The Mixed Multitude. Pawel Maciejko
detained in Mannheim while distributing Va-avo ha-yom el haayyin (Kamenker was a brother-in-law of Fishel of Złoczów);73 Jacob Frank’s mother, Rachel Hirschl of Rzeszów, was a sister of Löbl, father of Schöndl Dobruschka, the spiritus movens of Sabbatianism in Moravia.74 When Frank was only a few months old, his family left Poland and moved to the Ottoman Empire; it is likely that the move was connected to the affair that erupted after the detention of his uncle Moses Meir Kamenker a year earlier.
Young Jacob grew up in the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, spending extended periods in the Ottoman territories proper; he lived in Czernowitz, Smyrna, Bucharest, Sofia, and Constantinople. At some point during his stay in Turkey, he acquired the nickname “Frank” or “Frenk.” The word is a Turkish equivalent of the Arabic ifrandj or firandj, referring initially to the Franks, inhabitants of the empire of Charlemagne and then, by extension, to the Crusaders. By the sixteenth century, in many oriental languages (for example, Persian, farangi; Armenian, frank), the term had become a common appellation for Europeans in general as well as for “various things believed to have been introduced by the Franks, such as syphilis, cannon, European dress, and modern civilization.”75 In Jacob Frank’s milieu, his nickname betrayed his foreign European origins, identifying him as a Polish Ashkenazic Jew, a native Yiddish speaker who found himself among the Ladino-speaking Turkish Sephardim.
The Frankist chronicle informs us that in 1752, in Nikopol (present-day Bulgaria), Frank married Hana, the daughter of a certain Rabbi Tova; the rite was conducted according to the “Jewish-Turkish religion,” and his groomsmen were Rabbi Mordechai and Rabbi Nahman.76 Another source adds that on the night of his wedding, the groomsmen disclosed “the mystery of faith” to him, and one of them told the bridegroom that “there was a messiah in Salonika.”77 The practice of initiating new members of the sect on their wedding nights is known from Sabbatian rituals, and the “mystery of faith” was the final revelation of Sabbatai Tsevi, which he divulged only to those of his disciples who converted to Islam; its content was transferred orally among the sectarian elite.78 It is a matter of conjecture, but there is reason to believe that Frank’s father-in-law, called by the chronicle “Rabbi Tova,” was one of the most important Turkish Sabbatian leaders, Yehudah Levi Tova (Frank’s first biographer, the Jesuit Father Awedyk, confirms that Tova, father of Frank’s wife, was a Levite).79 The “Jewish-Turkish” religion was nothing other than the faith of the Muslim-Sabbatian group known as the Dönmeh.
After the death of Sabbatai Tsevi (1676), his last wife, Jocheved, proclaimed that the soul of the messiah had not left the earthly world but had reincarnated in her brother, Jacob Querido. Shortly thereafter, Querido received a series of revelations urging him to continue upon the path of Sabbatai and apostatize. Following these revelations, a group of some three hundred Jewish families converted to Islam in 1683 in the city of Salonika, thus founding the Sabbatian-Muslim sect of the Dönmeh.80 The Turkish word dönmeh signifies a recent convert, a neophyte, and has strong negative connotations; in modern Turkish, it might also be used as a slur against a male-to-female transsexual. It was intended as a term of abuse heaped upon the Salonika apostates by their enemies; the group’s own term was ma’aminim (“believers”; the standard Sabbatian self-designation) or sazanikos. Sazan is Turkish for carp, a fish that lives both in fresh- and in seawater. Thus the converts conducted their double lives under Judaism and under Islam; and just as the carp seems to change color, so they changed external appearances in accordance with changing needs and circumstances.81
