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Chapter 1

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In the Shadow of the Herem

The Lanckoronie Affair

Toward the end of January 1756, Jacob Frank and a group of other Sabbatians were discovered conducting a secret ritual in the little town of Lanckoronie, near the Moldavian border. The discovery set a process in motion, which led to the emergence of Frankism as a phenomenon distinct from other branches of the wider Sabbatian movement. The ensuing sequence of events included the arrest of the participants in the ritual, a series of unusually harsh punitive measures by the Jewish authorities, public clashes between Sabbatian and non-Sabbatian Jews in Podolia, the involvement of Christians in what would seem an internal Jewish affair, public disputations between the representatives of the Frankists and of the rabbinate, and, ultimately, the conversion of Frank and his followers to Roman Catholicism.

The Lanckoronie incident is one of the most widely known events from the history of Frankism. The sect’s reputation for orgiastic rites and antinomian ideology is based mainly on the descriptions of the Lanckoronie ritual and the testimony gathered by the authorities in its wake. Indeed, the key concept of mitsvah ha-ba’ah ba-averah (lit., a commandment fulfilled by breaking another commandment), which gave the title to Gershom Scholem’s seminal essay on what he termed “radical Sabbatianism,”¹ derives from one item of this testimony and does not appear in any other source. Scholem’s essay—especially after its title’s mistranslation into English as “Redemption through Sin”— became the best-known scholarly account of eighteenth-century Sabbatianism and shaped the perception of the movement among scholars and the wider public alike.

Given the impact of the Lanckoronie affair on the later history of the Frankist movement, surprisingly little is known about the incident itself. The extant sources disagree about almost everything: the exact date and character of the ritual, the manner and circumstances of its discovery, the number and names of the participants, and the nature of the subsequent developments. Scholarly accounts based on these sources contradict one another.² In order to clarify some ingrained misunderstandings (and to avoid exacerbating the existing confusion), I shall first lay out the available primary evidence, juxtapose the contradictory statements in it, and then try to establish the basic outline of what happened. On that basis, I shall offer suggestions as to the nature and the theological significance of the ritual.

Frankist sources (written twenty to thirty years after the incident) give only brief accounts of the Lanckoronie affair. Thus, the Frankist chronicle states: “[Frank] traveled from Lwów to Kopyczyńce. On 21 January, after having stayed there for only one night, the Lord traveled on the 25^th [sic] to Lanckoronie with Jakubowski and Jacob Lwowski. In Lanckoronie, all the True Believers sang, danced, and then they were jailed together with the Lord. On the third day, Turks came from no one knows where and why and ordered to set the Lord alone free.”³

The muddled chronology of the account does not allow us to date the ritual with precision, though it evidently took place during the last week of January 1756, and Frank arrived in Lanckoronie only a day or a few days before its commencement. “Jakubowski” was the Christian name taken later by Frank’s groomsman and teacher-turned-disciple, Nahman ben Samuel, then rabbi of Busk; Jacob Lwowski, otherwise hardly mentioned in Frankist documents, was the stepson of Frank’s other teacher and patron Mordechai ben Elias of Prague. The identities and number of other Sabbatians are not known; also unclear is the character of the ceremony, except that it involved singing and dancing.

The only mention of the Lanckoronie affair in The Words of the Lord is even more cursory: “When I came to Lanckoronie and you were singing songs, having covered the windows during the night, I went out and opened the window so that everything would inevitably be heard.”⁴ Again, the only thing we know about the character of the ceremony is that the participants sang songs. However, the text does present an interesting and important piece of information: the disclosure of the secret ritual was an intentional provocation on Frank’s part, and the Sabbatians were revealed because he opened the windows to let the town’s inhabitants hear them singing during the night.

