This work makes extensive use of archive and manuscript material housed in libraries and archives in Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, the U.K., the Vatican, and Israel. I shall discuss the majority of the relevant sources directly in the main body of the book. Two preliminary remarks, however, are in order.
The most important internal Frankist documents are two Polish manuscripts: the chronicle of the sect, Rozmaite adnotacyie, przypadki, czynnońci, i anektody Pańskie (Various notes, occurrences, activities, and anecdotes of the Lord), hereafter RA in the notes and “the Frankist chronicle” in the main body of the text; and the collection of Frank’s dicta, Zbiór Słów Pańskich (The collection of the words of the Lord), hereafter ZSP or “the dicta.”1 In 1984, Hillel Levine published a transcription of the Polish manuscript of the Frankist chronicle accompanied by a Hebrew translation and commentary.2 This was followed by a publication of the Polish original of the same text by Jan Doktór in 1996.3 A year later, the same scholar published an edition of Frank’s dicta titled Księga Słów Pańskich: Ezoteryczne wykłady Jakuba Franka (The book of the words of the Lord: Esoteric teachings of Jacob Frank).4
Unfortunately, Levine’s and Doktór’s editions are flawed in some respects. Levine’s reading of the manuscript of the chronicle is erroneous in numerous instances, which consequently led to misunderstandings and inaccuracies in the Hebrew translation and commentary. Most of the misreadings of the text of RA have been corrected by the publication of the Polish original by Jan Doktór. Yet Doktór’s reading of the manuscripts in the larger work, ZSP, is often also debatable. Moreover, his editorial policy was to make the texts available to a broad readership. The archaic spelling and punctuation have been modernized. Three different recensions of the manuscript have been compiled into one, which resulted not only in effacing differences between diverse versions but also in a confusion regarding the numbering of the fragments. In consequence, Doktór’s edition of ZSP greatly facilitates access to Frankist documents but does not allow for a more in-depth analysis.
Accordingly, when quoting RA, I rely on Doktór’s edition, occasionally correcting minor errors of transcription. When discussing ZSP, I decided to quote directly from the manuscripts (Jagiellonian Library, Kraków, Mss. 6968 and 6869; łopaciński Library, Lublin, Ms. 2118). After much hesitation, I decided not to use the yet unpublished English translations of Harris Lenowitz (The Collection of the Words of the Lord, available online).
One of the most important anti-Frankist sources is the account of the beginnings of Frank’s sect composed by Dov Ber Birkenthal of Bolechów (1723-1805). A respected wine merchant with numerous connections at the wojewoda court in Lwów, as well as links to foreign trade centers, he is sometimes considered the first Jew to master the Polish literary language. During the 1759 Lwów disputation between the Frankists and the rabbis of Podolia, Ber served as a secretary and an interpreter of the speaker of the rabbis, Rabbi Hayyim Cohen Rapaport, and was largely responsible for the composition of the anti-Frankist case. His account of the Frankist affair, titled Divre binah, was composed in 1800.
The autograph was discovered in Tarnopol during World War I by Abraham Brawer, who published sections of it first as “Makor Ivri hadash le-toledot Frank ve-si’ato,” Ha-Shilo’ah 33 (1918) to 38 (1929) and later incorporated them into his book Galitsiah vi-Yehudehah (Jerusalem, 1956). As Birkenthal’s autograph has mysteriously disappeared shortly thereafter, Brawer’s publications have been widely used by scholars of Frankism. It was only a few years ago that the manuscript was found again in the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem (Ms. Heb 8° 7507). A comparison of the rediscovered manuscript with Brawer’s publications reveals that the latter bowdlerized the text, omitting entire fragments without notice, inserting his own interpolations, and switching the order of paragraphs to fit his argument. Consequently, in my discussion of Divre binah, I decided to rely solely on Ber Birkenthal’s original manuscript.
East and Central Europe ca. 1770
Introduction
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Conversions to Christianity were among the most traumatic events in the history of medieval and early modern Jewish communities. Jews regarded baptism as a “betrayal of communal values, a rejection of Jewish destiny, a submission to the illusory verdict of history.”1 Willing apostates were seen as the worst traitors and renegades, forced conversions were considered the ultimate form of persecution of Israel by the Gentiles, and, according to the common ideal, it was better to choose a martyr’s death than to submit to the power of the Church.2 Each soul that Judaism lost was mourned. The dominant narrative did not even entertain the possibility that a Jew might embrace Christianity without any threat or ulterior motive. Christians themselves, while officially praising the apostates and expressing hope for “the blind synagogue’s” future recognition of the “obvious” truth of Christianity, privately voiced doubts concerning the sincerity of the converts and the very ability of the Jews to truly accept Christ.
In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the largest Catholic country in Europe and, at the same time, the home of the largest Jewish community in premodern times, baptisms of Jews were rare.3 Neither the local church nor the state conducted systematic missionary campaigns targeting the Jews. Forced conversions of individuals were forbidden by law and were few. Mass apostasies, like those known in Western Europe, did not occur—with one significant exception. In late summer and early autumn 1759, a sizable group of Jews—thousands, by most accounts—led by one Jacob Frank embraced Roman Catholicism in the city of Lwów. The conversion was unique not only in its sheer size. It was also—or at least appeared to be—voluntary: whatever caused Frank and his followers to approach the baptismal font, they were not facing a choice between baptism and expulsion or violent death like their brethren in medieval German lands or Portugal. What was most unusual, however, was the reaction of most Jewish contemporaries. In contrast to typical reactions of sadness, anger, or despair, many Jews saw the conversion of Frank and his group as a God-given miracle and a great victory for Judaism. Entire communities celebrated.
Among early Jewish accounts of the 1759 conversion, only one departed from the prevailing triumphant mood and expressed radically different sentiments. Israel Ba’al Shem Tov, known as the BeSh”T (1698–1760), who was the founder of Hasidism, the most important spiritual movement in Judaism of the period, was said to have bemoaned the Lwów mass apostasy or even to have died of pain caused by it.4 According to the story recorded in the hagiographic collection Shivhe ha-BeSh”T, the Ba’al Shem Tov laid the blame for the eruption of the entire affair on the Jewish establishment; he was “very angry with the rabbis and said that it was because of them, since they invented lies of their own.”5 The leader of Hasidism saw Frank and his group as part of the mystical body of Israel and presented their baptism as the amputation of a limb from the Shekhinah, the Divine Presence on earth: “I heard from the rabbi of our community that concerning those who converted [in Lwów], the Besht said: As long as the member is connected, there is some hope that it will recover, but when the member is cut off, there is no repair possible. Each person of Israel is a member of the Shekhinah.”6
The Ba’al Shem Tov died in 1760, a year after the Lwów apostasy. Some 150 years later, in Berlin, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, an aspiring writer who was later to become the State of Israel’s most celebrated author and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote a short essay on Frank. He juxtaposed various Jewish accounts of the 1759 conversion,