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.
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