Jewish sources contain more detailed accounts of the Lanckoronie ritual. The earliest of these comes from Rabbi Jacob Emden’s Sefer shimush (1760):

And they took the wife of the local rabbi (who also belonged to the sect), a woman beautiful but lacking discretion,⁵ they undressed her naked and placed the Crown of the Torah on her head, sat her under the canopy like a bride, and danced a dance around her. They celebrated with bread and wine of the condemned,⁶ and they pleased their hearts with music like King David . . . and in dance they fell upon her kissing her, and called her ‘mezuzah,’ as if they were kissing a mezuzah.⁷

Emden supplemented this report by telling how a few local Jews wanted to purchase a drink in a house adjacent to the place where the rite took place. They heard the sounds of singing, burst into the house, and severely beat up those present; only after calling for help from Gentile neighbors were the Frankists left alone. The following day, a message was sent to the nearby communities. Rabbinic courts gathered testimony from witnesses and pronounced a herem (ban of excommunication) against the participants in the ritual. Emden named Frank as leader of the group and stated that he had come to Lanckoronie “for he knew that the sect of Sabbatai Tsevi would gather there.”⁸ Aside from Frank, the only participants in the ritual identified by Emden were the rabbi of Lanckoronie and his wife. No information was given about the other participants, the date of the event, or the exact character of the non-Jewish neighbors’ intervention.

Another Jewish account appeared in Abraham of Szarogród’s “Ma’aseh nora be-Podolia”, first published in 1769.⁹ According to the author (who claimed to be an eyewitness of the affair), the incident took place not in Lanckoronie but in his hometown of Szarogród. A group of visitors led by Frank came to this town a few days before the festival of Shavuot (in early June) and stayed in the house of a certain Rabbi Hayyim Maggid. The community offered the visitors bread and meat; Frank, however, refused to have any dealings with local Jews, whom he claimed to be “descendants of the mixed multitude.”¹⁰

On the Shabbat before the commencement of the festival, the congregation awaited Frank’s group in the synagogue in order to begin the evening service. As the strangers were late, the rabbi sent a beadle to bring them over. The beadle went to Rabbi Hayyim’s house, where he saw a young woman naked to the waist with her head uncovered and hair loose; Frank and his company were dancing around her, hugging and kissing her. They had crosses (tselamim) hung on their necks.¹¹ Alerted by the beadle, the entire community ran to see the abomination. The following day, the rabbi of Szarogród pronounced a herem on the delinquents and sent information about the ban into other communities of Podolia. The sectarians ignored the ban and started a countercampaign against the rabbinate, which ultimately led to the staging of a public disputation between the parties.¹²

The most extensive Jewish account of the Lanckoronie affair can be found in Dov Ber Birkenthal’s Divre binah (1800).¹³ According to Birkenthal, Frank called upon the Lwów Sabbatians, followers of Krysa, to go with him to Salonika, where they would prostrate themselves on the grave of Berukhiah and would see him perform wonders. Some fifteen people, including a son of one of the leaders of the community and a young woman dressed as a man, heeded his call and left Lwów. On the way to Salonika, they reached the small town of Lanckoronie, where they took lodgings in the house of one Leyb. They were joined by several people from Lanckoronie and nearby communities and organized celebrations with singing and dancing that lasted several days.

One night, a peasant came to Lanckoronie to sell wood; having seen the celebrations, he asked the local rabbi, Gershon Katz, why they were being held. The rabbi knew nothing about the festivities and sent a boy to spy on Leyb’s house. On his return, the boy reported that the windows were covered with heavy carpets, so that he could not see much; but through a hole in the wall, he had seen men and women dancing together. The following night, Rabbi Gershon, officials of the Jewish community, Romanowski (the Polish governor of the town), and the local magistrate went to Leyb’s house; peeping through holes in the wall, they all saw naked men and women dancing and heard them singing rhymed chants in praise of Sabbatai Tsevi and Berukhiah. The governor immediately ordered the arrest of eight of those present (including Frank); they were jailed in the Lanckoronie military encampment and were set to work hewing heavy stones. The rest were set free.

