Jacob Frank: A Study in Transgression

Jacob Frank: A Study in Transgression

“Only to wipe out all laws, all religions, did I come to Poland, and it is my desire to bring life forth into this world.” 

— Jacob Frank, The Collection of the Words of the Lord, §130

“It was said to Abraham: Go, go from his country, and then to you too it was said: That means that you should go forth from those rituals which you have kept in the Jewish estate — like fasting, mourning, cursing, pretense, one beating another —  for all those things are from the side of death.”

— Jacob Frank, The Collection of the Words of the Lord, §977

Jacob Frank: A Study in Transgression

Messiah or Monster?

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.

The Libertine Counter-World of Frank and Sade

Shmuel Feiner, in The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe, characterizes antinomian heretic Jacob Frank as “the Jewish version of the ignominious French aristocrat the Marquis Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade, the infamous libertine of eighteenth-century Europe.” They were contemporaries, but de Sade and Frank almost certainly never met. Yet as Feiner notes, the Frankists “fit into the libertine world that existed on the margins” of European society. Sade’s milieu was a “counter-world that consisted entirely of the devastation of everything sacred,” a realm defined by “vitriolic anticlerical defiance of priests and nuns.” Sade’s novels teem with blasphemy, murder, and explicit sexual depictions, extending to incest, rape, sodomy, flagellation, torture, coprophilia, necrophilia, and the abuse of children. These acts unfold alongside sustained reflections on religion, politics, and philosophy, producing a jarring fusion of atrocity and intellectual inquiry. One of his works is, fittingly, titled Philosophy in the Boudoir.

While Sade’s novels have gained a certain cachet in contemporary left‑wing philosophical circles, it is easy to lose sight of just how debauched Sade himself was. Of his many scandals, two are especially illustrative and worth recalling here. Within months of marrying into the respected Montreuil family, Sade hired a young woman named Jeanne Testard, whom he confined and subjected to a series of coercive, blasphemous humiliations, threatening her life when she resisted and misusing sacred objects (a crucifix and chalice) in his self‑gratifying displays. Five years later, a widow named Rose Keller endured a similarly harrowing ordeal: locked in a room, forced to undress under threat of death, and subjected to physical abuse and intimidation. In both cases, Sade’s violence, coercion, and threats reveal the stark gulf between the philosophical libertinism of his writings and the brutality of his actions.

In a different register but with a comparable spirit of provocation, Frank taunted the rabbinical establishment, derided Jewish tradition, scandalized the synagogues and spread anti-Talmud propaganda. The most famous of incidents, though tame by Sade’s standards, was the Lanckoronie scandal, which took place in early 1756, and was said to involve Frank and the Sabbateans engaging in a strange rite with a naked woman.

This contemporary account comes from the prominent German rabbi Jacob Emden:

And they took the wife of the local rabbi (who also belonged to the sect), a woman beautiful but lacking discretion,’ they undressed her naked and placed the Crown of the Torah on her head, sat her under the canopy like a bride, and danced a dance around her. They celebrated with bread and wine of the condemned, and they pleased their hearts with music like King David . . . and in dance they fell upon her kissing her, and called her ‘mezuzah’, as if they were kissing a mezuzah.

The Lanckoronie affair, which shocked the Jewish community, was likely amplified by Frank’s adversaries — Rabbi Emden chief among them. Yet whatever its precise contours, the episode thrust Frank into public view and inaugurated his long career as a formidable irritant to the norms and authorities of mainstream Jewish life.

Just as Sade’s novels interweave explicit descriptions of transgressive sexuality with discourses on religion and philosophy, Frank’s major work, The Collection of the Words of the Lord, juxtapose serious theological speculation, midrashic exercises, biblical references and parabolic stories, alongside coarse provocations — boasts of lowering his trousers before the Torah and juvenile claims about his own body:

In my youth my member was so lively that when one time a youth wanted to climb a tree I erected it for him to stand on, and he climbed up on it. Also in the coldest water it would still stand. And when I went among the maidens I had to tie it up, because without that, then it would stick out the opening of my garment.

