Article:1.6.6

Jewish Messianic Movements

     Jewish Messianic Movements

Jan Doktór

       Topics
       ReligionJews and Their Surrounding

       Period
       Before 1772

       Region
       Galicia

       NLI Code
       997013604473405174

Extensions

• Ya’akov Frank

Related Personalities

• Person:Taz
• Person:Birkenthal
• Person:Krysa
• Person:RapaportHayim

Related Entries

• Article:1.6.5
• Article:2.6.1

Map

• Centers of Sabbatianism and Frankism in Eighteenth-Century Eastern Galicia

Jewish Messianic Movements in Galicia

Jan Doktór

The year 1648 was a turning point in the lives of Polish Jews. They had awaited this year with tension and great hope, as it had long been foretold that the Messiah would come then. The collision of hope and reality was very painful. Instead of redemption, this year brought a Сossack uprising that led to a series of tragedies affecting all inhabitants of Ukraine, particularly Jews, who were massacred in unprecedented numbers.

This disappointment, however, did not undermine the credibility of the prophecy for those who embraced it; paradoxically, it even confirmed it. The wars and misfortunes were interpreted as the final catastrophes foretold by Scripture that should precede salvation, for which tradition had even coined the term “the birth pangs of the Messiah.” The tragedy of 1648 intensified the messianic tension; it began to be seen as the beginning of the messianic era, the date of the messianic breakthrough postponed to a later time—especially when news of the events in Turkey began to come in.

Shabetai Tsevi and the Sabbatian Movement

In 1648 in Smyrna (Izmir), the young kabbalist Shabetai Tsevi (1626–1676) experienced a revelation in which he received a messianic mission from heaven Image:1.6.6-Messianic-1. At first, only a handful of believers gathered around him and he himself was cursed and banished from the city. His messianic proclamation, however, was not forgotten. In 1665, his mission was authenticated by another young kabbalist, Nathan of Gaza (1643–1680), whose followers valued and recognized him as a prophet. The messianic euphoria engulfed Jews all over the world. The subsequent events, however, embarrassed the public. In December 1665, when Shabetai Tsevi reached Istanbul from his native Smyrna, he was arrested by the order of the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire. On April 19, 1666, Shabetai was transported to Gallipoli (Abydos), a stronghold-residence on the European side of the Dardanelle where great dignitaries whom the Empire wished to place in custody were customarily held. There, he was provided not only with luxurious conditions but also with all freedoms, including the right to welcome believers who came to worship him from all sides 1.6.6-Messianic-2.

The public rituals and sermons that Shabetai conducted during his stint in honorable confinement were filled with mystical exaltation that far transcended accepted religious traditions. According to contemporaries, upon his arrival to Gallipoli on the eve of Passover, Shabetai sacrificed a lamb and cooked it in its fat (ḥelev), a forbidden act under the rules of kashrut (Leviticus 7:23–24). He also encouraged his guests to eat this forbidden food with him, blessing them with the words: “He who permits what is forbidden.” Later, Shabetai issued a circular to all of Jewry, changing the mourning fast of the Ninth of Av, the day of mourning on the destruction of the temples in Jerusalem, to a feast of joy on the anniversary of “the birth of our king and savior.”

Since the Jews of the future Eastern Galicia were traditionally connected by trade relations with those of the Ottoman Empire, they showed a keen interest in the new messianic movement from its early stage onward. The most spectacular event in this nexus was the visit to Gallipoli of a delegation from Lviv, sent by the famous rabbi David Ha-Levi Segal (Taz). It was headed by his son Yeshayahu, who served as a rabbi in Komarno, and his stepson Aryeh Leib. The mission was greeted very warmly and its members were honored with a personal conversation with the “Messiah” and a confidential sermon on a new mystical teaching that attested to the advent of the Redemption. Shabetai tried to make a strong impression on the envoys of Lviv’s learned circles, hoping they would become faithful guides of his messianic movement in their homeland.

Returning to Lviv, the delegates delivered gifts and a letter from Shabetai to Rabbi Segal. Soon after their departure, another guest from Lviv arrived in Gallipoli: Neḥemyah ha-Kohen, a well-known Galician messianic prophet and mystic. Neḥemyah spent three days in the fortress, arguing with Shabetai about the nature of the Messiah and the Redemption. The two mystics apparently clashed, each claiming a unique role in the coming Redemption. Eventually, Nehemya suddenly interrupted their meeting, declared to the authorities his desire to convert to Islam, and left Turkey. The case became a high-profile affair and was interpreted differently by believers in Shabetai as the Messiah and his opponents. Returning to Lviv, Neḥemyah said nothing about what had transpired in Gallipoli and, when asked about Shabetai, replied only that the Jews were waiting for the true messiah, not this one.

