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Liber XX · Kabbalah

Liber XX · Kabbalah · Chapter V: Lurianic Kabbalah

Jacob Frank and the Frankists: The Lwów Disputation of 1759

Jacob Frank and the Frankists: the Sabbatean heirs of Podolia, the Lwów disputation of 1759, mass baptism, Częstochowa, Offenbach and Frank's teachings.

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Jacob Frank (c. 1726–1791) was a Jewish messianic leader from Podolia, in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, whose followers, the Frankists, were the most radical heirs of the seventeenth-century movement of Sabbatai Zevi. After clashes with rabbinic authorities, the Frankists presented themselves to the Catholic Church as "anti-Talmudists", debated the rabbis in public at Kamieniec in 1757 and at Lwów in 1759, and then accepted baptism in large numbers, with Frank himself baptized in Warsaw with King Augustus III as his godfather. Imprisoned by the Church for thirteen years, Frank ended his life as a self-styled baron in Offenbach, and his movement left a lasting mark on Jewish, Polish and Central European history.

Jacob Frank: From Podolia to the Sabbateans of Salonica§

Frank was born around 1726 in Korolówka, a small town in Podolia, now in western Ukraine, then a frontier region of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth bordering the Ottoman Empire. His father may already have had Sabbatean sympathies; Podolia was one of the regions where belief in Sabbatai Zevi had survived in secret after the messiah's conversion to Islam in 1666, a story told in Sabbateanism. As a young man Frank worked as a travelling merchant in the Ottoman Balkans, where he acquired the name "Frank", the term used in the Ottoman world for Europeans.

In Salonica he encountered the Dönme, the community of Sabbatai's followers who had followed their messiah into outward Islam, and especially the radical branch associated with Baruchiah Russo, whose teaching held that in the messianic age the old prohibitions of the Torah were abolished. Frank absorbed these ideas and the reputation of a charismatic leader. In late 1755 he returned to Podolia, where local Sabbatean groups gathered around him.

Lanckorona, the Ban and the Kamieniec Disputation§

In January 1756, at the town of Lanckorona, a gathering of Frank and his followers was interrupted by local Jews, who accused them of conducting forbidden rites; the reports of singing, dancing and alleged sexual transgressions came from hostile witnesses, and their accuracy has long been debated. Frank, an Ottoman subject, was expelled, and his followers were arrested. In 1756 rabbinic courts, meeting at Brody and elsewhere, placed the sectarians under a ban (herem), declaring their marriages invalid and their children illegitimate, and restricted the study of the Zohar and of Lurianic writings to mature, learned men.

The persecuted group turned to the Catholic bishop of Kamieniec Podolski, Mikołaj Dembowski. They presented themselves as "contra-Talmudists": believers who rejected the Talmud, accepted the Zohar and confessed a God in three aspects. Dembowski organised a public disputation between the sectarians and rabbis at Kamieniec in the summer of 1757, ruled in favour of the anti-Talmudists and ordered copies of the Talmud in his diocese to be confiscated and burned. Thousands of volumes were destroyed that autumn. Dembowski died suddenly in November 1757, and the protection of the sect collapsed; Frank, abroad again, for a time outwardly embraced Islam, as the Dönme had done.

The Lwów Disputation of 1759§

In 1758 King Augustus III granted the anti-Talmudists a letter of protection, and the following year their leaders petitioned the Church authorities in Lwów (today Lviv) for a second disputation, promising that they would accept baptism. The debate took place in the cathedral of Lwów in sessions held between July and September 1759, presided over by the administrator of the archdiocese, Canon Stefan Mikulski, before a large audience of clergy, nobles and townspeople. On the rabbinic side the leading figure was Hayyim Cohen Rapoport, rabbi of Lwów.

The Frankists defended seven theses. The first six were Christian in content, though they read in a Sabbatean light: that the prophecies concerning the Messiah had been fulfilled; that the Messiah was God himself who had taken human form; that the ceremonial law had ceased with his coming; that the cross was the sign of the Trinity; and that salvation came only through baptism. The seventh thesis repeated the blood libel, the false accusation, current in Europe since the Middle Ages, that Jewish teaching required the use of Christian blood. The rabbis rejected it, and it has no basis in Jewish law or practice. The Church tribunal gave no formal judgement on that thesis, but the charge contributed to the anti-Jewish violence of the period; Lorenzo Ganganelli, a Franciscan theologian of the Roman curia and later Pope Clement XIV, prepared a report in these years rejecting ritual murder accusations against the Jews of Poland.

