Between Messiah and Monster: A Brief Biography of Jacob Frank

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 through sin was crystallized in his notorious antinomian blessing: “Blessed are You, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who permits the forbidden.”   

Outed as members of the Sabbatean sect, the family were forced to relocate — which they did, to Ottoman Moldavia-Wallachia, where Jacob came of age as a merchant, trading in textiles and precious stones. Among the Turks he became known as Jacob Frank, meaning ‘Frank the Westerner’.  

Although Frank married into the Dönmeh branch of the Sabbatians in 1752 — Dönmeh were crypto-Jews who outwardly embraced Islam while secretly preserving their Jewish faith and Kabbalistic traditions — he soon came to regard them as lacking in ‘wisdom’, a term he used to denote, above all, an inability to acquire wealth and power. 

Setting off for Ottoman Salonika, Frank posed as the reincarnation of the Sabbatian leader Berukhiah Russo and became known as Jacob the Sage. This claim of reincarnation spread among Sabbatians in his native Podolia, and by 1755 Frank had returned to his birthplace where his preaching earned him a devoted following.  

Defying the rabbinic establishment, Jacob Frank repudiated Talmudic Judaism and proclaimed himself the messianic successor to Sabbatai Zevi. (Like Zevi, Frank appears to have converted to Islam at some point, likely around 1756, and he encouraged several of his followers to do the same during that period. Yet the depth of his commitment is difficult to gauge, especially since he adopted Catholicism shortly thereafter.) His excommunication from the normative Jewish community — along with that of his followers — was soon followed by two extraordinary acts of apostasy. First, the Frankists (though not necessarily Frank himself) publicly endorsed the infamous and scurrilously antisemitic blood libel to win favour with the Catholic Church in Poland. Second, Frank led roughly a thousand adherents in a mass conversion at Lwów Cathedral — though he himself was baptized elsewhere — after securing assurances that his followers would be permitted to retain certain Jewish customs. 

How genuine this mass conversion was is difficult to assess. The same ambiguity surrounds the Frankists’ weaponization of the blood libel. Both may well have been calculated acts of political expediency, particularly given that some figures within the rabbinic establishment had urged Church authorities to have the Frankists burnt at the stake. That the Church ultimately sided with the Frankists underscores how profoundly the rabbinic leadership had misjudged its own political leverage.  

Unsurprisingly, suspicions regarding the authenticity of Frank’s conversion — further inflamed by denunciations from some disenchanted adherents — soon compelled Catholic authorities to place him under confinement in the fortress‑monastery of Czestochowa, where he remained for the following thirteen years. 

Yet several sources suggest that ‘confinement’ may overstate the case: he appears to have lived in the monastery rather than being formally imprisoned, a reading supported by the fact that his wife and children resided with him for some of the time. In either case, his confinement seems to have been relatively comfortable. 

Notably, Czestochowa was a hub of Marian devotion, renowned for the Black Madonna painting that drew thousands of pilgrims. The sacred mystery of the Virgin Mary became pivotal to Frank’s evolving religious vision, a mystery he ultimately transferred onto his daughter Eve. In Frank’s teaching, the Virgin — whom he claimed embodied the Shekhinah, the divine feminine of Kabbalah — became incarnate in Eve herself, whom he proclaimed the messiah in female form. The notion that the messiah was — or could be — a woman stands as one of the most radical features of Frankism. Among contemporaneous movements, only the millenarian Christian sect known as the Shakers advanced a comparable doctrine. 

After the Russian takeover of the region, Frank was released in 1773. He rejoined his followers in the Habsburg lands of Moravia, but soon departed for Offenbach in Germany following a dispute with Emperor Joseph II. Around this period, many of Frank’s sayings were gathered into what became known as The Collection of the Words of the Lord — a compendium of manuscripts containing stories, gnomic pronouncements, dreams, visions, and observations, by turns acerbic and obscene. 

Frank died in Offenbach in 1791, after which Eve assumed leadership of the movement, guiding it until her own death — impoverished — in 1816. The Frankist movement persisted for many decades in various forms. Some adherents remained within the Jewish community, while many others assimilated into the Polish Catholic establishment, often practising Judaism covertly while outwardly conforming to Catholic norms. In some measure, Frankism anticipates the Hebrew Catholic movement, whose adherents are Jewish converts to Catholicism who preserve elements of Jewish identity and Mosaic tradition while remaining fully united with Rome. 

Frankism left a long shadow in Polish and Jewish history, shaping debates about ethnicity, assimilation, heresy, and modernity. Suspicion toward the Frankists lingered in the Polish imagination for generations, producing an antisemitic backlash from some ultra‑nationalists and reactionary Catholics. On the other hand, Paweł Maciejko, in concluding his major historical study of Frankism, argues that the movement compelled both Judaism and Christianity to reconsider not only the boundary between them, but also the internal heterogeneity of each tradition. 

It forced the Jews to redefine the understanding of their own religion and their self-perception vis-a-vis the Christians. It changed the way that Judaism was seen among the Christians by demonstrating the internal heterogeneity and complexity of the Jewish world. Whether seen as an aberration, a movement of social unrest, or a theological innovation, it affected Jewish-Christian relations and revamped the mutual attitudes and perceptions of everyone concerned. 

Though Frankism possesses many compelling features and remains significant both historically and theologically, Frank himself is far less appealing. Critics frequently portray him as a sinister, deviant, and manipulative figure who demanded absolute obedience — and there is some justification for this view. Frank ruled his followers through a volatile fusion of seductive charisma, authoritarian discipline, ritualized humiliation, and radical antinomian practice. The mass conversion to Catholicism increased their dependence on him, as conversion isolated them from the Jewish community. Following his release from the monastery, Frank and his family lived in opulent style in Offenbach, supported financially by his followers. His self‑anointed messianism intertwined with calculated psychological domination, forging a community at once devoted and meticulously controlled. Frank’s mercurial nature and his ever-changing doctrine, meant his followers were never on safe theological ground. Harris Lenowitz, in his introduction to his translation of The Collection of the Words, has this to say:  

Throughout his life Frank demonstrated an ambiguous identity, ready to be, speak, relate, perform, wear whatever was expedient. In this first instance of shape-changing he betrayed his own followers; but his behavior was supported by a theology that stressed the importance and rectitude of such an act.

Ultimately, however, it is the allegations of sexual exploitation, the accusations of incest, and the invocation — whether by Frank himself or by his followers — of the blood libel in a disputation against ‘Talmudic’ Jews that most profoundly compromises any charitable reading of his character. Frank’s behaviour demonstrates how religious transgression can drift toward the exploitative and the monstrous. This raises a broader problem: whether a movement emerging from the trauma of the post‑Sabbatean collapse can resist reproducing trauma within its own ranks. 

For better or worse, Frank stands as the terminal mutation of the Sabbatean heresy — the final, fevered convulsion of a messianic movement already shaped by paradox and transgression. He is the figure who drives Sabbateanism to its logical limit: if redemption is found in the breaking of boundaries, then no boundary can remain intact. If the sacred is the very site of transgression, then the messiah must be the breaker of worlds. In this light, Frank emerges as a mythic emblem of humanity’s destructive impulse to shatter every norm even while insisting it is the path to freedom. Perhaps that is why Frank continues to fascinate: he embodies the dangerous proposition that liberation may require nothing less than the world turned inside out.