The Turkish authorities, however, alarmed by the public uproar caused by Shabetai’s activities, decided to end the affair by demanding that he convert to Islam on pain of death. The resulting apostasy of the self-proclaimed messiah sent shock waves throughout the Jewish world. The Sabbatian prophet Nathan of Gaza and other scholars in Shabetai’s orbit, however, managed to present this extraordinary decision as an essential part of the Messiah’s mystical mission to fulfill the Redemption process. Thus, they laid the foundations for the further development of the Sabbatian messianic doctrine in its various forms 1.6.6-Messianic-3.

In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Jewish messianic propaganda aroused outrage among Christian neighbors not only in view of what they considered the Jews’ arrogance and usurpation but due to fear of Jewish revenge, which some messianists had already announced openly, for Christian mistreatment over the ages. In his book The True Messiah, published in 1666 in Polish, Ruthenian (Ukrainian), and Latin, the Orthodox Archimandrite Joanicjusz Galatowski wrote:

The Jews already despised Christians, insulted them, laughed at them, and boasted about them, threatening [them] with their false Messiah, and promised to take vengeance on the Christians who reigned over them, saying: We will be your masters and you our subjects.

Such behavior among the Jews aroused not only fear but also aggression. Anti-Jewish tumult multiplied, especially during Jewish processions with images of Shabetai and joyful celebrations in his honor. King John Casimir was forced to intervene, and in his decree of May 4, 1666, he forbade Jews to publicly display the image of Shabetai and enjoined Christians from organizing anti-Jewish riots.

Bishops also took the floor. Stanisław Sarnicki, the Bishop of Przemyśl, in pastoral letters that were read from pulpits, urged magistrates and the nobility to exterminate “the new Jewish perversity, their paintings and prints under the penalty of the royal tribunals.”

Many rabbis in Poland were swept into the messianic euphoria. The Yiddish-language pamphlet Tiḳune teshuva Erets Tsevi [repairs for Repentance the land of Tsevi], published in Kraków in 1666—the year determined by the author of the pamphlet as the “year of salvation”—received a written haskamah (approbation) from the Kraków rabbi Aryeh Leib ben Zekhariah Mendel. The pamphlet contains exercises, meditations, fasts, and mortifications that were recommended by the ḥaside Ashkenaz—12^th and 13^th centuries Jewish pietists from the Rhineland, especially Yehudah he-Ḥasid and Eleazar of Worms—that were now recommended to all the pious who wished to hasten the salvation. In 1666, Polish Jews who believed in Shabetai Tsevi’s messianism and wished to help him to bring the salvation, called themselves not ma’aminim [believers], as in Turkey, but ḥasidim [pious], and combined their messianic activities with old ascetic-penitential traditions from the Ashkenazi pietist circle 1.6.6-Messianic-4.

In 1670 and again in 1672, the Council of Four Lands placed a curse on the followers of the faithless Messiah, which forced them to publicly renounce heresy. Those who maintained their faith in Shabetai went underground and eschewed overt messianic agitation, gathering in small groups and, under the guise of studying kabbalistic works, tried to sustain their messianic hopes. Shabetai Tsevi’s death in exile in 1676 did not undermine their faith. Announcements of his return from the afterlife or the upcoming reincarnation of the messianic soul as a savior who would complete the work Shabetai had begun recurred for the next two centuries, fueling further messianic outbursts.

Following the Polish–Turkish wars of 1672–1676 and 1683–1699, a new surge of messianic aspirations emerged in Poland. The kabbalist Hayim Malakh brought Sabbatian teachings to the future Eastern Galicia around 1700 after returning from lengthy travels in Italy, Turkey, and the Land of Israel. Establishing his beit midrash in Zhovkva, he attracted many supporters including rabbis Fishel of Zolochiv and Mordekhai Ashkenazi. A short time later, Rabbi Mosheh David began to preach Sabbatianism in Pidhaitsi and the rabbi and the rabbinical judge of Rozdil became open Sabbatians. After the Council of Four Lands renewed its excommunication of Sabbatians in 1722, many Sabbatians found refuge in Sub-Carpathian Eastern Galicia and especially in Nadvirna, where, according to Ya‘akov Emden, a leading opponent of Sabbateanism, “the entire community turned to heresy, following Shabetai Tsevi.”

The wine merchant and memoirist Dov Ber Birkenthal (1723-1805) of Bolekhiv reports that Jews in Nadvirna slaughtered a sheep on the fast day of Ninth of Av, roasted it in its fat (ḥelev), and celebrated this day, hoping for Shabetai’s second coming. One of the most prominent Sabbatians in Nadvirna was Yehudah Leib Krysa, who later became a supporter of Ya‘akov Frank and his rival for the leadership in the new messianic movement. According to Birkenthal, before Frank’s appearance in Podolia, “Leib Krysa wandered through all the towns of Podolia in order to deceive and to incite some people of Israel to change their faith and to profess the religion of Shabetai Tsevi.” Another prominent Sabbatian from Nadvirna, Zeev Wolf Benditsch, travelled to Thessaloniki in 1720 to meet the supposed reincarnation of Shabetai Tsevi, Berukhiah Russo, on his deathbed.

