Academia.edu - Jacob Frank: A Study in Transgression Published on Academia.edu (DOC) Jacob Frank A Study in Transgression

Jacob Frank's Dreams of Profanation Many of the sayings in Jacob Frank's The Collection of the Words of the Lord take the form of dreams or visions — modes of speech that resist verification and refuse the binary of true and false. By casting revelation in this indeterminate register, Frank unsettles the epistemic and nomian boundaries that ordinarily separate the holy from the profane. If, as Carl Jung suggests, the unconscious might produce a dream “which proposes an irrati

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 signifi

Dark Matter: Jacob Frank and Georges Bataille Jacob Frank remains one of the most unsettling figures in the history of religious thought — not simply because of his antinomian theatrics or his deliberate profanations, but because his teachings articulate a vision of matter that resists both classical gnosticism and rationalist secular materialism. While the gnostic imagination traditionally casts the material world as a prison to be escaped, Frank inverts the schema: matter b

Trigger Warning This article examines the lives, writings, and legacies of Jacob Frank and the Marquis de Sade, including their engagements with sexual transgression, religious antinomianism, coercive practices, and violence. It discusses explicit themes such as sexual exploitation, ritualized power dynamics, and philosophical justifications of cruelty within historical contexts. The analysis is scholarly, but the material may be disturbing or overwhelming for some r

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 tho

Academia.edu: Wittgenstein's Willing Subject: How the Happy Life Is the Only Right Life [complete] Published on Academia.edu (DOC) Wittgenstein's Willing Subject: How the Happy Life Is the Only Right Life [complete]

Ludwig Wittgenstein Part 1 - Wittgenstein's Willing Subject: How the Happy Life Is the Only Right Life Published on Academia.edu (DOC) Wittgenstein’s Willing Subject How the Happy Life Is the Only Right Life Part One

A Vagabond Jew from Lithuania: A Poem on Salomon Maimon It took a vagabond Jew from Lithuania to strike the wick that Königsberg’s sage had hid and let go out in dark’s old age. Said the synagogue’s rude son: Let there be German with a Yiddish tongue, and from his restless mind concepts flowed like fire onto the page. With quid facti? and quid juris? as his lamps, he lit the lecture halls and shadowed nooks of Europe with flame incandescent, a

A Strange Hatching Into Eden fly the winged elohim screeching like owls, scattering dark mist and whirling about, their wings flapping shadows over baffled beasts below. The first of the elohim selects an animal on two legs & calls it Adam. Into the brainstem a long needle of DNA is inserted. The second elohim draws out a rib from a gash in Adam’s side. From that rib a female of girlish proportions is fashioned & named Eve. Grinning like an ape,

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.’

Above Heroic (Though in Secret Done) 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 walked in steps, solitary. The Lord’s world lies before you, but all is war. A bulldog ant bites its tail just as the tail stings The head, multiplying curses. Earth tacks to your toes, dust sticks to your face. Strong light beats down; it burns your forehead As in wandering mazes you roam. At dusk

Expecting nothing but laughter and applause, Adam hears on all sides sounds of derision, Harshly sibilant. All were transformed to serpents

Under a Spinozan Lens: Israel, Zionism and Bob Dylan’s ‘Neighborhood Bully’ [Article originally published on academia.edu for Holocaust Memorial Day / Yom HaShoah on 27th January 2024.] Thus this prejudice became a superstition, and fixed its roots deeply in the mind — Spinoza, Ethics [1] A little forty years ago — October 1983 — singer-songwriter Bob Dylan unveiled his Infidels album, which featured the ironically-titled ‘Neighborhood Bully’, a song depicting the trials of t

"The temple curtain made of some heavy purple fabric, with its curious pleats ..."

When We Were There When we were there in the crooked hell of that scarlet and black room, the world was a useless idol broken and beyond repair. But now we are here, in the cosy tabernacle of this bright asylum, the world seems a god who brings the sun into being. The location of that old place, is hidden by a heavy veil, like the one in the temple; the boundary between heaven and earth.

Photo credit: Rachel Posner / Posner Family Estate, courtesy of Shulamit Mansbach, Haifa, Israel / yadvashem.org The Light in That Place “Our holiday has been turned into a day of mourning” -- Chaim A. Kaplan By lamp and by oil, we hunger the hours as the dusk's frost settles in. There is still time: the freight cars are not ready yet, but we are, we are ready, on this night. Sit, sit down while I set down these makeshift wicks, these meager latkes, this hanukkiah of ours, g

Adam’s Descent Adam is a dry rib but sinews are stretched, tissue and flesh fashioned. Man of Spirit, embodied. Descending the mountain with Moses, he falls with the rain, is blown on the wind; regales the tall and the small with poems and legends of Jonah; comforts the bloodied lamb, the gulping netted fish; descends further, into engines, turbines, hot factories, occupies the rolling paper mills; goes down, down into data banks, the microchips; enters gates, integrates cir