Crypto-Sabbatianism was the form that the Sabbatian movement took in eighteenth-century Western Europe. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, developments followed a different route. In Poland, the Sabbatian movement spread particularly in the southeastern part of the country, in Podolia. “Podolia” is a name of a geographical area (the Podolian Upland) and of an administrative division of the Crown of Poland (the Podolian Voivodeship or Palatinate of Podolia). To add to the confusion, early modern Jewish sources speak of “the Province of Podolia” (mahoz or galil Podoly’ah), usually meaning something in between: an area larger than the Palatinate of Podolia but smaller than the entire Podolian Upland and roughly encompassing the Podolian, the Bracław, and the eastern part of the Ruthenian Palatinates of the Commonwealth. This usage entered Jewish historiography, and I shall continue to use the term in this “Jewish” sense, although some locations most commonly associated with Podolia in works on Eastern European Jewry (such as Żółkiew and Podhajce) never belonged to the Podolian Palatinate.
From the perspective of the Jewish autonomous system of government, the territory of the Crown of Poland was divided into four large regions called “Lands” (Hebr., aratsot or medinot; Pol., ziemstwa), jointly administered by the umbrella organization of Jewish communities in the kingdom, the Council of Four Lands. The Land authorities collected poll tax paid to the Crown from all communities belonging to it, and the rabbi of the Land served as head of a court hearing appeals from verdicts of local bate din.49 The Province of Podolia belonged to the Land of Ruthenia with the seat of the Land rabbi in Lwów; the remaining three Lands were Greater Poland, Little Poland, and Volhynia.
In the late seventeenth century, the situation of Podolian Jewry went through a significant change. Following the disastrous war with the Porte and the Crimean Khanate, the Commonwealth signed a humiliating peace treaty in Buczacz in 1672, ceding the Palatinates of Podolia and Bracław to the Ottoman Empire. Poland-Lithuania had regained part of its territories by the following year, and all of them after the treaty of Karlowitz (1699); yet the impact upon the province’s Jewish communities of twenty-seven years of practical independence from the central administrative bodies of Polish Jewry was profound.50 Podolian Jews developed close ties with their brethren in Turkey, and for over twenty years, Turkish, Wallachian, and Moldavian Jews settled in the region. Even after the province was returned to Poland in 1699, the Council of Four Lands did not regain full control: local Jews often voiced their dissent from the decisions of the council or the rabbi of the Ruthenian Land in Lwów, and many disgruntled individuals moved to Podolia to seek a measure of freedom from the scrutiny imposed by the rabbinate in other parts of the Commonwealth.
After their return to Poland, the Podolian communities refused to pay their poll tax to the Land of Ruthenia, and the tax evasion in Podolia severely increased the fiscal burden placed on other regions.51 On 1 June 1713, King Augustus II ordered the creation of a separate, fifth Land, with the seat of the presiding rabbi in Satanów.52 Initially, the Council of Four Lands ignored the ruling. After several years, the new division of Polish Jewry into five Lands in fiscal matters became a fait accompli; in 1719, Jerzy Przebendowski, secretary of the royal treasury, confirmed that the Jews of Podolia were to pay the poll tax through their own Land, independently from the Lwów rabbinate.53 However, the central Jewish authorities still considered the split of Podolia from the Land of Ruthenia a source of danger to their power over the region, and, on several occasions, they sought to reintegrate the province into the previous structures. The spread of Sabbatianism among the Podolian Jews was both the reason for the rabbinate’s worries and an ever present pretext for its interventions.