The Frankist Movement

The last great messianic eruption of Sabbatianism took place in the mid-eighteenth century in the southeastern borderlands of the Commonwealth. This outbreak shocked the Jewish community and Christian opinion in all of Europe. It is not clear what prompted the messianists to act and what they wanted to achieve at a time when no messianic announcements were heard and no date for the messianic breakthrough was set. Apparently, they were fed up with nearly a century of suppression of their faith and repeated cycles of messianic uprisings and persecution. They were hard pressed by the last wave of repression in the 1740s, after the failure of the messianic announcements in the year 5500 (1740). However, discouraged and frustrated they were, the sectarians were loath to abandon their messianic faith and the Jewish community. They decided to emerge from the underground and found with the help of the Church, with which they flirted by propagating a doctrine ostensibly similar to Christianity, their own Jewish religious community, the third in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth after the existing communities of Rabbinical Jews and Karaites.

On the night of January 27–28, 1756, about a dozen messianists, headed by the Sabbatian prophet Ya’akov Frank (1726-1791), gathered in Lanckoroń (Zarichanka, a Podolian village near Kamianets-Podilskyi) at the home of a local Jew to conduct a secret mystical ritual. In this extraordinary ceremony, they sang and danced around the naked wife of the local rabbi, a Torah crown on her head. This meeting was apparently meant to demonstrate the Polish Sabbatians’ emergence from the heretical underground. The events that followed led to the formation of a movement later known as Frankism, named after its leader. The provocateurs were arrested by Christian authorities at the instigation of local Jewish elders who later turned to bishop of Kamianets-Podilskyi, Mikołaj Dębowski, accusing the detainees of heresy and asking the bishop’s court to judge and punish them. For reasons unknown, however, the elders quickly reconsidered and on February 9 withdrew the accusation and refused to participate in the proceedings. But it was too late; the proceedings had already begun because the consistory had decided to go ahead on the basis on its own information and ordered the detained Jews to be brought to the consistory. The heretic writings, allegedly confiscated by Jewish elders, were also delivered to the consistory for examination by a competent clergyman. The bishop, however, took the matter into his own hands, not only releasing the arrested Sabbatians but giving them security guarantees until the investigation was completed.

Now the central Jewish authorities joined the case. In September 1756, the Council of Four Lands confirmed the curse on the Sabbatians, previously announced in Brody by the rabbinic court, and extended it to the followers of Shabetai Tsevi throughout the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The Frankists demanded a public disputation with the rabbis, by which they wished to gain legitimacy as an independent Jewish denomination, and submitted an appropriate supplication to the Kamianets consistory. The disputation began at the cathedral of Kamianets-Podilskyi on June 20, 1757, under the chairmanship of bishop Dębowski 1.6.6-Messianic-5. The Frankists who participated in the debate were led by the preacher Elisha Schor of Rohatyn. The consistory court found the accusations against the messianists of having committed lewd and indecent acts on the night of January 27–28, 1756, unproven and not credible. Turning the disputation to the topic of the Jewish faith, Dębowski pronounced the Talmud a harmful book and ordered it to be burned publicly. Concurrently, he praised the theses of the Frankists, whom he called “Jewish anti-Talmudists,” and emphasized their entitlement to the privileges that the Commonwealth had extended to the Jews. He also guaranteed them the freedom to conduct open agitation among Jews for their faith on the basis of a manifesto they had presented in the disputation. He ordered the heirs of the anti-Talmudists’ homes to protect them vigilantly. As for Talmudists, i.e., all non-Frankist Jews, the court decided to recognize the competence of the authorities of the Republic of Poland to consider whether they should be tolerated in the Kingdom at all.

The ruling of the consistory court actually legalized a new “anti-Talmudic” denomination in the Kamianets diocese, which was to enjoy all the rights guaranteed to the Jews. One doubts whether the king and the Sejm of the Commonwealth really wished to fight Talmudism, but the creation of a new community in a non-Talmudic format, modeled on the Karaite community, seemed a foregone conclusion.

Bishop Dębowski, played a key role in these events, and his surprising and suspicious death just three weeks after the disputation was a turning point in the accelerating process of legalizing the sect. He died leaving the conflict unresolved. The outcome was only a matter of time 1.6.6-Messianic-6.

