Extension:Ex-1.6.6

     Ya’akov Frank

Jan Doktór

Ya’akov Frank

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Ya’aḳov (Jakob) Josef ben Leib, known as Frenk (a collective epithet for Sephardi Jews in Turkey and Wallachia) and later Frank, was born in 1726 in Podolia—in Berczanie village, Korolivka, or Buchach, according to various sources. His family migrated to Bukovina and later Wallachia when he was only two years old, after his father was accused of Sabbatian heresy. Frank grew up in Moldavia and Wallachia, with lengthy stays in Chernivtsi, Smyrna, Bucharest, Sofia, and Istanbul. He entered the public scene in 1752 when he married Ḥanah, daughter of the Sephardic scholar from Nikopol Yehudah ha-Levi Tovah. According to the Frankist tradition, it was at his wedding that Frank learned about the Sabbatian “true faith.” Frank’s birth in the Commonwealth and his numerous Sabbatian maternal relatives there made him a potential agitator among Polish Jews. On November 5, 1754, Frank founded his own beit midrash in the Jewish district of Thessaloniki, which was to be—as we can imagine—the nucleus of a new messianic formation in Judaism under his leadership.

This institution was not long-lived. It is hard to imagine, however, that the founding of the Sabbatian beit midrash in the Jewish quarter of Thesaloniki would end differently: Frank surfaced from the underground, revealed his ambitions, and had to pay for them. On May 15, 1755, he was forced to leave Thessaloniki and, after spending several months in Romani and Chernivtsi, Moldavia, he crossed into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on December 3, 1755. The news from Poland seemed to open up a chance to act within Judaism. Frank made an attempt to join the local Sabbatians in their demonstrative emergence from the underground. On his way to Podolia, Frank met, probably in Bukovina, the fascinating figure of Antoni Kossakowski, a Polish noble who joined the old-believers’ sect of Philippovtsi, assumed the name Moliwda, and later fled to the Ottoman Empire. Moliwda became a close associate of Frank’s and his main source of information about Christianity. Nobody invited him to the Commonwealth, and the local Sabbatians eyed the intruders with distrust: Frank wanted not only to join their venture but to lead it. This was not to everyone’s liking and the Nadvirna Sabbatian Yehudah Leib Krysa successfully competed with him for the leadership. After the incident in Lanckoroń (Zarichanka), Frank returned to Turkey and converted to Islam.

In August 1758, however, after receiving a letter of protection from King Augustus III, he again took the lead of his supporters in Poland. In 1759, during the preparations for the Lviv disputation, he proved indispensable to both the Galician sectarians, whom he subventioned for much time thanks to money from his supporters in Bukovina and Wallachia, and to the hierarchs of the Church, leading hundreds of sectarians to baptism. Several months later, the Church authorities arranged asylum for him in the Częstochowa monastery, where he spent thirteen years until he was chased out by Russian troops who were pacifying the Confederation of Bar. He went to Brno in Moravia and, in 1786, to Offenbach am Main, where he established his “court” much in the manner of eighteenth-century adventurers such as Casanova, Cagliostro, and Saint Germain, who claimed supernatural abilities and occupied themselves with alchemy. His lavish lifestyle, his spectacular appearances in a carriage escorted by mounted herald and armed pages, and his mysterious sources of money lead to widespread rumors that he was being financed by the Russian secret service. Ultimately, he announced his return to Poland, which he considered the promised land of the Jews and a place of messianic fulfillment.

After Frank’s death in 1791 (fig.1), his daughter Eve assumed the role of the “high priestess” of the sect, which continued to exist until her death in 1816.