Into the Field of Edom: Poland and the Frankist Imagination

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 significance for Frank and the Frankists. Yet perhaps the surprise is only superficial. For despite the pogroms, the ghetto walls, and the periodic eruptions of violence that would one day culminate in the Nazi genocide, Poland had long been a tolerant refuge. From the emergence of the Kingdom of Poland in the eleventh century through to the seventeenth, it offered conditions under which Jewish life could flourish to an extent unmatched elsewhere in Europe. By the mid‑sixteenth century, it is estimated that as many as three‑quarters of the world’s Jews lived within its borders. 

This relative openness did not last unchallenged. The Reformation and Counter‑Reformation brought new pressures, and the old equilibrium began to fray. Yet the memory — and the demography — of those centuries of Polish Jewish life remained foundational, shaping the world in which Frank and his followers imagined their own radical possibilities. 

In Frank’s imagination — formed long before the twentieth-century catastrophe that would forever shape the Jewish world — Poland was a new promised land, the site of redemption where the diaspora would be transfigured. Poland was not merely a symbolic horizon but a concrete political vision: it was to become the seat of a semi‑autonomous Frankist enclave, a space where his followers could enact the new order he proclaimed:  

"If you will be worthy to come to Poland, to Esau, then the whole world will recognize [it] and say that this is a deed of God’s hands, and only at that time will they begin to mention the name of God, and at that time the living God himself will rejoice.^" 

The reference to “Esau” is meaningful. It invokes a particular bible story in which Esau, elder son of Isaac, was usurped by his brother Jacob. The latter, having secured Isaac’s blessing through deception, provoked Esau’s fury and fled to Haran. When the brothers finally meet again two decades later, they reconcile, yet their destinies ultimately diverge: Jacob settles in Israel, while Esau establishes himself in the land of Edom. 

Biblically, Jacob (later given the name ‘Israel’) becomes the ancestor of the Israelites, while Esau is remembered as the progenitor of the Edomites. Rabbinic midrash, however, reinterprets Esau as the symbolic forefather of Rome, thereby identifying the Edomites with the Romans. This association was reinforced by the despotic figure of King Herod — an Edomite who ruled the Jews on behalf of the despised Roman Empire. 

Frank radicalizes this lineage further, extending Esau’s domain to Catholic Europe, and above all to Poland. Because Esau is described as a “man of the field,” and because the very name “Poland” means “field dwellers,” the country acquired a potent symbolic resonance for him: 

"When Jacob was wrestling with the angel, the angel asked him, Jacob, where are you going? He answered him, Into the field of Edom, that is to Poland.^" 

Seeing himself as the living embodiment of Jacob — Israel reborn — Frank believed he was destined to complete the long‑deferred reconciliation between Jacob and Esau, between Judaism and Catholic Europe. In this vision, Poland became not merely a geographical refuge but the stage upon which the final act of Judeo-Christian salvation history would unfold. Accordingly, Frank’s Jewish and Sabbatean adherents were commanded to take on the religion of Edom, that is, the Catholic faith. 

Of course, the Frankist belief in a messiah who must be either male and female, or female alone, made a religion that venerated womanhood an essential part of Frank’s design. Judaism and Islam, though necessary stepping-stones, had to be succeeded by a religion where a woman (i.e., the Virgin Mary) was held in high regard. Pawel Maciejko writes that “Frank’s rejection of normative Judaism was rooted precisely in the failure of the Jewish religion to truly appreciate the female facet of the Godhead and the messianic dimensions of femininity.”⁴ In this respect, Catholicism’s Marian devotion was, for Frank, the closest available analogue to his own theological vision, and thus as good as he could hope to find. In other words, the Church had to be part of the messianic program. 

Yet even Catholicism was a stepping stone, albeit a transformational one. What Frank ultimately sought was Edom, the semi-mythical Poland, where gnosis or knowledge of God will be revealed: 

"When we shall be worthy to come to Esau, that is to Edom, then the world will begin to mention the name of God and they will say that this is all a deed of God, but till now not only the name but even the by-name of God has not been mentioned, and the whole world has no knowledge of him at all; but as soon as God will be revealed to the world, the whole earth will come out from under [its] curse and will be changed into gold, and it will daily produce fruit and various foods; at that time there will be neither cold nor hot, only temperate season.^" 

Poland, then, was the terrain Frank designated as the place where the monotheistic religions would reach their culmination in a state of gnosis — a gnosis meant to free its adherents from the structures and strictures of established faith: “Only to wipe out all laws, all religions, did I come to Poland,” Frank proclaimed, “[for] it is my desire to bring life forth into this world.” This is what he had in mind when he insisted that his followers were “chosen for the future.” For Frank, the path to redemption required a radical traversal: overcoming Jewish ritual law, passing through the Abrahamic religions, and ultimately arriving at a higher state of gnosis (das or da’at in Hebrew):

“Pray God that you may be worthy to enter that Das for which we hope. [...] At that time you will be worthy to enter to Esau and you will have eternal joy. This will please me very much when, with my own eyes, I will see Abraham, the Patriarch, sitting beside the least of the Company.^" 

Those who stand in the light of gnosis are “no longer subject to defect, to sickness, or to death, because no evil dwells there.”¹⁰ In this radiance, the good God bestows gifts not as distant eschatological promises but as tangible blessings meant for this life: exquisite foods, robust health, towering stature, and splendid chariots. These are not metaphors for a world to come but signs that the redeemed condition erupts within the present order, overturning the constraints of ordinary existence. 

Given what we know about Frank’s religious transgressions and his hatred of laws, religious books, and empty rituals, one may be surprised to learn that Frank’s famed antinomianism does not preclude ethical living. In fact, one had to “possess one degree of virtue higher than other people” to ascend beyond the laws of conventional pieties: 

"Whoever wants to be attached to the living God must possess purity together with all good attributes before God and man and must, as much as he can, do good towards everyone, and likewise he must possess steadfastness, so that when any difficulty or a test should come upon him he must be stable of spirit and turn neither to the right nor the left. If he does that, the good God will strengthen him and will enlighten his heart and he will reach the level of a true man, either in foresight or in knowledge, and he will come forth from the darkness in which the children of Adam lie, being worthy to attain the Life of all lives.^" 

That the attainment of gnosis is tied to virtue, while moral laws are relegated to the realm of religion and dismissed as spiritually useless (“from the side of death”), is one of the characteristic paradoxes of Frankist doctrine. In its mythic register, the god of law belongs to this world, issuing commandments that bind and constrain; the good God, who gives no moral prescriptions, can be approached only through the cultivation of virtue. Yet this ascent is not universally available. It is only in Poland — this strange, semi-mythical, providential land — that the path to the good God opens. In a sense, Poland becomes the hinge between worlds: a territory where exile passes into vocation, where Judaism and Catholicism combine into a new mode of faith that ultimately leads to gnosis, riches and freedom.