What bound Frank and Sade together was not merely an appetite for shock, but a deeper compulsion to pursue the outermost edges of transgression itself. Libertinism, after all, requires prohibitions and boundaries — if only to revel in their violation.

As Timo Airaksinen observes in The Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade:

Sadean heroes need normative structures to create excitement by destroying them; but since such elements are absent from nature, they must create barriers and pretend that they are real. […] The moral rhetoric they use provides them with the moral pivot around which they can arrange their transgressive plans.

The transgressive pursuit resonates with Michel Foucault’s notion of the limit-experience — an act or encounter that approaches the edge of life itself, marked by intensity and apparent impossibility; “the point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or the extreme.” A limit‑experience can rupture the self’s internal coherence, rendering an event unintelligible once it is severed from inherited or socially sanctioned values. Such a rupture may precipitate a profound crisis or, conversely, inaugurate a radical reconfiguration of consciousness. Yet nothing of this sort occurs in Sade or in Sade’s protagonists: no crisis, no refiguration, no shattering of the self that yields a new form of subjectivity. Frank, too, shows little evidence of undergoing a transformative shift (other than his ever-changing religious doctrine). It is more plausible that some of his followers experienced confusion and a moral crisis — one that may have exceeded even the upheavals familiar to those raised within the Sabbatean fold — particularly after the irreparable break with the Jewish community that followed their conversion to Catholicism.

Yet the differences between Frank and Sade are just as striking. Sade and his novels are ferociously anti‑clerical, animated by an explicit hatred of religious authority, particularly the Catholic Church. Frank, by contrast, is not anti‑religious at all. Though he rejected forms of spirituality severed from the body and frequently collided with the conventional piety of Judaism, his fundamental orientation toward the sacred remained intact. Even if one allows that his alleged sexual transgressions were amplified by hostile witnesses, Frank’s violations were symbolic, ritualistic, and embedded within a theological framework. Sade’s, by contrast, were radically anarchic — acts of cruelty, excess, and unrestrained desire that sought no ritual meaning and acknowledged no higher order. For Frank and his circle, the erotic vision of a naked woman beneath a sacred canopy was not an obscenity but a radical reimagining of the traditional Jewish image of the Torah as bride. Frank simply pushed the metaphor to its outer limit: by literalizing it through the medium of human sexuality, a woman’s exposed body became, in his eyes, the Torah made flesh.

Though Sade and Frank inhabited the same libertine counter‑world — one that challenged the established pieties of Catholicism and Judaism and unsettled the moral frameworks of European society — they occupied fundamentally different positions within it. Sade advanced an amoral, violent, and often cruel doctrine that pushed transgression toward a nihilistic abyss. In his universe, the libertine pursues pleasure in ways that corrode any durable moral or social order, their provocations escalating through mutual complicity and invariably at the expense of victims — real or imagined, and most often female — who are subjected to imprisonment, coercion, humiliation, and violence.

Frank, by contrast, resisted this trajectory, articulating a more structured vision that remained, however paradoxically, tethered to the religious values he sought to overturn. His counter‑world coheres as a community oriented not toward sexual gratification but toward a reconfigured ideal of religious freedom. Indeed, by grounding itself in a communal ethos, the Frankist movement counteracted the centrifugal forces that drive Sadean libertinism toward moral dissolution. Though the entanglement of religious and political power in the Catholic territories — and the ever‑shifting tensions of Jewish–Christian relations — left Frank’s community existentially exposed, its shared norms and aspirations formed a moral scaffolding that let transgression circulate without plunging into the abyssal violence that saturates Sade’s world.

The Dark Matter of Frank and Bataille

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 becomes the privileged site of revelation, the very medium through which the divine must be sought. His is a counter‑gnostic materialism, one that refuses transcendence not out of atheistic disenchantment but out of a conviction that truth resides in the low, the impure, and the abject.

Frank’s theology — if that word can still be used — reconfigures the relation between matter and spirit by collapsing their hierarchy and insisting on the primacy of the material. In doing so, Frank anticipates Bataille’s ideas on gnosticism and “base matter,” which locates the sacred not beyond the world but in its most degraded and excessive forms. By tracing the contours of Frank’s counter‑gnosticism, we can begin to see how his movement forged a radical alternative to traditional religious metaphysics — a materialism that is neither reductive nor disenchanted, but ecstatic, transgressive, and often profoundly destabilizing.

