Frankism's Androgynous Messiah

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 androgyny provided a potent symbolic resource for Frank, whose own theology revolved around the the perfection of mankind’s first parents, Adam and Eve, in the form of Frank himself and his daughter, Eva. 

Indeed, Frank’s vision of restoring the unity of Edenic perfection rests on a supersessionist claim: that he and his daughter are bringing an end to the dominion of Christ. In Frank’s schema, the coming age is a new dispensation in which the old order is rendered obsolete: 

"Jesus revealed himself as God to this world as long as Adam did not come in the shape of Adam [i.e., Frank]; and he [Adam] will be utterly Adam and his wife will come in the shape of Eve and they both will go round about and will come obliquely with wisdom." 

(That Frank’s daughter could be cast as his spiritual consort is understandably troubling to modern readers, though accusations of literal incest overstate the case. The relationship belongs to the symbolic and mythic register of Frankist theology rather than to the realm of biological kinship.) 

The exact nature of Frank’s messianic doctrine is elusive, but the messianic figure in his system is either the androgynous union of Frank and Eva, or Eva alone as the fully realized messiah: “How could you think the messiah would be a man?” Frank asks. “[T]he foundation is the Maiden: She will be the true messiah; she will lead all the worlds.”

Although accounts of Frankist sexual libertinism are often exaggerated — and although the movement did place unusual emphasis on the liberation of female sexuality — Frank’s daughter, revered as the movement’s redemptive Maiden, was nonetheless upheld as a model of purity and moral virtue. This stands at a considerable distance from Bataille’s Madame Edwarda — the brothel prostitute who declares herself divine while exposing her most intimate parts. By contrast, Eve Frank is presented as composed, decorous, almost virginal — in short, a lady, closer in symbolic function to the Virgin Mary of the Catholic tradition than to any figure of transgressive sexuality.