The Frankist chapter of Jewish history in Podolia, where Jacob Frank was active, lasted for only two years in the middle of the 18th century. It all began with a mystic-erotic ceremony in Lanckorona.

By Israel Jacob Yuval

(Review of the The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755-1816, by Pawel Maciejko)

Many messianic figures in Jewish history bore names with messianic significance. Two of the most famous would-be redeemers whose names testify to their messianic qualities were Jesus (”redeemer,” in Hebrew ) of Nazareth and Shimon Bar Kochba (Bar Kochba is “son of the star,” in Hebrew ). It may be that Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi, the editor of the Mishna, also saw himself as a messiah, identifying with the tribe of Judah, which established the kingdom of the House of David. I recently came upon a suggestion that Moses Maimonides had messianic pretensions too, stemming from his identification with his name. He saw himself as a second Moses, and therefore, like the first one, he wrote a new Torah (the Mishna Torah ), led his people as the rais (leader ) of the Jews, and was close to the ruler of Egypt. Scholar Moshe Idel argues that Shabbetai Zvi identified with the astrological and messianic qualities of the planet Saturn (”Shabbetai” in Hebrew ). And Jacob Frank, who died in 1790, the founder of the Frankists, the sect that viewed him as the Messiah, identified with the biblical figure of Jacob the forefather, and saw himself as the third Shabbetai, after Shabbetai Zvi and his disciple Baruchia Russo.

Pawel Maciejko’s book about the history of the Frankist movement, soon to be published in Hebrew translation by the Zalman Shazar Center, reminded me of the experience I had several decades back when I read Gershom Scholem’s book “Sabbetai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676.” It is very rare for a work of scholarly research to offer such a fascinating reading experience. From this point of view, Maciejko’s book on Frank and the Frankist movement, which was awarded a 2010 Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanities at the Hebrew University, where the author is a lecturer in Jewish thought, is a natural and valuable successor to Scholem’s classic volume on Shabbetai Zvi and his followers.

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Review of Maciejko’s new book about the Frankists. It supposedly contains new info about Frankist connections to secret societies and Masonic groups as well.

Maciejko’s “The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816,” is a brilliant study of Frank and the Frankist movement. It is the product of meticulous archival research in Polish, German, Hebrew and Yiddish, and it brims with sharp observations as it sweeps through its thesis. It convincingly argues that Frankism was a far more pervasive movement in Poland than originally thought, not only in the Jewish community, but also among the Polish aristocracy and clergy. Originally from Poland, Maciejko was trained at Oxford University and is now a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In “The Mixed Multitude” he argues that without Frank, the history of Judaism and modernity is missing a crucial chapter. The Frankists were not a marginal sectarian movement but a tremendous force in parts of Poland, a force that resulted in the conversion to Christianity of thousands of Jews in the late 18th century.

The movement attracted the attention of Polish kings, noblemen, clergy and intellectuals, and some of the greatest Jewish minds of the time. It had among its ranks such figures as the alleged Sabbatean Jonathan Eybeschutz, who was the rabbi of the prestigious Three Communities (Altona, Hamburg, and Wandsbeck), and his son, Wolf, who was openly Frankist. The Frankists’ conversion to Roman Catholicism forced Jews to rethink their relationship to Christianity. For example, Maciejko suggests that Rabbi Jacob Emden’s famous positive appraisal of Christianity, where he deems the church an “assembly for the sake of heaven,” was written largely to force the Frankists — heretics who had converted but retained some allegiance to Judaism — out of Judaism. In short, more than an expression of tolerance for Christianity, Emden wanted to create an alliance between Jews and the church against the Frankists.

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Ultimately, Israel’s sane majority that wants peace and democracy rather than war and theocracy will wake up and break the destructive stranglehold of those who wish to make the country a theocracy.

Carlo Strenger - Published 17:36 04.03.11

Benjamin Netanyahu, very belatedly, has decided to confront the settlers on a limited scale, and their reaction has been violent. At some point an open conflict with the national-religious movement will be inevitable, because Israel will end the occupation either on its own initiative or through growing international pressure. For many years Israeli decision-makers have been worried about how this conflict will be played out.

To predict the course of this confrontation we should look at the extremes of the national-religious movement in a wider historical perspective. Active Messianism is, an incarnation of the much wider historical phenomenon of Millenarian movements in Christianity, Judaism and Islam. These were fuelled by the belief that the end of time was near, that the messianic period was close, and needed actively to be brought about. This was one of the theological foundations of the crusades; it plays an important role in Shiite theology, and it has of course played itself out in Judaism a number of times, most famously in the messianic frenzy around Shabbetai Zvi in the seventeenth century.

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A new book explores the rich history of Turkey’s Dönme, Sephardic Jews who converted to Islam in the 1600s

Adam Kirsch - Jan 12, 2010

[...] a small group of Sephardic Jews, many of them descended from conversos, did not think that Zevi’s apostasy invalidated his mission. On the contrary, they decided to follow him by converting to Islam themselves, while continuing to believe in their messiah and follow his commandments. This group, totaling about 300 families, became known in Turkish as Dönme, “converts,” though they referred to themselves in Hebrew as Ma’aminim, “believers.” By the 1680s, the Dönme had congregated in Salonika, the cosmopolitan and majority-Jewish city in Ottoman Greece. For the next 250 years, they would lead an independent communal life—intermarrying, doing business together, maintaining their own shrines, and handing down their secret traditions.

In The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks, Marc David Baer has produced the first scholarly study of this group. That it is a scholarly work, limited in its scope and sticking closely to written archives, is something that Baer insists on, and with good reason. For while the Spanish conversos are now seen as an interesting historical phenomenon, and it is even rather fashionable to claim converso ancestry, Turkey is still a part of the world where the anti-Semitic imagination runs wild.

