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