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Me’ayin yavo ‘ezri? The Help of Jacob Frank and His Daughter, Ewa Harris Lenowitz On the 21st of October, 1784 the Lord saw a dream, I had a golden ring on my hand and I dropped that ring onto a mirror which broke into small pieces. Having turned that mirror onto the other side, I found shining glass there also and, likewise, a bracelet fell from my hands and broke the other side. He himself gave the interpretation that, My help hastens to come. This dictum, numbered 451 in the manuscripts of the “Collection of the Words of the Lord [Jacob Frank]” (Zbiór słów pańskich), is the most beautiful, most self-revelatory, and, in some ways, the most puzzling of all of Jacob Frank’s Words delivered and recorded in the Cracow mss. The lectures were not delivered at a single sitting. From the material therein (covering holidays, significant events, and, occasionally, dates), it must be concluded that he began talking this way, in these genres and employing Sabbatean language as well as his own, during his early youth (1735); and that there might have been several gatherings of notes, editings, and, ultimately, Polish translation from Yiddish—if there was a Yiddish version—in stages, until almost the moment of his death in 1791 and then, mutatis mutandis, in additions and editings. The puzzle here is not—as often is the case in Frank’s lectures—how to understand an allusion to biblical or rabbinic literature, but how to view the relationship between the fable and the text’s moral. The beauty of the dictum is manifested first by the symbols in the field it generates and what 282 Harris Lenowitz they picture forth; thereafter, between the symbols of the fable and the actor in the dream; and then between the actor in the dream and the Interlocutor who stands in the middle, speaking back to the text and speaking out to his listeners, the Company, the Brothers and Sisters. The simplest interpretation might be that the dictum describes how Frank sees himself, draped in riches, eternal golden power and a wealth of selves, the cynosure of more than a few attentive devotees. The dictum generates multiple selves, achieved not through repeated reflections from one object to a number of mirrors but through a single reflection that shatters when observed, faithfully mirroring that which is reflected, the smashing of the eidolon, the astral double that represents the shattering, the liberation of the universe from its bounds and constraints. Or, alternately, how Frank wishes others to mirror him. There is no element on the surface of the imagery of the fable connected to the moral’s “help,” and precisely what links the imagery of shattering to that moral is a puzzle. This paper begins with that break and describes the processes and agencies Frank might have been invoking in his desire to create an enabling force that operates throughout the universe for himself as well as for others. This enabling force materializes out of the space that the term “help” energizes, for himself as well as for his following. His wife’s role in the conduct of the sect was rather restricted; and it appears that, disappointed with his sons and unwilling to share his power, Frank settled on his daughter Ewa Frank as his messianic successor. He never ceded his authority to Ewa. But her aristocratic manners and French proficiency were a great “help,” especially after they left Poland and began to socialize with western nobility; and on a theological plane her gender was a great “help” as an object upon which he could project feminine religious symbolism. Ewa, for her part, periodically struggled to free herself from her father’s narcissistic grip and, as certain dicta suggest, his incestuous passions. Quite a lot has been written about Frank and his following.1 He was successful from his youth onward in gleaning manners and conduct from common as well as from rarer sources (like Turkish folklore and the Persian Shahnameh), not only from traditional Jewish sources but from all sources and encounters that could be turned to use as parables, tales with “morals.” He worked as a caravaneer, traveling especially between south Poland and the Ottoman Empire. His encounters with Sabbateans in these areas seem to have taken hold of his native rebellious, antinomian, mischievous, selfaggrandizing inclinations; following on the career of Baruchia Russo (who was the most important heir of...

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