The Mixed Multitude. Pawel Maciejko
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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 accounts based on these sources contradict one another.2 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