Frankism's Androgynous Messiah Though Jacob Frank’s engagement with Jewish mystical literature was ambivalent, he appears to have drawn on a central motif of the Zohar. There, every soul is said to descend as a single, unified entity before being split into male and female upon entering the world, reunited only in marriage when (says the Zohar) “they again constitute one body and one soul, forming as it were the right and left of one individual.” This myth of primordial andro

Into the Field of Edom: Poland and the Frankist Imagination   For three millennia the lands of Israel and Judea have stood at the heart of Jewish national imagination. They are the terrain of biblical kings, the stage on which the Judeans confronted Rome, and the ground on which the modern State of Israel now stands. Everywhere else is spiritual and physical exile.  Against this backdrop, it is striking to discover that Poland, rather than Judea or Israel, held decisive signi

Between Messiah and Monster: A Brief Biography of Jacob Frank   Jacob Frank — born Jakub Lejbowicz in Podolia in 1726, then a province of Poland and now part of Ukraine — was the son of Leib Buchbinder and Rachel Hirschl. Through his father he inherited a link to the scandal‑ridden Sabbateans, the heterodox Jewish movement that continued to uphold the messianic claims of Sabbatai Zevi, the seventeenth‑century Ottoman rabbi, Kabbalist, and apostate whose doctrine of redemption

No God but the Gold Forged in the Furnace of Flesh: A Poem on Jacob Frank       Jakub Lejbowicz slithered east   Beneath a heretic’s curse.   A worm of rot, crowned in Ottoman dust,   He wore another man’s face —   Berukhiah reborn   Jacob Frank, Westerner of Podolia,   Messianic pretender.     In Salonica, blasphemy transmuted:   Sin kissed the breasts   Of someone else’s wife.   Torah pressed into palpable skin,   White fire turned utterly black.   Apostates writhed.   A th

Cometh the Lion    Cometh the Lion, cometh the hour.   On his head is my name; on his back is my power.   The time is narrow, and the world is wide   And the Lion comes now with a spear in his side.     Look how he bleeds; his flesh is a prize   For the cross-hearted hunter with blood in his eyes   (Brimming red in the heat of the noon)   And vowing to return by the light of the moon.     ‘Come follow me,’ the Lion commands,   ‘Or the hunter will come and hack off your hands.

Father O'Sinner   Father O’Sinner is not his name (not quite),   Though it should be and not O’Connor,   Which was the name bestowed by his stepdad,   Who drank and killed himself aged forty.   Here he lies this foggy midnight on the cradle   Of his drears and prayers. Faith does not   Fructify; it is dirty. On a mattress   Hard his rump   Swells, bruises   His core parts, the body revolts   Amidst all this blasting and mildew.     Life gone old and fat around the waist.    

“Stuck in this uneasy station, what else To do but to let these words I write (Knowing that you, Son of God, Will never write anything,...

Exile, or ignominy, or bonds, or pain   You must wait for courage or grace but fate Is stubborn. Waiting is very long, like exile, And is...

Contraction After the fusion of blood and tree, I descended, the voice of derision singing in my ears, past the wet-green eyes of my...