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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Anthony Grafton - January 7, 2009

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But another story–a less dramatic one suggested by the letters–seems much more likely to be the true one. When Scholem learned that the Mar Saba discoveries bore on the Carpocratians, he replied enthusiastically: “I am amazed to hear that there is still unknown information about the Carpocratians to be found. Those are the Frankists of Antiquity. Produce it as soon as possible!” The Frankists were the followers of Jacob Frank, an eighteenth-century Polish Jew who had taught that those who followed him were free from the law and should pursue salvation through ecstatic sexuality. In a famous essay published in 1937, not long before Smith joined him in Jerusalem, Scholem explored the mysteries of what he called “redemption through sin”: “It would be pointless to deny that the sexual element in this outburst was very strong: a primitive abandon such as the Jewish people would scarcely have thought itself capable of after so many centuries of discipline in the Law joined hands with perversely pathological drives to seek a common ideological rehabilitation.” In this characteristically imaginative way, Scholem, no religious believer, re-created the deep meanings that Judaism had even–or especially–for its heretics in another age.

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As a midcentury Episcopalian, Smith would never have thought the Bible inerrant. But he did think almost that of Scholem. Could Scholem’s enthusiastic comparison of Carpocrates to Frank have set Smith on the way to making Jesus a magician? Could Scholem’s teaching have inspired Smith to rethink the nature of religious experience, and Christianity, and find new meanings in the life of Jesus? It seems very likely, to me at least, that Scholem’s way of thinking about redemption and salvation, religion and sex, acted slowly but irrevocably on Smith–in just the time-bomb way that great teaching often acts: like so many of the great Jewish scholars he knew, he found in history of a particular kind a way to appreciate the emotional richness of traditions to which he could no longer pledge personal loyalty. In The Secret Gospel, Smith described Scholem’s deep impact on him and recalled that when he told Scholem about the letter, “he pounced immediately on the mention of the Carpocratians,” whose leader supposedly “taught that sin was a means of salvation…. A remotely similar theme was important in the writings of some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jewish heretics whom Scholem had been studying (Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank).”

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