LITMIR.BIZ

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Frank’s star rose quickly in Salonika. He established his own house of study, where he expounded the Zohar, and came to be known as Hakham Jacob (hakham, lit., “sage,” is a Sephardic equivalent to the title “rabbi” as employed by Ashkenazic Jews). His former teachers, Rabbi Mordechai and Rabbi Nahman, became his first pupils.⁹⁰ He debated the secrets of Torah with Jewish scholars in Salonika⁹¹ and tried to bolster his Sabbatian credentials by mimicking some of the actions of Sabbatai Tsevi: he threw himself into the sea, which did not want to take him and resuscitated him alive,⁹² and performed “strange deeds,” publicly violating the Shabbat⁹³ or—during a service in a synagogue—taking the Torah scroll, lowering his trousers, and sitting on it with his naked buttocks.⁹⁴ He also made a pilgrimage to the grave of Sabbatai’s prophet, Nathan of Gaza, in Skoplje.⁹⁵ At the grave of Nathan, he formulated his program for the first time: “The Ran [Rabbi Nathan of Gaza] ordered that after he died, a bag of earth should be placed in his coffin, thus giving a sign that he wished to convert the spiritual world into the world of flesh. But I tell you that already in this world, everything that is in spirit must be made into flesh like our flesh. Then everyone will see, as any visible thing is seen.”⁹⁶

      Frank’s meteoric rise did not go down well with some of the Dönmeh. Hints scattered in the Frankist dicta suggest that, in pretending to be the incarnation of Berukhiah, Frank became embroiled in a ferocious power struggle with other leaders of the Salonika Sabbatians.⁹⁷ “The messiah of Salonika,” about whom Frank had been told by Rabbi Mordechai on his nuptial night, was most likely Berukhiah’s son and designated successor.⁹⁸ Frank was told that he would not even be able to speak to him (he finally managed to do so, only once, after singing a song in Ladino in front of his window).⁹⁹ Many years later, during the investigation at the Warsaw consistory after his conversion to Christianity, Frank testified that he had demanded a miracle from the alleged messiah of Salonika, but the “messiah” could not deliver; in a conversation with his disciples, Frank pronounced him the Antichrist.¹⁰⁰

      Clearly, the sect of Berukhiah, the Koniosos, were loyal to the accepted line of succession and refused to recognize Frank—a foreigner and an upstart among the Turkish Sabbatian elites—as the vessel of their messiah’s soul. It seems that another faction of the Dönmeh, the Kavalieros, were more forthcoming: according to a Frankist source, they offered Frank fifty purses of gold if he would agree to lead them. Initially, Frank was inclined to agree; but during the night, he had a dream telling him that it was not his destiny to become a leader of the Dönmeh. He declined and remained steadfast in his refusal even after the Kavalieros raised the offer to a hundred purses of gold and a maiden from their group.¹⁰¹ Frank might really have had a vision advising him not to tie his future to the Kavalieros. He might also have realized that no matter how well he played his hand in Salonika, he would always remain a maverick among the Turkish Sabbatians. And perhaps, precisely at this time, he might have understood that another option had opened up.

      According to Dov Ber Birkenthal, sometime in the early 1750s, two emissaries from Podolia, the dayyan (rabbinic judge) of Strzyże Rabbi Mordechai Baharab and Morenu Ze’ev Wolf Benditsch of Nadworna, were sent by all the Podolian Sabbatians to welcome the messiah Berukhiah. They arrived in Salonika and found Berukhiah severely ill, lying on his deathbed. They witnessed how “Berukhiah passed away while revealing secrets of the Torah, but, before his holy soul departed, he anointed Hakham Morenu Rabbi Jacob Frank of Korolowka by placing two hands on his head. . . . And [Frank] stood up and left for Poland.”¹⁰²

