Jakob Frank, der Messias aus dem Ghetto (review)

Book Reviews 163 the evolution of agendas at the World Jewish Congress; and Daniel Elazar offers his seven-point plan for the preservation and prosperity ofEuropean Jewish communities. Replete with informative and useful data, this book reminds us that important Jewish communities and active Jewish life still exist in Europe and in some places even prosper. It therefore serves as a helpful corrective to our predisposition to concentrate solely on American Jews and Israelis when dealing with Jewish concerns. But this book represents only the tip of the iceberg in the story. Much more spade work into the history and sociology of European Jewry post World War II needs to be done to understand the Jewish communities in and of themselves and where they fit into the larger picture of world Jewry. Benny Kraut History/Jewish Studies Queens College Jakob Frank, der Messias aus dem Ghetto, by Klaus Samuel Davidowicz. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. 438 pp. $56.95. Jakob Frank (born Jakob Leibowicz, c. 1726) was one ofthe most bizarre, colorful, and enigmatic personalities to emerge from the Jewish world of the eighteenth century. From the time that he returned to Poland in 1755, where he converted to Catholicism, throughout his years in Brunn, Moravia, to the end of his life when he held court in Offenbach, Frank's career crossed so many boundaries that historians are at odds over where his primary influences were derived. Does Frank represent the last figure in a chain of ever stranger Jewish messianic pretenders? Or is he, perhaps, better suited to the ranks of those eighteenth-century European "adventurers," picaresque charlatans who gained adherents primarily because oftheir odd ideas and colorful behavior? Was Frank a true libertine, testing the very limits ofsocial, religious, and sexual mores ofhis day? Does Frank belong within the mainstream of Jewish history because he was nourished by its sources? Frank's doctrines and actions were so transgressive of accepted religious, moral, and social boundaries that his very place within the realm of Jewish history was questioned by some historians. After some of the Frankists converted to Catholicism and later tookpart inpublic disputations against rabbinic representatives, they breached an invisible line that no Sabbateans before them, even those who had converted, had dared to cross. After they affirmed the ancient canard that Jews used Christian blood for Jewish religious ritual, most Jews turned away from them in disgust, and the last vestiges of respectability of Sabbateanism in the Jewish world received their death blow. Opponents and apologists ofFrank, from his time until our own, have tried to fit his career into one framework or another. Many shed light on various aspects ofFrank's 164 SHOFAR Fa112000 Vol. 19, No.1 ideas and movement, but thus far, a truly comprehensive study ofFrank and Frankism has remained an elusive goal. Davidowicz narrates the history ofFrank and his movement from several primary sources, particularly the "Sayings of the Lord," recensions of Frank's teachings recorded by members of the inner circle for the benefit of other members. Written mostly in Polish, these sources have never been translated in their entirety into other languages and have remained relatively underused. Davidowicz makes particularly rich use oftwo unpublished Cracow manuscripts of"The Sayings," and the history ofFrank and Frankism by Alexander Kraushar which was apparently based on another, similar recension ofthe "Sayings ofthe Lord," now lost. The first volume ofKraushar's history was translated into Hebrew, but after Kraushar's conversion to Catholicism, the second volume remained untranslated from the Polish, and thus inaccessible to many readers. Davidowicz uses the manuscript sources in both ofKraushar's volumes to supplement the Cracow manuscripts. This book, then, presents the reader with a narrative based on sources that have not been sufficiently mined until now. While there is great value to reading the history of Frankism according to the stories that Frankists told themselves, there is also a great danger. The tendency to see history through Frankistlenses, discounting the accounts oftheir opponents as distorted by anti-Sabbatean zeal, tends to overpower the critical demeanor that the author professes to pursue. While Jacob Emden certainly deserves the label zealot, historians must be very cautious before dismissing his sources...