Jacob Frank and the Frankists

In 1666 Sabbatai Zevi, whom much of the Jewish world had hailed as the Messiah, converted to Islam before the Ottoman sultan. Most Jews concluded he had been a false messiah, but a minority kept faith, explaining his apostasy as a hidden stage of redemption. Small circles of believers survived in secret in the Ottoman Empire and in Poland for the next century, despite repeated condemnations by the rabbis. It was in this underground world that Jacob Frank grew up.

Frank was born in 1726 in Korolówka, a small town in Podolia, the south-eastern borderland of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. His father was reputedly connected to Sabbatean circles. As a young man he worked as a travelling merchant in the Ottoman Balkans, where he came into contact with Sabbatean believers, including the Dönme of Salonica, descendants of those who had followed Sabbatai into Islam. There he gained a reputation as a charismatic teacher, and he took the name Frank, a word used in the Ottoman world for Europeans.

In 1755 he returned to Podolia and quickly gathered followers among local Sabbateans, who saw him as a successor to Sabbatai and a bearer of divine power. Scholars often prefer the neutral term “new religious movement” for groups of this kind, since “cult” is a contested label; in the eighteenth century, Jewish authorities simply called them heretics.

The new movement soon clashed with the rabbis. In January 1756 Frank and a group of followers were caught at a private gathering in Lanckorona, a town in Podolia, and accused of a transgressive rite. Later that year a rabbinical assembly meeting at Brody excommunicated the sect. Facing persecution from their own communities, the Frankists turned to the Catholic bishop of Kamieniec, Mikołaj Dembowski, presenting themselves as “anti-Talmudists” who rejected the rabbinic tradition. In 1757 the bishop staged a public disputation in Kamieniec Podolski between them and the rabbis, declared the Frankists the winners and ordered copies of the Talmud to be burned.

Frank taught that the old law had lost its force and that the way to salvation lay through breaking it, a radical extension of Sabbatean ideas. His sayings, later collected as The Words of the Lord, describe a hidden God, the Good God, and a female divine figure, the Maiden or Lady, whom he associated with the Jewish idea of the divine presence. True believers, he said, had to follow him on a path through other religions, keeping their real faith secret. He called this the way to Esau, using the biblical brother of Jacob as a figure for Christian Europe.

After Bishop Dembowski’s sudden death in 1757 the Frankists again faced attacks, and Frank spent a period in Ottoman lands, where the sources say he embraced Islam. In 1759 his followers asked the Church for baptism. A second disputation was held in Lwów, at which the Frankists, to their lasting discredit, supported the false accusation of ritual murder against the Jews. That autumn hundreds of Frankists were baptised in Lwów, and in November Frank himself was baptised in Warsaw with King Augustus III as his godfather.

Women played an unusual part in Frank’s movement. His teaching gave a central place to a female divine figure, and his daughter Eva was raised as a sacred person, surrounded by attendants and treated with reverence by visiting believers. Historians such as Ada Rapoport-Albert have traced how earlier Sabbatean circles had already given women roles as prophets, and how Frank took this further. Contemporary opponents seized on these features as proof of immorality. Modern scholars read them instead as part of a radical theology in which the old order, including the old roles of men and women, was to be overturned before redemption.

The Church soon heard reports that Frank’s followers regarded him as a holy figure above Christ. In 1760 he was arrested and confined in the monastery fortress of Jasna Góra in Częstochowa, home of the famous icon of the Black Madonna. Far from breaking his authority, the imprisonment strengthened it. Followers settled nearby and visited him, and Frank identified the Madonna with the Lady of his teaching. He was released in the early 1770s, after Russian troops took Częstochowa during the first partition of Poland.

Frank moved first to Brno in Moravia and in 1786 to Offenbach am Main, near Frankfurt, where he lived in a castle as “Baron Frank”. He maintained a lavish court, with uniformed young followers who drilled like soldiers, funded largely by contributions from believers in Poland and elsewhere. Rumours circulated that his daughter Eva was a secret child of the Russian empress Catherine the Great, rumours the family did little to discourage. Frank died in Offenbach in December 1791.

Eva Frank, whom followers revered as the embodiment of the Lady, led the court after his death, together with her brothers. Contributions dwindled and debts mounted. When she died in 1816 the court came to an end, leaving little behind except unpaid bills and the curiosity of the townspeople.

In Poland, the baptised Frankists and their descendants gradually became part of Catholic society. A number were ennobled or entered the professions in Warsaw and other towns. For a few generations some families kept up private ties and married among themselves, but by the mid-nineteenth century most had lost any distinct religious identity. Rumours that this or that famous Pole had Frankist ancestors circulated for a long time; some are well founded, others are not, and such claims were often used by antisemitic writers to cast suspicion on assimilated families.

In Jewish memory the Frankist episode reinforced deep suspicion of messianic claims and of secret kabbalistic teaching. Rabbis such as Jacob Emden in Germany fought hard against Sabbatean influence, and the shock of the Lwów disputation, with Jews from within the community lending support to the blood libel, was long remembered.

Modern scholarship has taken the Frankists seriously. Gershom Scholem’s essay “Redemption Through Sin” treated them as an extreme product of Jewish messianism, and later historians such as Paweł Maciejko have placed them in the religious and political world of eighteenth-century Poland. The Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk retold their story in her novel The Books of Jacob (2014), which brought Frank to a wide new readership.