And because the Dönme played an outsize role at key moments in modern Turkish history, the myth of their secret Jewish power has itself become powerful. As Baer writes in his introduction, there have recently been bestselling books in Turkey claiming that everyone from the current prime minister, the religious Muslim Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the revered founder of modern secular Turkey, are secretly Jewish. “Ghost Jews haunt the Turkish popular imagination,” as Baer puts it.

This makes it a delicate matter to write about the Dönme. In fact, Baer says, most of the descendants of Dönme whom he interviewed for the book asked him not to use their names. “Although many believe conspiracy theories about the Dönme,” Baer writes, “very few know the real character and history of the group.” His book, perhaps deliberately, will not raise the profile of the Dönme very much. Not only is it an academic book, published by Stanford University Press, but Baer says very little about the origin of the Dönme, or about their religious beliefs and practices—matters that many Jewish readers would be curious about.

By Orly Halpern

'Shabbatai Tzvi enthroned,' Amsterdam, 1666

Aubrey Ross is an unusual man with an unusual pastime. He’s looking for Jewish Muslims. In Turkey. With the help of the Internet. And he’s convinced he has found some.

In a book entitled “The Messiah of Turkey,” due to be published this winter by Frank Cass Publishers in Great Britain, Ross reveals that there are a number of key figures in the present government of Turkey who are Sabbateans - i.e., followers of Shabbtai Tzvi, a Jew who, in the 17th century, claimed he was the messiah, God of Israel, and later converted to Islam.

Ross, an Orthodox Jew from London who has lectured on mysticism at Hebrew University in Jerusalem - but has university degrees in economics and the history of political thought, and is an adviser on pensions at the National Health Service in Great Britain - became intrigued by the subject when he was reading the chapter about false messiahs in Gershom Scholem’s “Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.”

“I was fascinated by a short sentence that said `many of them were still around in 1970,’” he says.

Shabbtai Zvi was born in Izmir, Turkey in 1625 and became a Muslim in the 1660s, Ross explains, when he was challenged by the sultan of Turkey for declaring that his mission as messiah was to take back the land of Israel, then under Ottoman rule. The sultan offered him three alternatives: make a miracle and become the true messiah of the Jews; be killed; or become a Muslim. Shabbtai Tzvi chose the latter.

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Jewish Political Studies Review 19:1-2 (Spring 2007)

by Jacob M. Landau

The dönmes (converts) are a community descended from the disciples and adherents of Sabbatai Tsevi, who abandoned Judaism and adopted Islam in the late seventeenth century.  Wary of their Muslim neighbors, they kept to themselves, maintaining strict secrecy in all their religious practices and general behavior. Our knowledge of the dönmes is therefore rather limited.

The main dönme center was in Salonica, where they had a real impact on social and economic life until 1924, when, as a result of the population transfer, the dönmes moved to Turkey, chiefly to Istanbul and Izmir. This migration caused their communal institutions to break down, and growing assimilation into the Muslim Turkish environment (including intermarriages) diminished the dönme population considerably. The hostility of sections of Turkish ultranationalists and extreme Islamists also affected the community.

Dönme (convert; also apostate, a pejorative term) was the common appellation used by Muslim Turks to designate the Jewish adherents of Sabbatai Tsevi who embraced Islam in the last third of the seventeenth century, imitating their prophet’s conversion in Istanbul in 1666, and their descendants.[1] The dönmes themselves preferred to be called ma’mīnīm (”believers” in Hebrew), indicating the conviction that they had inaugurated a new sect within Judaism that reinterpreted messianic Judaism, at the same time insisting on strictly Muslim behavior in public.

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Text and photographs by Albena Shkodrova

Neither Muslims nor Jews, but rather a bit of both, Thessaloniki’s Dönmeh were the most influential group in the city over a period of almost 400 years. The rumours that the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk, was one of them remain unconfirmed. But spending a few days in present-day Thessaloniki makes one wonder whether the city has really managed to rid itself of the influence of the eclectic, and often purely extravagant, tastes of the now extinct sect.

East of the park behind the White Tower, Thessaloniki’s colourless, new residential blocks surround the streets, blocking the way of the fresh sea breeze.

Barber shops, pastry shops, garages and stores string by in their usual rhythm. Women hang laundry out on the balconies, motorbikes whiz past with a deafening noise – altogether everything is going about in its usual manner, until suddenly – in the middle of the little neighbourhood, a small square opens up. The building in its middle instantly grabs the attention.

This is Yeni Jami, the ‘New Mosque’. A strange mixture of Art Nouveau and Moorish architecture from the time of the Arab Khalifate in Spain, it starts out with a stained glass window above the door and continues with rounded arches, ending with a sharp-edged, ornamental roof frieze and two wooden clock towers, decorated with multiple Stars of David.

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Today’s Zaman, Turkey - Aug 15, 2008

Sabbateanism, a movement that began 400 years ago in the Ottoman Empire, is the subject of some of the most popular conspiracy theories in Turkey.

Although interest in these theories has considerably increased in recent years, there has been a lack of any academic study of the issue. All the existing theories have been superficially constructed from loose links to certain figures known to have Sabbatean backgrounds. Now, however, those looking for an academic perspective on the Sabbatean phenomenon can turn to the work of historian Cengiz Şişman, who studied the subject for his doctoral thesis at Harvard University and recently published a book on the subject in Turkish titled “Sabatay Sevi ve Sabataycılar: Mitler ve Gerçekler” (Sabbatai Sevi and Sabbateans: Myths and Realities).

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