The Mixed Multitude. Pawel Maciejko
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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 1756 in the house of Leyb Aaron.14 Those who had gathered there closed the door and covered the windows with carpets to avoid being disturbed by people coming to the market the following day. Long into the night, they devoted themselves to the “reading of the Scriptures and singing of the Psalms.”15 A local arendator, one Gershon, summoned a few Jews, who, accompanied by the magistrate’s attendants, broke into the house, arrested the participants in the ritual, beat them, and confiscated their property, including books and manuscripts. A boy (in Kleyn’s account, he is one of the participants in the ritual, not the rabbi’s servant) was brought before the town governor, Romanowski, flogged, and compelled to describe the ritual and repeat the chants. Those arrested were forced to do menial labor. Romanowski feared that Gershon was trying to implicate him in a scandalous legal case and tried to restrain the arendator, stating that “he found no cause in these Jews.”16
Yet Gershon paid no heed to Romanowski and sued the arrested Jews in the municipal court of Lanckoronie. Parallel to the proceedings of the magistrates, the Jews initiated their own case before the gathering of the elders of the Lanckoronie, Satanów, and Smotrycz communities. The arrested parties were shackled by their necks and interrogated under coercion; one of them was beaten “almost to death” by the beadle of the Lanckoronie synagogue.17 Their houses were broken into, their property looted, and their books and manuscripts confiscated. The participants in the ritual whom Kleyn mentioned by name were Frank, Woł (the rabbi of Krzywcze), and Leyb Aaron of Lanckoronie (owner of the house).
On the basis of the extant sources, a few basic facts can be established. Following Kleyn’s protocol, we can date the Lanckoronie incident to the night of 27–28 January 1756. The Frankist chronicle (often inaccurate in matters of chronology) shifted it by a few days; Abraham of Szarogród, who dated it to May or June of the same year, confused the timing of the event itself with that of the conclusion of the rabbinic investigation and the issuing of the excommunications. (Abraham’s moving the event from Lanckoronie to Szarogród, an attempt to give himself extra credibility as an eyewitness, can be discounted.) About a dozen men and women participated in the ritual; the list certainly includes Frank and the owner of the house, Leyb of Lanckoronie. Most reports also attest to the participation of one or more communal rabbis: the Frankist chronicle mentions Nahman of Busk (Jakubowski); Kleyn Woł of Krzywcze, and Emden the unnamed rabbi of Lanckoronie.18 A few participants were arrested by local Polish authorities. Frank, a Turkish subject, was released almost immediately; the Polish Jews were jailed for a longer period of time.
Following the discovery and the arrest, there was some physical violence, and books were confiscated. The exact character of the Frankists’ actions is more difficult to determine: the only element on which all sources agree is that the Lanckoronie celebrations involved singing and dancing. Information about the particulars of the ritual can be found only in Jewish anti-Frankist accounts. Whereas it is impossible to verify the accuracy of every detail, I am inclined to accept the basic veracity of