      As it stands, Birkenthal’s story is inaccurate, at best. Berukhiah died in 1720, before Frank was even born; it is also highly unlikely that the Podolian Sabbatians did not know about his death some thirty years after it happened. However, Rabbi Jacob Emden confirms that a certain Wolf of Nadworna (accompanied by Frank’s uncle Moses Meir Kamenker!) indeed went to Salonika on a mission sometime before the eruption of the 1725 scandal concerning Eibeschütz.¹⁰³ Sabbatian sources, in turn, attest that throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, European sectarian Jewish groups often sent emissaries to the Ottoman Empire seeking to access the authentic esoteric traditions transmitted orally among the Turkish Sabbatians. I conjecture that Ber Birkenthal conflated the mission of the early 1720s, during which the Podolian Sabbatians learned about the death of Berukhiah, with another, which took place in the early 1750s, when emissaries from Podolia heard about the incarnation of Berukhiah’s soul in Jacob Frank (indeed, it is even possible that Ze’ev Wolf of Nadworna took part in both missions). Be that as it may, the news that Frank was a reincarnation of Berukhiah certainly began to spread in Podolia around 1753–54. The scene was thus prepared, and the return to Poland suddenly began to look like an attractive possibility.

      In May 1754, Jacob Frank, accompanied by two disciples, left Salonika. He spent some months in the Moldavian town of Romani, than in Czernowitz.¹⁰⁴ On 3 December 1755, he crossed the Dniester River and entered the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After arriving in Poland, Frank took a kind of tour through the principal centers of Sabbatianism in Podolia, retracing the steps of Hayyim Malakh.¹⁰⁵ He went first to Korolowka, and then to Jezierzany, Podhajce, and Busk, where his disciple Nahman was a rabbi. From Busk, Frank journeyed to Lwów. After a short stay in Lwów, Frank came to Rohatyn, where he established contacts with the Shorrs, probably the most important Sabbatian family in Podolia. The family descended from Rabbi Zalman Naftali Shorr, whose book Tevu’at Shorr was held in high esteem among rabbinic scholars,¹⁰⁶ and the Shorrs enjoyed a high status among all Jews. Elisha Shorr, the doyen of the family, was known as a principal leader of the Sabbatian movement in the region; his daughter Hayah was considered a prophetess.¹⁰⁷ Through marriages, the Shorrs were tied to Sabbatians in all the major towns of the province.¹⁰⁸ If Frank managed to win them over, his success in Podolia would be assured. Indeed, before long, Elisha’s three sons, Salomon, Nathan, and Leyb, accepted Frank as their leader. As Frank’s following was growing, Yehudah Leyb Krysa also joined his group. However, tension between the two never abated, and Krysa challenged Frank’s leadership on several occasions.

      Frank’s authority among the Podolian Sabbatians was based on the claim that he had inherited the mantle of Berukhiah and his transmission and dissemination of Turkish Sabbatian teachings and rites in Poland. Baruch me-Erets Yavan, the chief opponent of the Frankists during the early phase of the development of the movement, recorded a prayer introduced by Frank in Podolia; the prayer addressed Berukhiah as God of Israel incarnate and mentioned the abolishment of the torah de-beri’ah and its replacement by the torah de-atsilut.¹⁰⁹ In a letter to Emden accompanying the text of the prayer, Yavan claimed that Frank had spread Berukhiah’s teachings in Podolia, advocating abolition of the prohibition of incest and introducing idolatry in the proper sense of the term: worship of a deified human being.¹¹⁰

      Indeed, Frankist sources also confirm that during his first months in Poland, Frank recited the Ladino prayer Mi dio barach io (Berukhiah my God),¹¹¹ and his followers responded with a verse from the “credo” of the Dönmeh: “I believe with perfect faith in the faith of the God of truth . . . the three knots of faith that are one.”¹¹² On the basis of such accounts, Gershom Scholem argued that Frankism was “for generations nothing other than a particularly radical [off]shoot of the Dönmeh, only with a Catholic façade.”¹¹³ Scholem’s claim is only partly true: if Frank’s followers were, in some sense, “nothing other than a particularly radical offshoot of the Dönmeh,” this was not for generations but only before they acquired their “Catholic façade”: during the first two months of Frank’s activity in Podolia. Afterward, Frankism became something entirely different.

      Sabbatianism, particularly the Turkish variety, is the indispensable context for the study of Frankism. However, I believe that Frank consciously—and, to a large extent, successfully—attempted to discard his Sabbatian legacy and to separate himself from other Sabbatian groups, including (and perhaps particularly) the Dönmeh. Most scholars have tended to treat Frankism as an extension, branch, or late phase of Sabbatianism. Thus Simon Dubnow stated that “Jacob Frank was for the Polish-Russian Jews of the eighteenth century what Sabbatai Tsevi was for entire Jewry of the seventeenth.”¹¹⁴ Scholem argued that “there is no basic

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