Emden’s description of the Lanckoronie incident suggests that Frank and his followers performed a rite based on Jewish rituals of the adulation of or the mystical marriage with the Torah. For instance, the festival of Simhat Torah, which concludes the annual cycle of the public reading of the Law, includes carrying the Torah scrolls around the synagogue accompanied by singing and dancing. When the scrolls are carried through the congregation, it is customary for men to touch the edge of their prayer shawl to them and then kiss the prayer shawl as a sign of respect and veneration. The Simhat Torah rite also includes a great deal of marriage symbolism: the person who completes the reading of the Torah is called hatan Torah— bridegroom of the Torah—and in some communities, he is placed, together with the scroll, under the bridal canopy.20 Also, kabbalistic tradition interpreted the festival as a marriage between Israel and the Torah.21
While these customs and interpretations belong to the perfectly normative Jewish practice, in Sabbatianism the mystical marriage with the Torah acquired a special significance: in 1648, Sabbatai Tsevi, having invited the most prominent rabbis to a banquet, erected a bridal canopy, had a Torah scroll brought in, and performed the marriage ceremony between himself and the Torah.22 He signed his letters “the bridegroom coming out from under the canopy, the husband of the dearly beloved Torah, who is the most beauteous and lovely lady” and was fond of singing his favorite song, the Spanish romanza “Meliselda,” while hugging a Torah scroll in his arms.23
Sabbatai was severely censured by the rabbis for his performances; still, the concept of the mystical marriage of a Jew and the Torah was deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition, and his action only stretched the boundaries of mainstream Judaism. The Lanckoronie rite, however, seemed to go far beyond Sabbatai’s stretching the boundaries of the acceptable: it turned the acceptable upside down. Sabbatai replaced the human bride with the Torah; participants in the Lanckoronie ritual replaced the Torah with a naked woman. In imitation of Simhat Torah observances, the wife of the Lanckoronie rabbi was adorned with typical ornaments of the Torah scroll (the Crown of the Law), seated under the canopy like a bride, and kissed and hugged in veneration. This first account of a Frankist rite encapsulated the relationship between Frankism and Sabbatianism sensu largo. While Sabbatai Tsevi—the “true” messiah—ascended to the status of the bridegroom of the true word of God, in Frankism the true word of God descended into palpably material female flesh.
The idea of systematically turning everything spiritual into material, voiced by Frank for the first time at the grave of Nathan of Gaza, was put into practice. Aside from its heavily transgressive nature, this trope also encompassed the seeds of Frankism’s romance with Christianity and anticipated its later acceptance of the concept of incarnation (as opposed to the deification expounded by the sect of Berukhiah) and the eventual appropriation of elements of Catholic Mariology. This sheds special light on Emden’s otherwise obscure remark that the ritual involved celebrations with the “bread and wine of the condemned.”
The phrase “wine of the condemned” (yein anushim) appears in the Hebrew Bible only once, in the prophet Amos’s description of Israel’s transgressions and its backsliding into idol worship (Amos 2:9). Taken in itself, Emden’s statement could have been understood as a merely formulaic emphasis on the transgressive and idolatrous character of the Frankist rite. Yet juxtaposed with other accounts, it might hint that the Lanckoronie ritual entailed some form of imitation (or parody) of the Christian Eucharist. This impression is strengthened by Abraham of Szarogród’s mention that participants in the ritual wore crosses on their necks. Whereas, as we have seen, Abraham’s account is unreliable when it comes to the date and the place of the event (and many other things as well), I am prepared to take his word on this particular detail: Kleyn’s Coram iudicio mentions that, after the discovery of the ritual, one of the anti-Sabbatian Jews “burned the cross”24— an act otherwise inexplicable—and Frankist sources confirm that Frank and his followers used crucifixes in other ceremonies.25
The Investigations
All the sources agree that non-Jews were involved in the Lanckoronie case from the very outset: on the request of their Jewish opponents, participants in the ritual were apprehended by magistrates and brought before the town’s governor. By the standards of eighteenth-century Poland, there was nothing unusual about this request: both the official Jewish leadership and individual Jews often called upon Polish authorities in internal Jewish matters, and sometimes they even had recourse to non-Jewish courts as an arbiter in conflicts among Jews.26 What happened next, however, was highly unusual: the case became a matter of interest for not only the town governor and the magistrates but for the Catholic ecclesiastical authorities.
Only four days after the Lanckoronie incident, on 1 February 1756, the bishop’s consistory court of the Kamieniec Podolski diocese demanded that the books confiscated in Lanckoronie be submitted to it for inspection; three days later, the court ordered the arrested participants in the ceremony to be brought to Kamieniec for interrogation. The directives of the court touched upon a moot legal issue: following Sigmundus III’s privilege of 1592, the Jews of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were granted full legal autonomy and were not subject to the jurisdiction of the Church unless they lived on Church-owned estates. While individual members of the clergy sometimes violated this privilege and encroached on the rights of the Jews, Church tribunals normally did not hear cases in which none of the parties was a Christian. Ostensibly, the intervention of the Kamieniec episcopal court in the Lanckoronie affair constituted an open—and unprecedented—breach of jurisdiction.
At the time of the Lanckoronie incident, the Kamieniec diocese was headed by Bishop Mikołaj of Dębowa Góra Dembowski (1680–1757). Jewish historiography has routinely regarded Dembowski as a rabid anti-Semite (as exemplified, for instance, by his 1750 edict expelling the Jews from the city of Kamieniec) and maintained that the bishop “heard” about the events in Lanckoronie, overstepped his prerogatives, violated the laws granting Jews legal autonomy, and forced them to appear before his court. What is certainly true about this scenario is that the bishop indeed was a rabid anti-Semite. However, the scholars who have propounded this line of argument never bothered to explain how exactly Dembowski—head of a diocese the size of half of France—could have “heard” about an incident involving a few Jews in a remote townlet only three days after it took place.
The official protocol of the consistory court’s investigation was published in Franciszek Kleyn’s Coram iudicio and was already known to the first scholars of Frankism. While Kleyn’s tortuous Latin is not free of ambiguities, the protocol is clear and unequivocal in this particular case: the episcopal court took up the case because it was explicitly and directly asked to do so by the Jewish authorities. Immediately after the arrest of the participants in the ritual by the Lanckoronie magistrates, the “elders of the Satanów and Lanckoronie synagogues” brought suit against them at the Kamieniec consistory for “deviating from the Mosaic Law and the ancient [Jewish] traditions.”27 This formulation of the accusation was fraught with consequences.
The canon law principle that the Catholic Church has supreme authority in the internal religious affairs of not only Christians but all peoples and all confessions has a long history. The popes claimed power to punish the Jews for deviations from Mosaic Law, exactly as they were empowered to punish pagans for transgressing natural law.28 Innocent IV (1243–54) already stated that “the pope can judge the Jews . . . if they invent heresies against their own law.”29 As Jeremy Cohen has noted, “Innocent’s line of thought quickly became the common opinion of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century canonists. It apparently guided the friars of the papal Inquisition. By the second half of the fourteenth century, the Dominican Inquisitor Nicholas Eymeric considered it a direct mandate to the Inquisition to defend genuine Judaism against internal heresy.”30 The functionaries of Bishop Dembowski’s court followed Eymeric’s position. They invoked the bull of Gregory XIII Antiqua Iudaeorum improbitas,31 giving the Inquisition jurisdiction over