The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816 (review)

This fascinating book tells the tangled story that began in 1756 when Jacob Frank, a charismatic Ottoman Jew, returned to his native Poland and turned the world of east European Jewry topsy turvy. He proclaimed himself the bearer of a new, eccentric variant of Sabbatianism, a seventeenth-century antinomian and messianic strain within Judaism that taught salvation through faith alone, coupled with flagrant ritual violation of the laws of halakhah, rather than their observance. Inevitably, Sabbatians and traditional Jews came into fierce conflict, each faction abusing the other as the erev rav, the “mixed multitude” of the Hebrew Bible who threatened the purity of Judaism from within.

As related here by Pawel/Maciejko, a lecturer in Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Frank quickly attracted adherents, notice, and controversy in Poland. Faced with competing pressures from the Catholic Church that was eager for Jewish converts and the rabbinic leadership that was bent on purging these undesirables from the fold of Jewry, Frank and his followers received baptism as Catholics in 1759, the culmination of a bizarre but discernible chain of religious logic. By the next year, Frank found himself confined to lengthy virtual imprisonment in Częstochowa by decree of Polish church authorities, dismayed by the lurid and heretical rites of the Frankists as well as the discovery that their leader had accepted Islam before his arrival in Poland. If anything, the aura of martyrdom merely swelled the ranks of his followers to the tens of thousands. Freed by the Russians in 1772 at the time of the first partition of Poland, Frank and his considerable entourage moved on to the Habsburg Empire and finally Offenbach am Main, constructing a cultic adoration of his daughter as a semi-divine being modeled on a peculiar understanding of the Virgin Mary and living out his days in ostentatious splendor. After his death in 1791, his movement lingered on for several decades, with greater decorum but decreasing visibility, before fading out, as neither mainstream Christians nor Jews in Poland regarded it as a legitimate or reputable branch of their own tradition.

Maciejko has based his account on an impressive amount of archival research in Poland, the Holy See, and four other countries. In addition, he has done careful reading of the published work of other scholars and is not shy to take issue with conventional wisdom on the subject. Above all, he stresses that Frankism should not be regarded as simply a new form of Sabbatianism, but as a doctrine sui generis cobbled together by its inventor; the strength of Frank’s undeniable religious appeal, which persuaded thousands to regard him as a messiah rather than a mere charlatan, was not consistent defense of clearly stated convictions, but his originality and flexibility in adapting his creed to suit different audiences and circumstances. One suspects that the debates over Frankism have not ended, but for now, The Mixed Multitude should stand as the authoritative work on the subject.