Rot/Salvation/Happiness

I came across the story of Jacob Frank in Czeslow Milosz’s History of Polish Literature. I was looking up Jan Potocki (whose Turkish valet, Ibrahim, is, for some reason, given the name Osman by Milosz – out of such small deviations in the constant rain of microscopic facts come our free will and our myths).

Milosz wrote that Frank came from a family of Sabbateans – Jews who followed the heretical beliefs of the Sabbatai Zevi. His family fled to Turkey, which is where he had a vision of Poland as the promised land. “Upon his return there, he was greeted enthusiastically, mostly by poor folks opposing the rabbis, but also by some Jewish notables. Frank, as a new messiah, proclaimed the end of Jewish law and, as a matter of fact, of all law – “I have come to abolish all laws and religions in order to bring life to the world.” The ascent to the kingdom of freedom and wealth was to be accomplished by a descent into abomination and perversion. A Manichean tradition, so strong in the Balkans, is clearly perceivable in Frank’s teachings. Evil was to be overcome by doing evil, sin by sinning. The Frankists, like the Hasidim, practiced ecstatic dancing and singing accompanied by the clapping of hands, but also held orgiastic rituals whereby men and women undressed “to see truth in its nakedness” and copulated indiscriminately – while only the leader stood apart. Frank interpreted the idea of the mystic trinity in the cabbala as a union of the Holy Primeval (attika kadisha); the Holy King (Malka kadisha, who was the messiah (Frank himself); and the Primeval Mother (Matronita elyona), who was none other than Frank’s daughter, Eve.”

Frank’s followers were brought up before the Polish authorities by the orthodox rabbis, but turned the tables by “converting” – baptism being the lowest and most abasing thing one could do. Apparently the Christians themselves, after gloating about the conversions, began to suspect that Frank was not what he seemed, and ‘imprisoned’ him for thirteen years in a monastery, Czestochowa, where he was – oh how loose the world can become – inexplicably given leaway to practice his own rituals. His followers slowly filled up the region, and he was well supplied with money. Eventually, he ‘migrated to Offenbach in Germany, where, as “Count Frank”, he was surrounded by a mounted bodyguard in fanciful uniforms and used to drive in a princely coach. The French Revolution seemed to be an accomplishment of Frank’s prophecies, and many Frankists joined the Jacobins (among them, the heir apparent and nephew of Frank, known in Vienna under the name of Frank Thomas Edler von Schoenfeldt, and his brother Emanuel), only to be beheaded on the guillotine in 1794 along with Danton.”

Milosz’s source for this information is evidently Gershom Scholem, Benjamin’s friend, whose essay about Frank, Redemption through Sin, was, according to the famous Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano, “perhaps one of his greatest essays”. Steven Wasserstrom makes the case for a parallel with Pierre Klossowski’s essay on Sade, “The Marquis de Sade and the French Revolution”, given in 1939 to the College of Sociology. The connecting link here is Klossowski and Scholem’s mutual friend, Walter Benjamin. Klossowski had this to say about Sade’s notion of evil: ‘the evil must, therefore, erupt once and for all; the bad seed has to flourish so the mind can tear it out and consume it. In a word, evil must be made to prevail once and for all in the world so that it will destroy itself and so Sade’s mind can find peace.” [quoted, Wasserstrom, 1999:219]
This is Scholem’s summary of Frankism:

“. . . just as a grain of wheat must rot in the earth before it can sprout, so the deeds of the
“believers” must be truly “rotten” before they can germinate the redemption. This
metaphor, which appears to have been extremely popular, conveys the whole of sectarian
Sabbatian psychology in a nutshell: in the period of transition, while the redemption is still in
a state of concealment, the Torah in its explicit form must be denied, for only thus can it too
become “concealed” and ultimately renewed.”

One might wonder why Milosz would even include a mention of the Frankists in a history of Polish literature. He was no doubt influenced by Mickiewicz, who mentioned the Frankists indirectly in his lectures on Poland before the College de France in the 1840s. After discussing the political mystic and mathematician, Wronski, who proclaimed the religious mission of Napoleon, Mickiewicz adds:

I would draw your attention to the fact that during this time, in Poland, there were numerous Israelite sects, half Christian and half Jewish, which were also messianic, and which believed to see in Napoleon a messiah or at least a precursor.” [Les Slaves, Mickiewicz 306]

According to Abraham Duker, ‘A correspondent from Warsaw in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums in 1838 referred to Mickiewicz as a Frankist “belonging to our nation.” [Duker, 1963, 292]

To be continued