Provocations from a Libertine Counter-World: Jacob Frank and/or the Marquis de Sade

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 readers. Please take care of your emotional well‑being and proceed only if you feel prepared for these topics. 

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Provocations from a Libertine Counter-World: Jacob Frank and/or the Marquis de 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.