Before turning to Frank’s and Bataille’s overlapping notion of “base matter” and their shared gnostic materialism, it is worth underscoring the extent to which materialism functions as a foundational premise within Frank’s thought. Frank’s utterances display, as Jay Michaelson rightly points out, a thoroughgoing materialism, quite at odds with the mystical strain of Judaism espoused by messianic precursor Sabbatai Zevi. For Frank, otherworldly doctrine has no place — worse, it has no power  — in the material world.

Michaelson is surely right when he states that “there is no place here for the metaphorical and the spiritual: only the material is true.” Religious claims predicated upon non-material explanations, such as spiritual or metaphysical doctrines, are critiqued, even ridiculed and parodied. Appeals to spiritual causes and laws — prayer, ritual, dietary rules — amount to little more than magical thinking.

Not that Frank is opposed to magic; rather, for him magic — what he calls a “deed of union” through which he is joined with the divine (perhaps by way of a sexual rite) — is legitimate only when grounded in material conditions and producing material, empirical effects, such as wealth, power, transformation. Life is a material business; direction of travel is from the spiritual to the material and any religion that preaches otherwise is bogus. As Frank says, “I only look at what God does on the earth.”

Beyond the more conventional pursuit of power and riches (“gold”), the Frankist quest aims — according to Michaelson — at nothing less than the transformation of Frank and his followers into “semi‑immortal beings who will ride in gilded chariots, own huge mansions, and eat gourmet meals.” Indeed, there is a telling passage in Frank’s writings that illustrates his belief that sensual delights outweigh conventional piety:

I will furnish my court and conduct it in gala dress. I will give all sorts of parties with food and drink. I will have my own musicians, theatre with its actors, and all will dance and rejoice in common, young and old alike, and that which stands will be fulfilled: As they stood to play before Saul, so the spirit of God rested upon him, for my God rests nowhere else but only where rejoicing and gaiety reside.

For Frank, power and glory were to be tasted in this world, as sensual and material as any bodily pleasure. Beauty, purification, rejuvenation, immortality, and even height, were promised — gifts that outstripped the conventional Judeo‑Christian hope for resurrection. Freedom from divine judgement and an end to religious authority were also on offer to the faithful. Michaelson observes that the Frankist drive toward wealth, health, perfection, and eternal life mirrors, in striking ways, the alchemical quest to transmute matter:

Like the degrees of masonic initiation, this staged quest depends on the knowledge of certain magical secrets and is entirely materialistic; the world operates according to materialistic (if secret) principles, and one should use the knowledge of those principles to one’s personal aggrandizement.

In effect, religion becomes the raw substance for a transformative ascent into worldly force. Michaelson’s insistence on “knowledge” and “secrecy” is apt, for these terms summon the memory of early gnosticism and its promise of salvation through hidden truths. But Frankism flips the schema: a counter‑gnosticism in which the material eclipses the spiritual, the mirror‑image of the gnostic hierarchy it echoes. In this sense, Frank’s teaching becomes a doctrine of gnostic materialism.

It is apt at this point to bring in Bataille. Gnostic materialism forms one of several crucial point of contact between Frank and Bataille. Bataille’s most explicit engagement with gnosticism appears in his essay “Base Materialism and Gnosticism.” His anti-theological reading is deliberately idiosyncratic, stripping gnosticism of the metaphysical idealism that marked its first- and second‑century formulations. Recasting gnosticism as a celebration of the very materiality it once sought to transcend, Bataille elevates matter’s darkness, sovereignty, and excess. Matter is not passive, not a degraded emanation of spirit, but an eternal and creative force, an active principle that is “endowed with its own “eternal autonomous existence as darkness (which would not be simply the absence of light).”