In the mid-eighteenth century, Podolia became for Judaism what twelfth-century Languedoc was for Christianity: a seditious province where dissenters gathered and heterodoxy was practiced openly and publicly. Podolia was the only place in the world where—almost a hundred years after Sabbatai Tsevi’s conversion to Islam—many Jews openly adhered to Sabbatianism. A number of communal rabbis belonged to the sect and drew in their entire communities. Many Podolian Sabbatians were scholars: among some twenty sectarians identified by name in Ber Birkenthal’s Divre binah, the names of eight of them are preceded by the title morenu (“our teacher”), a rabbinic equivalent of the title of doctor conferred by Christian universities.54
In the early 1700s, the main channel of transmission of esoteric doctrines from the Ottoman territories to Poland was Hayyim Malakh, the open Sabbatian and acknowledged rabbinic scholar55 who had studied with several famous kabbalists in Italy and Turkey and become acquainted with all the major Sabbatian schools of the period.56 In 1700, Malakh had taken part in the abortive attempt to resettle the Land of Israel led by Rabbi Yehudah Hasid (1650–1700).57 Expelled from Jerusalem, he made his way to Podolia, where he established vibrant Sabbatian groups in Buczacz, Nadworna, Rohatyn, and other places. He is said to have transformed the prestigious center of rabbinic learning, the bet midrash (house of study) of Żółkiew, into a hotbed of radical Sabbatianism.58 In the end, he was excommunicated and expelled by the rabbinate. Yet others followed in his footsteps. Fishel of Złoczów, also a noted Torah scholar, reputed to know the entire Talmud by heart and greatly honored for his extreme piety, suddenly “revealed that he belonged to the sect of Sabbatai Tsevi” and confessed that he had been committing numerous offenses for many years.59
Another well-known ascetic (and another ex-member of the group of Rabbi Yehudah Hasid), Moses of Wodzisław, who used to fast every day of the week except for the Shabbat and who refrained from eating meat at all, “publicly announced that none other than Sabbatai Tsevi is the messiah.” When reproached by some members of the community, he stated that he “would be prepared to stand upon the tallest tower of the city and loudly proclaim his belief, and was not afraid even to die for it.”60 Rabbi Moses David, an eminent kabbalist to whom I shall return in Chapter 5, overtly preached Sabbatianism in Podhajce;61 the same is true of Rabbi Mordechai Ashkenazi in Żółkiew.62 Messianic beliefs were upheld in public by the communal rabbi and rabbinic judge of Rozdół.63 Documents from 1759 state as a known fact that the towns of Busk and Gliniany were “under the control” of Sabbatians.64 The anti-Sabbatians also confirmed that the sectarians had completely taken over some communities: Rabbi Jacob Emden lamented that “in a town called Nadworna, the entire community turned to heresy, following Sabbatai Tsevi.”65
Indeed, Nadworna seemed to be particularly notorious for the open practice of Sabbatianism. Ber Birkenthal of Bolechów reported that in 1742, a known Sabbatian from Nadworna stayed at his father’s inn. Those present were told a story about how, on the fast day of the Ninth of Av (the fast commemorating the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans, abolished and turned into a feast day by Sabbatai Tsevi),66 the people of Nadworna went to the surrounding fields and stole a sheep. They slaughtered it without observing the requirements regarding ritual slaughter, cooked it in milk (thereby breaking another dietary prohibition), and celebrated merrily, hoping for Sabbatai’s second coming and expecting imminent liberation from exile.67 In the years directly preceding Frank’s appearance in Podolia, the most prominent Sabbatian from Nadworna was Leyb son of Nata, called Leyb Krysa. Ber Birkenthal, who met him in Lwów in 1752, recounts that Krysa was known as a kabbalist and came to Ber’s house to study the Zohar from the Amsterdam edition, which Birkenthal owned. He used to “wander through all the towns of Podolia in order to deceive and incite the people of Israel . . . to accept the faith of Sabbatai Tsevi,”68 and he established a Sabbatian house of study in Lwów.69 Insofar as we can judge from the few existing sources, in the year or so preceding Frank’s appearance, Krysa gained a substantial following and was singularly successful in uniting Podolian Sabbatian groups under his leadership; it seems that many of the later “Frankists” were initially the “Krysists.” But suddenly, Frank showed up and stole the show.
Frank’s Beginnings
According to the Frankist chronicle, Pan (“the Lord”), Ya’akov ben Leyb, later known as Jacob Frank, was born in 1726 in Berczanie, a small village in Podolia.70 Other sources give other Podolian locations, Korolowka71 or Buczacz,72 as the place of his