A search carried out in the house revealed many subversive and heretical writings. The writings were confiscated by the rabbi, who also wrote to the district rabbi, Menahem Mendel of Satanów, asking him to come to Lanckoronie in person and investigate the incident. However, Rabbi Menahem Mendel was ill and sent his brother-in-law, Eleazar Lippman, accompanied by several community functionaries. An impromptu bet din was set up in Lanckoronie, and those arrested were brought before it in fetters, one by one. Some of them confessed to various misdeeds and sought repentance; they also reported the names and crimes of other Sabbatians. The delinquents were placed under a ban, and the property of the Jews who left Lwów with Frank was confiscated by the rabbinate.

Ber Birkenthal’s account was composed more than half a century after the events described. In recounting what had happened in Lanckoronie, its author relied on oral sources, as well as on the official protocol of a Christian investigation of the affair (I shall discuss the details of this investigation below). This protocol was written in 1757 by the canon of the Kamieniec consistory, Franciszek Kazimierz Kleyn, and published a year later under the title Coram iudicio recolendae memoriae Nicolai de stemmate Jelitarum a Dembowa Góra Dembowski, Dei & Apostolicae Sedis Gratia Episcopi Camenecenis . . . Pars III: De decisoriis Processus inter infideles Iudaeos Dioecesis Camenecensis, in materia iudaicae eorum perfidiae, aliorumque muto obiectorum a.d. 1757 expedita ac in executis pendens. It is the most important Christian account of the Lanckoronie incident.

Kleyn’s protocol placed the Lanckoronie ritual on the night of 27–28 January 1756 in the house of Leyb Aaron.¹⁴ Those who had gathered there closed the door and covered the windows with carpets to avoid being disturbed by people coming to the market the following day. Long into the night, they devoted themselves to the “reading of the Scriptures and singing of the Psalms.”¹⁵ A local arendator, one Gershon, summoned a few Jews, who, accompanied by the magistrate’s attendants, broke into the house, arrested the participants in the ritual, beat them, and confiscated their property, including books and manuscripts. A boy (in Kleyn’s account, he is one of the participants in the ritual, not the rabbi’s servant) was brought before the town governor, Romanowski, flogged, and compelled to describe the ritual and repeat the chants. Those arrested were forced to do menial labor. Romanowski feared that Gershon was trying to implicate him in a scandalous legal case and tried to restrain the arendator, stating that “he found no cause in these Jews.”¹⁶

Yet Gershon paid no heed to Romanowski and sued the arrested Jews in the municipal court of Lanckoronie. Parallel to the proceedings of the magistrates, the Jews initiated their own case before the gathering of the elders of the Lanckoronie, Satanów, and Smotrycz communities. The arrested parties were shackled by their necks and interrogated under coercion; one of them was beaten “almost to death” by the beadle of the Lanckoronie synagogue.¹⁷ Their houses were broken into, their property looted, and their books and manuscripts confiscated. The participants in the ritual whom Kleyn mentioned by name were Frank, Woł (the rabbi of Krzywcze), and Leyb Aaron of Lanckoronie (owner of the house).

On the basis of the extant sources, a few basic facts can be established. Following Kleyn’s protocol, we can date the Lanckoronie incident to the night of 27–28 January 1756. The Frankist chronicle (often inaccurate in matters of chronology) shifted it by a few days; Abraham of Szarogród, who dated it to May or June of the same year, confused the timing of the event itself with that of the conclusion of the rabbinic investigation and the issuing of the excommunications. (Abraham’s moving the event from Lanckoronie to Szarogród, an attempt to give himself extra credibility as an eyewitness, can be discounted.) About a dozen men and women participated in the ritual; the list certainly includes Frank and the owner of the house, Leyb of Lanckoronie. Most reports also attest to the participation of one or more communal rabbis: the Frankist chronicle mentions Nahman of Busk (Jakubowski); Kleyn Woł of Krzywcze, and Emden the unnamed rabbi of Lanckoronie.¹⁸ A few participants were arrested by local Polish authorities. Frank, a Turkish subject, was released almost immediately; the Polish Jews were jailed for a longer period of time.