At first glance, the notion of gnostic materialism appears paradoxical because it fuses two seemingly antithetical orientations: the gnostic impulse toward hidden knowledge, transcendence, and liberation from the material world, and the materialist insistence that all phenomena — including consciousness, spirit, and revelation — are reducible to physical processes. Gnosticism traditionally posits that the material world is a prison or illusion, crafted by a demiurgic power and that salvation lies in secret knowledge (gnosis) which reveals the true, immaterial source of being. Frank’s gnosticism rejects immaterial essences; it is a knowledge of this world grounded in the claim that the decisive things in life — power and longevity — arise solely from matter in motion.

And just as gnosticism seeks the triumph of light (spirit) over darkness (matter), Frank told his followers that he would lead them into the darkness. Only in the deepest darkness — what might be termed a dazzling darkness – where the holy and the unholy intermix, does a “far greater brightness” reveal itself.

By insisting that salvation can be achieved only through an antinomian immersion in the very substance of existence, Frank’s gnostic materialism — grounded in the claim that it is the spiritual, not the material, that requires transcendence — destabilizes conventional distinctions between the sacred and the profane, turning everything of the spirit back into flesh.

And by declaring that “it is my desire to bring life forth into this world,” Frank stands in stark opposition to the quasi-gnostic Christ of John’s Gospel, whose profound assertion that “my kingdom is not of this world” is neatly illustrative of the barely-concealed gnostic subtext of the Johannine literature.

Frank’s gnostic freedom — grounded as it is in worldly things — is inseparable from his antinomianism. Frank promises to accomplish what neither the biblical patriarch Jacob nor Christ could: to free the world from all laws and statutes and to draw the flow of life from the upper world into this one — what Robert Akers describes as “the unbridled flow of life which liberates man because its force and power are not subject to any law.” It is only when the world is freed from laws and statutes — but without jettisoning the world itself — will the good God reveal himself. In this sense, Frank finds his closest kin in Abraham, the forefather of the three main monotheistic religions:

It was said to Abraham: Go, go from his country, and then to you too it was said: That means that you should go forth from those rituals which you have kept in the Jewish estate — like fasting, mourning, cursing, pretense, one beating another —  for all those things are from the side of death.

Frank’s libertinism, however steeped in material appetite, remained religious at its core; like all antinomian impulses, it depended on the very moral law it sought to defy. Indeed, it is only through the suspension — indeed, the overturning — of the Law that the messianic truth latent within Judaism can finally emerge. The Judaism of the “future” (“in the end the Laws will be forgotten by the Israelites; but you were chosen for the future”) envisions a community no longer bound primarily by halakhic obligation. In its place arises a quasi‑secular horizon defined by land, wealth, power, and territorial sovereignty, intertwined with quasi‑magical promises of rejuvenation, heightened stature, and even the conquest of death itself. This future Judaism is not a refinement of the Law but its displacement: a transformation of religious destiny into material, political, and bodily transcendence.

By repudiating Jewish law, Frank proclaimed that moral and social redemption could only be achieved through the annihilation of normative structures that encompassed, but weren’t limited to, sex. Yet he insisted that he did not violate positive commandments at all; the laws he shattered were, in his view, merely negative. For Frank, “all religions, all laws, all books […] came forth from the side of death.” Yet this radical overturning was not devoid of form; it was cloaked in ritual and symbol, even when those rituals appeared as parodic inversions of conventional religious practice.

Frank’s so‑called “strange deeds” — frequently alluded to in his writings — were presented as gestures of liberation from established religious authority (“I came to Poland only to nullify all the laws and all the religions”). Only through such transgressive gestures, he taught, could the Frankists enter the divine and carry Jewish history toward what they understood as its climatic moment. Frank’s antinomianism foreshadows Bataille’s conception of “sovereignty,” which finds expression in negative, even nihilistic, acts of freedom that are stripped of utility.

For Bataille, anyone who eludes the explanatory frameworks of society or the state may be regarded as a “sovereign” individual (“evil is not transgression, it is transgression condemned”). Sovereignty is expressed in the breaking of taboos, in eroticism, and in the enjoyment of transgressive acts emptied of instrumental purpose.

