Jacob Frank יעקב פרנק

Born in 1726 at Korolówka in Podolia, as Jacob Leibowicz. His father belonged to a secret Sabbatean circle. Trading, Frank fell in with the Sabbateans of Turkey—those who had gone over to Islam after Shabbetai Tzvi—and declared himself his direct successor.

In 1755 he returned to Podolia and began gathering the local sectarians around him. After the scandal at Landskron in 1756 the rabbis brought the matter into the open, and the assembly at Brody excommunicated them.

What followed had no precedent in Jewish history: the excommunicated went to the Church. Two disputations—at Kamenets in 1757 and at Lwów in 1759—were held under the presidency of Catholic clergy, one side Jewish and the other calling itself 'anti-Talmudists'. After the Kamenets disputation the bishop ordered every copy of the Talmud in his diocese burned.

In 1759 more than five hundred Frankists were baptised at Lwów; Frank himself was baptised twice that year. The insincerity soon showed: they still married only among themselves. In 1760 he was seized at Warsaw and held thirteen years in the monastery of Częstochowa—and the imprisonment made him a martyr in his followers' eyes.

Released in 1772, he set up a court at Brno, then at Offenbach, where he lived as 'Baron of Offenbach' until his death in 1791.

The movement dissolved: the scattered Frankists became genuine Catholics and entered the Polish nobility. For Jewish history this is the one case where a whole group left not under compulsion but of itself—and that is why it is particularly remembered.