The Worst Jew Ever is Having a Moment

So what are we to make of Jacob Frank, this enigmatic leader who betrayed his former coreligionists, caused of book burnings, sex scandals and mass conversions, and went to jail? What a guy!

Jacob Frank is arguably the worst Jew in history. He certainly belongs up (down) there in the pantheon, along with Bernard Madoff, Sabbatai Tzvi (the false messiah who preceded Frank), and assorted despots like Herod and King Ahab, and perhaps Na'ama, the Mother of all Demons (though not her associate, Lilith). Throw in 20th century nominees, mobster Mayer Lansky and the "semi-fascist" racist, Meir Kahane. But Jacob Frank (1726-1790) just might top them all.

How bad was he? Well, read this description of one of what was generously called Frank's "sacred orgies."  This is the stuff they didn't teach you in Hebrew School. 

The sexual adventures reached the ears of the senior rabbis of Poland, after the Frankists held a rough sexual ceremony described by David Kahana in his “Book of Darkness”: on the 26th day of the month of Shvat in 1756, on a market day in the town of Lanzkron, Podolia, the people of the Frank sect gathered in the morning in an inn of one of their own, closed all the windows in secrecy, and took the rabbi’s wife, a beautiful and promiscuous woman, sat her down naked in a palanquin, placed a Torah crown upon her head and danced around her, playing instruments, falling on her and kissing her, while calling her “mezuzah”.

But now he is having a moment. Two books about him have just come out. One is a novel written nearly a decade ago by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, a Nobel Prize winner for literature. It's called The Books of Jacob, and I read it this summer - all one thousand pages of it. That was my July. The New York Times called it "an overwhelming novel," and I concur. It is astounding how the author was able to bridge Polish Catholic cultural sensibilities with a rabbinic-level knowledge of Judaism (she is not Jewish). Read this interview, where she talks at length about Frank and this novel.

The story of Jacob Frank is in some ways more a Polish-Ukrainian story than a Jewish one, but Jewish scholars have taken a keen interest in him, beginning with Gershom Scholem (whose study of the Sabbatean movement can be read here, excerpted in Commentary Magazine). Another book has come out, penned by the spiritualist and scholar Jay Michaelson, called The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth. Rather than piling on more condemnation of his excommunicated subject, Michaelson describes Frank as an "original and prescient figure at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, reason and myth, Kabbalah and Western Esotericism." Everything that followed the tumult of Frank's 18th century, including the Haskalah, Hasidism, Zionism, Socialism, Secular Yiddishism - you name it - owes something to Jacob Frank, according to Michaelson, which hardly makes him rogues gallery material. 

So what are we to make of this enigmatic, charismatic leader, whose followers stayed with him after he converted both to Islam and Christianity (a mean trick), who betrayed his former coreligionists by legitimizing accusations of Blood Libel, who was the cause of mass Talmud burnings, who was the focus of sex scandals and, as noted, orgies, who led thousands of Jews to be baptized and who ultimately went to prison. But otherwise, what a guy!

I've always been a fan of Michaelson - and being a wee-bit of a heretic myself, I'm sympathetic to the antinomian thread that he has always brought to his writing. I also see how both Frank and Sabbatai Tzvi were much more mainstream than we are led to believe by those who tried to write them out of Jewish history. It is a great source of embarrassment that so many Jews were sucked into these movements. People followed their wacky ideas because they were desperate and looking for strong, charismatic leadership. 

Frank's imprisonment lasted thirteen years, yet it only increased his influence by lending him the aura of martyrdom. Below are a couple of passages from Tokarczuk's book, describing Sabbatai Tzvi's conversion and imprisonment, that attest to the cognitive dissonance that happens when your savior is incarcerated and all their lies exposed. The analogies to hard-core Trumpism are hard to ignore, especially following the upsurge of QAnon conspiracy-mongering.  As the pressure of Trump investigations increased, so did the delusions. The true disciple never succumbs to doubt - or to facts.  

From The Books of Jacob: 

Was it really prison? Blessings in disguise? Not really converted to Islam? it's truly  embarrassing to think that Jews were so duped by Sabbatai Tzvi, and then again just a generation later by Jacob Frank. But unless we look closely at why it happened then, we are more likely to succumb again. Leon Festinger's classic treatise "When Prophecy Fails", demonstrates that no matter when or where, people have devised ingenious ways to overcome cognitive dissonance when their messiah turns out to be a fraud.  In that work, the social psychologist infiltrates a doomsday cult to see what would happen when the group’s apocalyptic beliefs are disconfirmed. Rather than dissolving the cult and dispersing, the group doubles down on their diet of crazy and find ways to continue to believe.

We see it now - I mean aside from the cult of Trump. The Jewish world has enough personality cults to keep us quite busy (cough, cough Bibi), most especially the dangerous strain of ethno-nationalism inspired by Meir Kahane and Baruch Goldstein, now propagated by their apostle, Itamar Ben Gvir. He will bring his ultra right wing party into the Israeli government if Netanyahu's bloc gains enough seats to gain a majority in the Knesset after the November 1 vote. So when people say that democracy is on the ballot this November, they could just as easily be talking about Israel as America.

You can learn more about Michaelson's revisionist approach to Jacob Frank in this recent Judaism Unbound" podcast and in this essay from 2007, Why I Study Sabbateanism, where he calls Jacob Frank...

... a manipulative, vulgar cult leader who converted both to Islam and Catholicism, may have had a long-term incestuous relationship with his daughter, and was regarded by thousands of 18th-century Jews as a messianic figure. Not a nice guy - but, to me, a fascinating one, precisely because his was a theology of transgression in which no answers were assured. Indeed, in which answers were the enemy. If you see a boundary, cross it - that's the view, because it's what God did, mixing Godself with the impurity of the material world. Where does that end up? Some scholars call it nihilism - but it's a nihilism that greatly influenced Frank's contemporary, R. Israel Baal Shem Tov, and which, astonishingly, paved the way for the Haskalah (Enlightenment) in some communities, assimilation in others.

You may quibble about whether such a destructive figure deserves to have a moment as Frank is having now, but there is no question that he was influential. And his impact, ironically for someone who burned so many bridges, has been to bridge Polish-Ukrainian and Jewish cultures. Tokarczuk's vivid descriptions of places like Lviv and Podolia, the heart of Jewish Ukraine, are particularly poignant now. The same boulevards and squares where Talmudic volumes were burned back then have recently been set aflame again by Putin's missiles. But now, the lines separating former antagonists, Jews and Ukrainians, have been blurred. These are the boundaries that were meant to be crossed, unlike the red lines of Jewish practice transgressed by Jacob Frank. Ukraine's current Prime Minister is Jewish - and he is an epochal, charismatic leader, but his following is not a personality cult. Zelensky is the bridge, and Tokarczuk, much more than Frank, laid the foundation.

The Books of Jacob is a book well worth reading, if you've got a spare month, with either a thesaurus or a rabbi close at hand. Otherwise, I'd wait for the movie. Though if you are looking for a challenge, go for it. The book continually fascinates (for instance, the pagination runs backwards, as if the book is meant to be read from right to left, like a sacred Hebrew scripture), This is not a book to take to the beach. It's too heavy, in every respect. But if you do manage to tackle this Nobel Prize winning novel, you'll come away with a far deeper appreciation of just how infinitely layered Jewish civilization is, and how susceptible we all are to the influence of very bad people (cough cough).

And at this moment in history, that's reason enough to read about people like Jacob Frank, and to celebrate a Polish writer's Nobel Prize.