It is here that Bataille locates the sacred. If Frank pulls down the sacred into the world, Bataille’s sense of the sacred unfolds not along a vertical, transcendent axis but starts and ends on a low-lying horizontal plane — the domain of human sexuality, even when that domain takes shape in the dim, compromised spaces of brothels, clandestine rooms, and voyeuristic encounters. (No wonder, then, that Bataille once remarked that “my true church is a whorehouse — the only one that gives me true satisfaction,” a declaration that could easily have been uttered by any number of Sade’s fictional characters.)

For Frank, sex could not be collapsed into sensation, nor into transgression emptied of purpose. His libertinage is largely untouched by pointless violence or sex; it remains anchored in a religious cosmos — far from Bataille’s bleak disenchantment. His eroticism remains anchored in a religious cosmos — far from Bataille’s bleak disenchantment. Moreover, Frank’s project is utilitarian in the sense that the material things of the world are subordinated to the goal of achieving them. Besides, Bataille has no use for Frankist promises of gilded carriages, rejuvenation, or purification.

Insofar as sacred is conceived in immanent, bodily terms, immanent to material processes, materiality itself harbours the sacred from the outset. Put another way, the sacred erupts from matter’s excess, its violence, its baseness, its own self-wasting limits. For Frank, though, the sacred is conferred upon material form by bringing the former into the latter via a deed of union between the upper world and this one.

If for Frank the spiritual is useless and ineffective without the material, for Bataille it is the sacred that is useless — but that uselessness is precisely its value. Indeed, the sacred is sacred because it is useless, without telos. Its ecstasy lies precisely in in this refusal of ends, in the deliberate squandering of energy, pleasure, and meaning, even when such waste culminates in exhaustion. Indeed, the yearning for  expenditure without return, without purification, without the fantasy of recuperation, is at the crux of Bataille’s antinomianism: the law to be violated is not Jewish Halakhic law (as it is in Frank) but the utilitarian logic of productivity and procreation. Bataille’s libertinism is no messianic overturning; it is an existential plunge into an unstructured erotic intensity, a confrontation with the taboo of non‑productivity itself.

(Interestingly, Bataille sounds a note of caution about the perils of such uselessness, which can easily shade into depletion. The erotic — especially what he calls “erotic licentiousness” — can culminate in “depression, disgust and the inability to continue.” In this respect, Bataille diverges from Sade, whose characters seem to possess an inexhaustible appetite for violation, whether erotic or violent. It differs too from Frank who makes several references in his writings to ‘completion’ rather than ‘depletion’ — the completion of his work, the completion of the biblical patriarch Jacob’s task to further the cause of Judaism.)

Frank’s insistence on the material over the spiritual — and his repeated use of “base,” “debase,” and the broader motif of “abasement”— anticipates, however obliquely, Bataille’s emphasis on the base and the abject. This emphasis is central to Bataille’s effort to purge materialism of any relation to otherworldly spirit or Platonic form, stripping it of every residue of idealism and insisting on matter freed from all ontological hierarchies, including the Marxist hierarchy of matter over spirit.

Though Frank is less extreme — bringing the upper world down to earth and mingling it with matter rather than abolishing it altogether — he nevertheless insists on the need to dig down into matter, into the muck and mayhem of the world, including the main three monotheistic religions, with all its “teaching, laws, religions and bad ways.” The reward for this descent is not spirit but a special kind of knowledge (Das) that confers good health and immortal life (as well as a  convenient sideline of material gains). Frank himself was not exempt from the process — “I also descended on your account for I was told: Go down! I must enter Das” — the difference being that he is the trailblazer:

And so I must take on myself all the pains and plagues and completely bear the troubles until thereafter the good God renews and rejuvenates my years like the eagle rejuvenates, I will be powerful and healthy forever. So all people from whom I want to make people, then it is necessary for them to bring them down low and humblest, thereafter to raise them up tall and highest, as it stands with you: I will refine and test them.

When Frank told his followers “base things about Bucharest, about dealings with women,” he is not confessing vulgarity; he is reframing the profane as spiritually operative. For Frank, lowness, abasement, and debasement are necessary stages in a cosmic process of transformation. Salvation, we are told, must emerge from “a low and base place.” Frank repeatedly insists that only from the lowest point can infinite rising begin: “[F]rom among the lowest of the low, as we are, our abasement down to the very bottom, it will be so that our rise may go on forever upwards.” Similarly, the ‘divine feminine’ is described as descending into the abyss so that her rise will be “without foundation and never cease.”

