Jacob Frank has long been vilified in Jewish historiography. Gershom Scholem, for example, labeled him “one of the most frightening phenomena in the whole of Jewish history,” a person of “tremendous if satanic power.” Frankism, however, has fared differently, viewed as distasteful by Scholem and others yet at the same time as a vehicle of emancipation and the harbinger of Jewish modernity, its nihilism credited with paving the way for the Haskalah, Reform Judaism, secular intellectualism, skepticism, women's sexual liberation, and revolutionary Jewish politics. Considering the upheavals that Frank and Frankism have caused—whether through their public sexual transgressions, open defiance of rabbinic authorities, collaboration with the Church, or accusations of ritual murder against Jews—and the lengths Frankist descendants went to whitewash the deeds of their ancestors, it is not surprising that few have ventured to give an unbiased account. But less excusable is the lack of distinction between the ideas of Frank and all expressions of Frankism, the presentation of Frank's theology and Frankist religion in decontextualized fashion, and ahistorical approaches that obliterate radical changes over time.
In light of these common approaches, The Mixed Multitude is a major scholarly achievement. Thoroughly versed in two centuries of writing on the man, the movement, and the religion, author Paweł Maciejko, while not hesitant to place Frank in the context of eighteenth-century charlatanism, reserves his displays of emotion for criticizing earlier scholarly approaches to the topic, rather than attacking Frank or exaggerating the significance of Frankism for modern Judaism and Jewish politics. More significant, Maciejko meticulously presents Frank's ideas and Frankist practices as they emerged and developed, based on an exhaustive reading and interpretation of all relevant sources, many not previously explored by scholars of Frankism. The book is arranged chronologically according to the major episodes in Frank's life, and the narrative of each episode is based on the Frankist and anti-Frankist polemics and literature of the period as well as observations by Polish, papal, Russian, Czech, or German participants and commentators. What emerges is a careful and nuanced reevaluation of Frank and Frankism that criticizes received wisdom in every one of its chapters.
One major revisionist argument of the book is that although in the first stages of his activity Frank carried on in the Sabbatean tradition of prophets, he quickly discarded his Sabbatean legacy and separated himself from other Sabbatean groups. Although in 1755 Frank returned to Podolia from Salonika as an emissary of the Dönme and anointed successor (or even reincarnation) of Berukhiah, Maciejko argues that within a very short time after his arrival he began to create something distinct from Sabbateanism. This was evident during the Lanckoronie affair of 1756, when Frank went a step further than Shabbetai Ẓevi—who performed a marriage ceremony between himself and the Torah—by replacing the Torah with a naked woman. Yet to Maciejko, what Jews found most disturbing was that the incident involved the use of crucifixes. This was the first intimation that Frankism would not only surpass Sabbateanism in its excesses, causing an unprecedentedly brutal rabbinic response, but become a new religion, separate from Judaism.
In 1756–57 the Frankists presented themselves as contra-Talmudists, an autonomous group opposed to the power of the rabbis, yet a sect within Judaism, and were determined the victors in the Kamieniec disputation with the rabbis. Frankism was legally recognized as a legitimate form of Judaism, allowed to be freely professed and practiced. Maciejko argues that the contra-Talmudists tried to remain within Judaism, but rabbinic opposition ultimately made them reject Judaism. According to the author, Frank's syncretism, bringing together Christianity and Judaism in a new religion, was seen as a theological and political threat, causing Frankists to be considered not only outside of normative Judaism but outside of the Jewish people as well. They were labeled “the mixed multitude”—the Egyptians who joined the Israelites during the Exodus and did not stem from the patriarchs. Frankists labeled their rabbinic opponents with the same phrase, claiming that the followers of Frank were the true Jews. Public rabbinic insistence that Sabbateanism was immoral also forced the Frankists to disavow Sabbateanism before the Church; and after the disputations they had to reinvent themselves into a distinct religious group.
Maciejko argues that Frankists presented themselves as a group branching away from Judaism for the first time in 1759 when Frank requested a disputation in Lwów with the rabbis who had engaged in what Maciejko considers the first concerted effort to eradicate Sabbateanism. The author shows how rather than being a dupe of the Church, as he has been presented, Frank was actively seeking revenge, and thus initiated charges that Jews had committed ritual murder. After this, the break with Jews was irreversible. The condition under which the Lwów disputation was conducted was the conversion of the Frankists, and Maciejko estimates that around three thousand converted in total. He also notes that this was the only period when Frankism became a social phenomenon and a mass messianic movement, for only in those months did Frank voice messianic pretensions.
Although the Frankists would become Christian, Frank requested that they be allowed to retain a distinct group identity and self-government, and be given land for a semi-independent colony of Christian Sabbateans. This project, the author argues, must be seen not merely as a reconstruction of Jewish national and economic existence, as Scholem claimed, but within the messianic context of earlier Sabbatean teachings that Poland would be the starting place of redemption, where the Shekhinah would begin to rise from the exile.
Dreams of public autonomy within Christianity were dashed as fellow converts began denouncing Frank. He was arrested and, after his detention, abandoned by the majority of those who converted with him. He dropped his messianic pretensions during the investigation in 1760, after which he was sent to Częstochowa, whose Shrine of Our Lady was the most important center of the Polish Marian cult. Maciejko argues that during his imprisonment Frank developed his highly original teachings, in which he combined elements of Judaism, kabbalah, and Sabbatean theosophy with Catholic Mariology. Central was the argument that the Shekhinah had transformed into Mary, an element of the Godhead, and she was actually present in the icon at the shrine. Frank declared that the true incarnation of the divine maiden and the true Messiah was his daughter, Eve, around whom a cult was introduced. “How could you think that the messiah would be a man?” he asked (178).
After his release from prison in 1773 Frank went to Brünn in Moravia, a region with a long tradition of Sabbateanism. As Maciejko explains, Frank not only fit the bill of eighteenth-century charlatans, but fascination in him also partook of philo-Semites' fascination with kabbalah and esoterica. In this new phase, Frank used the mythology of secret societies to develop relations with Freemasons. Frankism was increasingly seen through the prism of Masonic obsessions: in the 1770s and 1780s Frankism was defined more as a secret society than a religion.
Frankism entered a final phase when it splintered at the end of the eighteenth century. Frank and Eve settled in Offenbach in 1786. In line with Weber's theory of the routinization of charisma, after Frank's death in 1790 leadership passed to his children and closest associates; a canon of his teachings was instituted; his biography was given canonical form; and membership and recruitment were regulated. Maciejko argues that Frank was assigned a messianic role, yet most of his theological innovations were discarded and his followers returned to an earlier, less radical form of Sabbateanism, shorn of its original Frankist tenets.
Maciejko is careful to distinguish the Frankism of Offenbach, which was seen more as a secret political organization than a religious sect, from that expressed in Warsaw and Prague. Frankism in Warsaw was marked by a religious dimension, which eventually evaporated. Frankism in Prague, which emerged among an older, independent strand of Sabbateans, appropriated Frank for its own ends, Maciejko argues, returning to traditional Sabbatean discourse. The main borrowing from Frankism, the liberation of the feminine principle, was converted from a religious into a political program to improve the social position of women and promote their sexual liberation.
Maciejko at times overstates the break between Frank and Sabbateanism, depicting the latter as being far more conservative and causing less upheaval than it actually did. Later chapters of the book would have benefited from a comparison with the Dönme. Nevertheless, this is the single best study written to date of Frank and Frankism in all their complexity and will be required reading for any student or scholar of early modern Jewish history and Christian-Jewish relations, kabbalah, and Jewish messianism.
