The Heresy of Jacob Frank
From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP USA
- Date of Publication 24 April 2023
- ISBN 9780197530634
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages272 pages
- Size 159x241x20 mm
- Weight 517 g
- Language English 298
Categories
Short description:
Jacob Frank (1726-1791) was once known as the most sinister of Jewish heretics, a man who led his sect to convert en masse to Christianity and led sexual orgies in secret meetings. But what was the truth behind these myths? The Heresy of Jacob Frank argues, based on close readings of Frank's late teachings, that Frank was not some sex-crazed "degenerate" but an original and prescient figure at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, reason and magic, Kabbalah and Western Esotericism.
MoreLong description:
The Heresy of Jacob Frank is the first monograph length study on the religious philosophy of Jacob Frank (1726-1791), who, in the wake of false messiah Sabbetai Zevi, led the largest mass apostasy in Jewish history. Based on close readings of Frank's late teachings, recorded in 1784 and 1790, this book challenges scholarly presentations of Frank that depict him as a sex-crazed "degenerate," and presents Frank as an original and prescient figure at the crossroads of tradition and modernity, reason and magic, Kabbalah and Western Esotericism.
Frank's worldview combines a skeptical rejection of religious law as ineffectual and repressive with a supernatural, esoteric myth of immortal beings, material magic, and worldly power. With close readings of the theological and narrative passages of Frank's teachings, Michaelson shows how the Frankist sect evolved from its Sabbatean roots and the infamous 1757-59 disputations before the Catholic Church, into a Western Esoteric society based on alchemy, secrecy, and sexual liberation. Sexual ritual, apparently tightly limited and controlled by the sect, was not a libertine bacchanal but an enactment of the messianic reality, a corporealization of what would later become known as spirituality.
While Frank was undoubtedly a manipulative, even abusive leader whose sect mostly disappeared from history, Michaelson suggests that his ideology anticipated themes that would become predominant in the Haskalah, Early Hasidism, and even contemporary 'New Age' Judaism. In an inversion of traditional religious values, Frank's antinomian theology held personal flourishing to be a religious virtue, affirmed only the material, and transferred messianic eros into social, sexual, and political reality.
In the mainstream of Jewish collective memory, Jacob Frank was portrayed as an egomaniacal and depraved ignoramus, a false messiah, and a cynical serial convert-to Islam, then Christianity...Jay Michaelson makes a complementary theoretical argument in The Heresy of Jacob Frank, which received last year's National Jewish Book Award for scholarship...Michaelson, well known as a popular writer on religion and spirituality and an activist for gay rights both in Jewish life and the broader world, has been studying Jacob Frank for almost two decades...In a recent essay, he described being "seduced" by the "allure" of Frank's vigorous confrontation with traditional Jewish law and norms in The Words of the Lord, the late miscellany of Frank's oral teachings and anecdotes.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Boundary Crosser
Chapter 1. “I tell you everything and tell you nothing”: Charlatan, Fool, Deviant, Heretic-Who Was Jacob Frank?
Chapter 2. “I do not look to heaven but at what God does here on Earth”: Frankist Antinomianism as Materialist Skepticism
Chapter 3. “Everything that is of the spirit has to be turned into flesh”: Magic, Myth, and the Material Imaginaire
Chapter 4. “To make a man in wholeness, stable and possessing eternal life”: The Occult Quest for Immortality
Chapter 5. “With this deed we go to the naked thing”: Sexual Antinomianism as Mystical Messianism
Chapter 6. “We have no need of books of Kabbalah”: Rejecting Kabbalah and Sabbateanism
Chapter 7. “The gods of freemasonry will have to do that which those two did”: Frankism as Western Esotericism
Chapter 8. “All religions change and go beyond the borders laid down by their ancestors”: Foreshadowing Secularism and Spirituality
Appendix: Review of Scholarship and Textual Notes
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