If debasement functions as a spiritual technique, a ritual unmaking of social, moral, and metaphysical order, then the base emerges as a metaphysical site, a place where hidden knowledge resides. And yet for Frank, base matter remains something to be passed through, a necessary descent on the way to a higher restoration. In this respect he differs sharply from Bataille, for whom base matter is not a stage but an end: a sovereign zone where the sacred already inheres, requiring no sanctification from above and no teleology of ascent. Bataille refuses any movement beyond the low; the base is not a threshold but the very terrain of the sacred itself.

The juxtaposition of Frank and Bataille reveals two distinct yet convergent attempts to rethink the relation between matter, the sacred, and the transgressive. Frank’s counter‑gnostic materialism, grounded in a radical inversion of Jewish metaphysics, transforms the material world into the exclusive arena of revelation and redemption. Bataille, by contrast, strips gnosticism of its metaphysical scaffolding altogether, locating the sacred not in a redeemed materiality but in matter’s own formless excess. What unites them is a shared refusal of transcendence and a commitment to the low — to the base, the abject, the impure — as the privileged site of truth.

Yet the divergences between them are equally instructive. Frank’s descent into matter is ultimately teleological: a necessary passage toward restoration, sovereignty, and the fulfilment of a messianic horizon. Bataille’s descent has no such end; it is a sovereign expenditure without return, a plunge into the useless and the unproductive that resists every promise of completion. Frank sacralises the material by drawing the upper world downward; Bataille discovers the sacred already immanent in matter’s darkness, requiring no sanctification and permitting no ascent. If Frank’s antinomianism seeks to overturn the Law to inaugurate a transformed world, Bataille’s seeks to escape the very logic of utility that underwrites both law and redemption.

Reading Frank through Bataille — and Bataille through Frank — thus illuminates a broader, more unsettling genealogy of materialist mysticism. Both thinkers expose the instability of the boundary between the sacred and the profane, revealing how easily the spiritual collapses into the material and how insistently matter resists being subordinated to any higher principle. Their respective visions of “base matter” challenge not only classical gnosticism but also modern secular materialisms that imagine matter as inert, passive, or disenchanted. In their hands, matter becomes a site of danger, revelation, and transformation — a domain in which the sacred is neither transcendent nor absent, but immanent, volatile, and profoundly disruptive.

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 (not to mention the West Bank) now stands. Everywhere else has been 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 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.” 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 was gnosis or knowledge (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.” 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 law:

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.

The Androgynous Messiah

Though 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.

Dreaming and Profanation

Many of the sayings in 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 irrational and therefore unexpected third thing as a solution,” then the content of The Collection functions precisely as that third term: a form of utterance that slips beyond the either/or of truth and falsity, of sanctity and transgression.

Jewish scholar Elliot R Wolfson asks, ‘What does it mean to cast one’s teachings in this way?’:

The appeal to the oneiric indicates an epistemic challenge to the customary distinction between truth and untruth — the logical underpinning of our sensory and cognitive experiences in the world as well as the axiological foothold for the values that inform our socio-political communities—since within the parameters of the dreamscape, the image is true to the extent that it is untrue and untrue to the extent that it is true. By anchoring his anti-Mosaic duty to undermine the nomian binary of holy and unholy, Frank conveys that the nature of the message that he was destined to communicate bears the structure of the parable that both reveals and conceals the literal truth, indeed, it reveals by concealing and conceals by revealing. To acknowledge the inherently parabolic nature of his words means, therefore, that Frank was cognizant of the dissembling character of his comportment.

If the true/untrue binary is played out in the form of a vision or dream, it is Frank’s profanation that exposes the undecidability of what is holy or unholy. Profanation acts as a transgressive signifier that cuts across the holy/unholy binary, undoing its privative logic, erasing the distinction, and occupying both sides simultaneously.

In effect, Frank’s profane anticipates not only Bataille’s base materialism, but also Serres’s ‘parasite’, and Derrida’s dethroning of logocentrism.