Deprived of their protector, the accursed Frankists fled their hometowns. On May 8, 1758, the exposed sectarians left Poland in a tight group but stopped just past the border in the principality of Moldova, where they awaited the development of events in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. They did not wait long. In August 1758, they received a letter from King Augustus III of Poland guaranteeing their personal safety, removing them from the jurisdiction of the Jewish judiciary, and placing them under the protection of common courts. For several months they stayed in three villages—Iwanie, Uścieczko, and Harmackie—belonging to the episcopal estates in Sub-Carpathian Eastern Galicia, but they were reluctant to return to their hometowns, where they saw no future for themselves. Since returning to rabbinic Judaism was out of the question, baptism was the only solution. To convince the sectarians to convert, Frank, who only then became their undisputed head, agreed to return to the Commonwealth.

A delegation of sectarians went to Lviv for talks with the newly appointed Archbishop, Władysław Konstanty Łubieński; there, on February 20, 1759, they made a supplication to the consistory, declaring their readiness to be baptized in the Roman Catholic Church and asking for another public debate with the rabbis, in which they wished to raise the issue of ritual murder. In another supplication, presented on May 16, the sectarians added a new demand: they wanted the authorities to allow them to settle together in two royal cities in Galicia, Busk and Hlyniany, where they would constitute the majority of the Jewish inhabitants. Konstanty Łubieński reluctantly agreed.

The second disputation took place at the Lviv Cathedral from July 17 to September 19, 1759 1.6.6-Messianic-7. Yehudah Leib Krysa of Nadvirna and Shelomoh Schor of Rohatyn spoke on behalf of the “anti-Talmudists,” while the rabbi of Lviv, Ḥayim ha-Cohen Rapaport, represented the Jewish mainstream point of view. In the course of this disputation, the Frankists publicly accused rabbis of practicing ritual murder and thus poisoned Christian–Jewish relations for decades to come. After the end of the disputation and a few weeks of cursory catechesis, the anti-Talmudists, together with Jakob Frank, whom they presented as their “patriarch,” were baptized in Warszawa, where King Augustus III himself acted as godfather of Frank, who was christened Joseph. Like the earlier Sabbatians, many Frankists found refuge in Sub-Carpathian Eastern Galicia. In 1759, the papal nuncio in Poland, Nicolai Serra, reported to Rome that “recently, twenty Jewish families, together with their rabbi, declared in Sniatyn their wish to convert to Christianity.” The history of the sect did not end with this: in November 1759, Frank was accused of claiming that he was the reincarnation of Jesus, and in January 1760 he was arrested and placed in protective custody in Częstochowa. After his arrest, Bishop Kajetan Sołtyk of Kraków continued to support him and his followers and wrote in a report to Rome:

“I supplied his [Frank’s] needs out of Christian charity and I have not stopped making efforts to provide an opportunity for him to renounce his false visions. I also transferred at my own expense thirty families of these converts to the border of Rus [i.e., Sub-Carpathian Red Ruthenia], where I settled them in my own towns and villages. I distributed more than four thousand złoty in Roman currency proportionally to every family in order to provide them with an honorable existence”.

Descendants of these Frankist converts probably still live in some villages in Sub-Carpathian Eastern Galicia.

The Sabbatian and Frankist messianic movements had no longstanding impact in Galicia and the and the extent of their influence in the emergence and spread of the Ḥasidic movement is disputed. The Frankists’ arguments in favor of the blood libel, however, continued to be used in numerous antisemitic compositions during the 19^th and 20^th centuries. On the Jewish side, the Frankists’ conversion to Christianity temporarily strengthened the traditional leadership, among which the anti-Sabbatian tendency gained the upper hand. On the Christian side, attitudes toward the Frankist movement sharpened the split inside the Polish Catholic Church between the enlightened camp, which opposed support for the Frankists, and the reactionary forces that supported them.

Select Bibliography

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Doktór, Jan. Śladami mesjasza-apostaty, Żydowskie ruchy mesjańskie w XVII i XVIII wieku a problem konwersji. Wrocław: Leopoldinum, 1998.

Doktór, Jan. “Shabbetaj Zvis Übertritt zum Islam: Versuch einer neuen Sicht.” Jewish History Quarterly 239 (September 2011), 311–326.

Doktór, Jan. Jakub Frank i jego mesjańska droga. Warszawa: Nowe spojrzenie, 2023.

Kalik, Judith. “Christian Kabbala and Polish Jews: Attitudes of the Church to Jewish Conversion and the Idea of ‘Jacob’s Return’ in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18th Century,” Jewish History Quarterly 212 (2004), 492–501.

Kraush, Alexander. Frank i frankiści polscy 1726–1816: Monografia historyczna osnuta na źródłach archiwalnych i rękopiśmiennych, vol. 1–2. Kraków: Druk. W. L. Anczyca i Sp, 1895.

Maciejko, Paweł. The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Scholem, Gershom. Sabbatai Ṣevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.