The Frankists: Sabbateanism that left Judaism

Sabbateanism did not vanish after Shabbetai Tzvi's death; it went inward: secret circles lived in the communities for generations, and the hunt for them—the Hayyun affair, the Ramchal affair, the amulet controversy—fills the whole eighteenth century. The Frankists are how it ended at the eastern edge.

Jacob Frank, son of a man from a secret Sabbatean circle, traded in Turkey, fell in there with the Sabbateans who had gone over to Islam, and in 1755 returned to Podolia declaring himself Shabbetai Tzvi's direct successor.

In 1756 a scandal broke at Landskron, the rabbis brought the matter into the open, and the assembly at Brody excommunicated them. And then something happened for which Jewish history had no precedent: the excommunicated went to the Church for protection and called themselves 'anti-Talmudists'. The disputation at Kamenets in 1757 was presided over by a Catholic bishop—and after it the bishop ordered every copy of the Talmud in the diocese burned. The second disputation was at Lwów in 1759.

That same year more than five hundred Frankists were baptised. Frank was baptised twice. The insincerity soon showed—they still married only among themselves—and in 1760 he was seized at Warsaw. He spent thirteen years in the monastery of Częstochowa, and for his own people that made him a martyr. He was released in 1772, kept a court at Brno and at Offenbach, and died there in 1791.

It ended in dissolution: the scattered Frankists became genuine Catholics and entered the Polish nobility. For Jewish history the case is unique: a whole group left not under compulsion but of itself—and took with it what had begun as an expectation of redemption.

And one lesson was drawn: the burning of the Talmud in Podolia in 1757 was arranged not by Christians against Jews but by yesterday's Jews against Jews. After that, suspicion of hidden Sabbateanism in the communities was no longer a fear but an experience.