Frank’s profanation even prefigures an essay written in 1931 by Theodor W. Adorno, in which the German theorist argues that religious ideas (“theological content”) must pass through “the realm of the secular, the profane” (by which he meant ethics, culture, politics, philosophy) if they are to avoid irrelevance on one side and nihilism on the other. Adorno reiterated this idea many years later, saying that the profane tends to secularize the sacred “to the point that only as secularized does the [sacred] endure.” In short, the sacred can endure only if it is made profane.

At times the path to profanation was puerile, as when he claimed to have sat naked upon a Torah scroll, and he once asked why, if God had constructed a dwelling for His spiritual light, He had not also built Himself a “privy” — a toilet:

When Rabbi Mardocheusz told me of the 10 Sephiroth and drew them on paper, I asked him, What is this? He answered me, They are houses. I asked him, And where is there here a privy? For when they build houses don’t they always allocate a place for a bathroom first of all? When they build houses in Bucharest they dig a very deep hole in the ground first and then they spill quicksilver there to bore through the earth as deep as an abyss. Then they build a privy on top of it; and only then do they put up a house.

Yet Frank’s profanation of the sacred could also boast a rough common sense. For instance, Frank says it is a dog — not an angel — that protects the infant Jacob from evil. He even claimed to have cut up a Torah scroll to make shoes for his friends. As historian Simon Schama observes, “Jacob Frank’s style was to turn matters from the poetic to the physical.”

Indeed, Frank claimed to be astonished that anyone would pray to go to heaven when nobody has ever seen it “with their own eyes.” “It might be that they ask and pray by a place that is the worst of all,” he adds caustically. One might also add another of Frank‘s utterances: “I do not look to heaven, that help might come to me from there, but I only look at what God does on the earth in this world.”

Conclusion

There is no question that Jacob Frank was an agitator who unsettled central and eastern European Jewish communities by rejecting halakhic authority and orchestrating the most sweeping apostasy in Jewish history. In Frank’s vision, redemption required nothing less than a revolt against the entire inherited order. By repudiating Jewish law and insisting that “all religions, all laws, all books … came forth from the side of death,” he cast established pieties as impediments to spiritual renewal. His career exposes the volatile convergence of mystical speculation, political game-playing, religious authority, and the human hunger for immediacy with the divine at a moment when some of the old certainties of faith and allegiance were beginning to fray.

By styling himself at once messiah, heretic, and political actor, Frank transformed the structures of Sabbatean antinomianism into a radical experiment that could not survive long beyond his own presence. Although the movement persisted under the leadership of his daughter, her death in poverty left many of the Frankists with little choice but to assimilate into normative Polish‑Catholic society.

For the duration of its existence, however, the Frankist movement demonstrates how transgression can function not merely as theological provocation but as a method for dissolving inherited norms and reconfiguring bonds of loyalty. Yet it also reveals the limits of such transgression: its drift toward authoritarianism, its dependence on Frank’s monstrous charisma, its secrecy and coercion, and its ultimate failure to generate a sustainable alternative to the religious and political orders it sought to overturn.

Frank’s legacy forces a reconsideration of the boundary between religious reform and political seduction, between liberation and manipulation. Being neither Jewish nor Catholic — nor even coherently Judeo‑Catholic — Frankism becomes a lens through which to examine why shifts in religious allegiance, undertaken without support from either the community one leaves or the community one joins, and dependent on a leader whose own views are ever‑shifting, are destined to collapse, leaving the host traditions largely untouched. Though an aberration on the margins of Jewish and Catholic history, Frank’s impact is largely confined to a partial reshaping of Polish culture. The Frankists themselves illuminate a deeper ambivalence at the heart of modernity: the desire to break free from inherited structures and the simultaneous vulnerability to new forms of domination that such freedom entails.

Ultimately, the study of Jacob Frank is not merely an inquiry into a singular, transgressive figure but an exploration of the conditions that make such figures possible. His movement invites reflection on the seductions of radicalism and the impulse to turn the world upside down. Whatever judgment we pass on Frank, his life and career mark an extraordinary — if brief — episode in the history of the Jews of Poland and central Europe.

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