he claimed to be “descendants of the mixed multitude.”10
On the Shabbat before the commencement of the festival, the congregation awaited Frank’s group in the synagogue in order to begin the evening service. As the strangers were late, the rabbi sent a beadle to bring them over. The beadle went to Rabbi Hayyim’s house, where he saw a young woman naked to the waist with her head uncovered and hair loose; Frank and his company were dancing around her, hugging and kissing her. They had crosses (tselamim) hung on their necks.11 Alerted by the beadle, the entire community ran to see the abomination. The following day, the rabbi of Szarogród pronounced a herem on the delinquents and sent information about the ban into other communities of Podolia. The sectarians ignored the ban and started a countercampaign against the rabbinate, which ultimately led to the staging of a public disputation between the parties.12
The most extensive Jewish account of the Lanckoronie affair can be found in Dov Ber Birkenthal’s Divre binah (1800).13 According to Birkenthal, Frank called upon the Lwów Sabbatians, followers of Krysa, to go with him to Salonika, where they would prostrate themselves on the grave of Berukhiah and would see him perform wonders. Some fifteen people, including a son of one of the leaders of the community and a young woman dressed as a man, heeded his call and left Lwów. On the way to Salonika, they reached the small town of Lanckoronie, where they took lodgings in the house of one Leyb. They were joined by several people from Lanckoronie and nearby communities and organized celebrations with singing and dancing that lasted several days.
One night, a peasant came to Lanckoronie to sell wood; having seen the celebrations, he asked the local rabbi, Gershon Katz, why they were being held. The rabbi knew nothing about the festivities and sent a boy to spy on Leyb’s house. On his return, the boy reported that the windows were covered with heavy carpets, so that he could not see much; but through a hole in the wall, he had seen men and women dancing together. The following night, Rabbi Gershon, officials of the Jewish community, Romanowski (the Polish governor of the town), and the local magistrate went to Leyb’s house; peeping through holes in the wall, they all saw naked men and women dancing and heard them singing rhymed chants in praise of Sabbatai Tsevi and Berukhiah. The governor immediately ordered the arrest of eight of those present (including Frank); they were jailed in the Lanckoronie military encampment and were set to work hewing heavy stones. The rest were set free.
A search carried out in the house revealed many subversive and heretical writings. The writings were confiscated by the rabbi, who also wrote to the district rabbi, Menahem Mendel of Satanów, asking him to come to Lanckoronie in person and investigate the incident. However, Rabbi Menahem Mendel was ill and sent his brother-in-law, Eleazar Lippman, accompanied by several community functionaries. An impromptu bet din was set up in Lanckoronie, and those arrested were brought before it in fetters, one by one. Some of them confessed to various misdeeds and sought repentance; they also reported the names and crimes of other Sabbatians. The delinquents were placed under a ban, and the property of the Jews who left Lwów with Frank was confiscated by the rabbinate.
Ber Birkenthal’s account was composed more than half a century after the events described. In recounting what had happened in Lanckoronie, its author relied on oral sources, as well as on the official protocol of a Christian investigation of the affair (I shall discuss the details of this investigation below). This protocol was written in 1757 by the canon of the Kamieniec consistory, Franciszek Kazimierz Kleyn, and published a year later under the title Coram iudicio recolendae memoriae Nicolai de stemmate Jelitarum a Dembowa Góra Dembowski, Dei & Apostolicae Sedis Gratia Episcopi Camenecenis . . . Pars III: De decisoriis Processus inter infideles Iudaeos Dioecesis Camenecensis, in materia iudaicae eorum perfidiae, aliorumque muto obiectorum a.d. 1757 expedita ac in executis pendens. It is the most important Christian account of the Lanckoronie incident.
Kleyn’s protocol placed the Lanckoronie ritual on the night of 27–28 January