Baptism and Imprisonment at Częstochowa§

After the disputation, several hundred Frankists were baptized in Lwów, and more followed in the next months, with members of the Polish nobility acting as godparents. Frank himself was baptized in Lwów in September 1759 and again, in a ceremonial confirmation, in Warsaw in November, with King Augustus III as godfather. Converts took Polish surnames, and some of their descendants later entered the Polish gentry and professions.

The Church soon learned that Frank's followers regarded him not merely as a convert but as a divine or messianic figure. In early 1760 he was arrested in Warsaw, examined by an ecclesiastical court and confined in the monastery fortress of Jasna Góra at Częstochowa, the shrine of the Black Madonna. His detention lasted thirteen years, but it was not strict; his family and followers settled nearby, visited him and recorded his teaching. He was released in 1772, when Russian troops took Częstochowa during the upheavals that followed the first partition of Poland.

Frank's Teachings: The Words of the Lord§

Frank's ideas survive mainly in a Polish collection of his sayings, Zbiór słów pańskich ("Collection of the Words of the Lord"), recorded by his followers, and in a chronicle of his life; an English selection was published by Harris Lenowitz as The Sayings of Yakov Frank (1978). The sayings are allusive, earthy and often deliberately shocking. They speak of a hidden "Big Brother", a higher divine power, and of "the Maiden", a feminine divine figure whom Frank came to associate both with the Shekhinah of the Zohar and with the Virgin Mary venerated at Częstochowa.

Frank taught that his followers must take up the "burden of silence", conceal their true faith, and pass through every religion and law on their way to a new life beyond them. Baptism, in this view, was a stage in a hidden journey toward "Esau" or "Edom", names that in Jewish tradition stood for Christian Rome. Gershom Scholem, in his essay "Redemption through Sin" (1937), read Frankism as the extreme of Sabbatean antinomianism, in which the violation of law itself became a religious act, and he saw in it a turning point toward Jewish secular modernity. Paweł Maciejko's The Mixed Multitude (2011) has stressed instead the movement's entanglement with Polish church politics, its use of Christian theology and the strategic character of its conversions. Frank's teaching drew on the Lurianic doctrine of descending into the realm of evil to redeem trapped sparks, described in Lurianic Kabbalah, but pushed it far beyond anything Luria's school had taught.

Brno, Offenbach and the Afterlife of Frankism§

After his release Frank moved to Brno (Brünn) in Moravia, where relatives of his wife lived and where he kept a small court of followers, drilled a guard in uniforms and attracted the curiosity of the imperial court in Vienna. In 1786 he moved to Offenbach am Main, near Frankfurt, where he lived in a castle in considerable state under the title of baron. He died there on 10 December 1791. His daughter Eva Frank, whom followers venerated as a divine figure, led the community until her death in 1816, after which it gradually dissolved.

Frankist families remained distinct for generations in Poland, Bohemia and Moravia, some within Catholic society and some, in Prague, within the Jewish community. The movement's memory shaped Jewish suspicion of messianic enthusiasm and of Kabbalah outside traditional limits, a climate that also affected the early Hasidic movement, which arose in the same region at the same time, and the Italian kabbalist Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto a generation earlier. In 2014 the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk retold the story in her novel The Books of Jacob, renewing public interest in a movement long treated as a footnote.

Frequently asked questions§

Who was Jacob Frank?§

Jacob Frank (c. 1726–1791) was a Jewish messianic leader from Podolia who claimed spiritual succession from Sabbatai Zevi. He led his followers through a public break with the rabbis, disputations sponsored by the Catholic Church and mass baptism in 1759.

What was the Lwów disputation?§

It was a public debate held in Lwów Cathedral in 1759 between Frank's followers and rabbis, organised by Church authorities. The Frankists defended seven theses, mostly Christian doctrines, and one that repeated the false blood libel, and afterwards many of them were baptized.

Why did the Frankists convert to Christianity?§

They had been excommunicated by the rabbis and sought the Church's protection, but their conversion also had a religious meaning for them. Frank taught that his followers must pass through other religions, concealing their true faith, on the way to messianic redemption.

What happened to the Frankists after Frank's death?§

His daughter Eva led the group in Offenbach until 1816. Afterwards Frankist families gradually merged into Polish Catholic society or into Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia.

Sources and further reading§