The Dönmeh formed a close-knit group shunning exogamous marriage with either Jews or Muslims, and they developed their own version of Sabbatian theology, focusing on the radical duality between the Torah of the Created World (torah de-beri’ah) and the new spiritual Torah known as the Torah of Emanation (torah de-atsilut). With the coming of the messiah, the former—identified with the commandments of Judaism—was replaced with the latter, and Sabbatai Tsevi’s “strange deeds” provided a pattern for normative behavior. Accordingly, the Dönmeh’s brand of Sabbatianism acquired a very pronounced antinomian tendency, whereby ritual violations of the principles and rites of Jewish religion became a significant part of religious practice. Since the advent of redemption signified liberation from the yoke of the commandments, their further observance would be not only senseless, but blasphemous. Conversely, almost the only way to demonstrate that the redemption had arrived was to break the laws and statutes of the unredeemed world. In the words of Rabbi Moses Hagiz: “It is their custom to argue that with the arrival of Sabbatai Zevi, the sin of Adam has already been corrected and the good selected out of the evil and the ‘dross.’ Since that time, according to them, a new Torah has become law under which all manner of things formerly prohibited are now permitted, not least the categories of sexual intercourse hitherto prohibited. For since everything is pure, there is no sin or harm in these things.”82
Jacob Querido died during a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1690. As the principle of leadership among the Dönmeh was based on the idea of reincarnation of Sabbatai Tsevi’s soul into a new leader, several pretenders appeared, each claiming to be the new abode of the soul of the messiah. The Salonika group splintered into three principal branches—the Kavalieros, the Jakubis, and the Koniosos; the most important one for the present discussion is the last, led by Berukhiah Russo (in Islam: Osman Baba; 1677–1720).83 Berukhiah’s group was the most radical among the Dönmeh subsects: not only did he believe that the traditional laws of Judaism had been abrogated, but he claimed that, with the arrival of the messianic era, the thirty-six most serious transgressions punishable by the ultimate punishment of karet84 had turned into positive commandments (the category includes all sexual prohibitions, mainly various forms of incest). In 1716, Berukhiah’s followers declared him the incarnation not merely of the soul of the human messiah Sabbatai, but also of the God of Israel (the idea of the divinity of the messiah or some form of the doctrine of divine incarnation had appeared in earlier Sabbatian theology but was eschewed by most Sabbatians). His group promulgated this claim among other Sabbatian groups, and until his death in 1720, Berukhiah was worshiped by some Sabbatians of Salonika as a divine being, Signor Santo, Holy Lord.
At first, Frank was skeptical about the revelation of the “mystery of faith” that he had received during his wedding. He told his mystagogues that he would not believe their words until he saw that they possessed “the wisdom of making gold.”85 He also questioned Berukhiah’s divinity, asking: “If he really belonged to the Godhead, why did he die?” When told in response that the divine Berukhiah had to experience everything in the world, including the bitterness of death, Frank continued: “If he came to experience everything, why, then, did he not taste how it would be to be pasha, vizier, or sultan? Why did he not experience power? I don’t believe it.”86 Yet, notwithstanding his initial incredulity, Frank’s interest in the messiah of Salonika was aroused. Perhaps his ambitions were also awakened at this critical juncture: Frank decided to go to Salonika and take up where Berukhiah had left off, that is, to experience the only thing missing from the messiah’s catalog of accomplished experiences: power.
According to the Frankist chronicle, a year or so after his wedding, in November 1753, Frank arrived in Salonika accompanied by Rabbi Mordechai, his groomsman. Rabbi Mordechai ben Elias Margalit was a known Sabbatian from Prague; accused of adultery and other antinomian conduct, he also left Bohemia and moved to the Ottoman Empire after Moses Meir Kamenker was caught smuggling Sabbatian literature into Germany in 1725.87 According to Rabbi Jacob Emden, Frank arrived in Salonika as Rabbi Mordechai’s servant. The leaders of the Dönmeh told Rabbi Mordechai that secrets of the Torah could be revealed only through a young and unlearned man and asked him to let his servant act as a medium. Indeed, on the very first night that he stood before the Dönmeh, Frank entered a trance, fell to the ground, and revealed many secrets and mysteries.88 The Frankist chronicle, skimpier in details and—rather predictably—contrary to Emden in its appraisal of the protagonists of the story, described the same event as follows: “It was the first night on which the Lord had the Ru’ah hakodesh— sending of the Holy Spirit. . . . He said: ‘Mostro Signor abascharo, Our Lord descends.’”89 On the very first night that he spent among the Dönmeh, the soul of