Following the discovery and the arrest, there was some physical violence, and books were confiscated. The exact character of the Frankists’ actions is more difficult to determine: the only element on which all sources agree is that the Lanckoronie celebrations involved singing and dancing. Information about the particulars of the ritual can be found only in Jewish anti-Frankist accounts. Whereas it is impossible to verify the accuracy of every detail, I am inclined to accept the basic veracity of Emden’s description: while extremely tendentious in his judgments and interpretations, on many occasions Emden has been proved to be careful and trustworthy with regard to facts,¹⁹ and there is no reason to assume that he invented an entire ritual in this particular instance; his account therefore will provide a point of departure for an interpretation of the theological meaning of the ceremony.

Emden’s description of the Lanckoronie incident suggests that Frank and his followers performed a rite based on Jewish rituals of the adulation of or the mystical marriage with the Torah. For instance, the festival of Simhat Torah, which concludes the annual cycle of the public reading of the Law, includes carrying the Torah scrolls around the synagogue accompanied by singing and dancing. When the scrolls are carried through the congregation, it is customary for men to touch the edge of their prayer shawl to them and then kiss the prayer shawl as a sign of respect and veneration. The Simhat Torah rite also includes a great deal of marriage symbolism: the person who completes the reading of the Torah is called hatan Torah— bridegroom of the Torah—and in some communities, he is placed, together with the scroll, under the bridal canopy.²⁰ Also, kabbalistic tradition interpreted the festival as a marriage between Israel and the Torah.²¹

While these customs and interpretations belong to the perfectly normative Jewish practice, in Sabbatianism the mystical marriage with the Torah acquired a special significance: in 1648, Sabbatai Tsevi, having invited the most prominent rabbis to a banquet, erected a bridal canopy, had a Torah scroll brought in, and performed the marriage ceremony between himself and the Torah.²² He signed his letters “the bridegroom coming out from under the canopy, the husband of the dearly beloved Torah, who is the most beauteous and lovely lady” and was fond of singing his favorite song, the Spanish romanza “Meliselda,” while hugging a Torah scroll in his arms.²³

Sabbatai was severely censured by the rabbis for his performances; still, the concept of the mystical marriage of a Jew and the Torah was deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition, and his action only stretched the boundaries of mainstream Judaism. The Lanckoronie rite, however, seemed to go far beyond Sabbatai’s stretching the boundaries of the acceptable: it turned the acceptable upside down. Sabbatai replaced the human bride with the Torah; participants in the Lanckoronie ritual replaced the Torah with a naked woman. In imitation of Simhat Torah observances, the wife of the Lanckoronie rabbi was adorned with typical ornaments of the Torah scroll (the Crown of the Law), seated under the canopy like a bride, and kissed and hugged in veneration. This first account of a Frankist rite encapsulated the relationship between Frankism and Sabbatianism sensu largo. While Sabbatai Tsevi—the “true” messiah—ascended to the status of the bridegroom of the true word of God, in Frankism the true word of God descended into palpably material female flesh.

The idea of systematically turning everything spiritual into material, voiced by Frank for the first time at the grave of Nathan of Gaza, was put into practice. Aside from its heavily transgressive nature, this trope also encompassed the seeds of Frankism’s romance with Christianity and anticipated its later acceptance of the concept of incarnation (as opposed to the deification expounded by the sect of Berukhiah) and the eventual appropriation of elements of Catholic Mariology. This sheds special light on Emden’s otherwise obscure remark that the ritual involved celebrations with the “bread and wine of the condemned.”

The phrase “wine of the condemned” (yein anushim) appears in the Hebrew Bible only once, in the prophet Amos’s description of Israel’s transgressions and its backsliding into idol worship (Amos 2:9). Taken in itself, Emden’s statement could have been understood as a merely formulaic emphasis on the transgressive and idolatrous character of the Frankist rite. Yet juxtaposed with other accounts, it might hint that the Lanckoronie ritual entailed some form of imitation (or parody) of the Christian Eucharist. This impression is strengthened by Abraham of Szarogród’s mention that participants in the ritual wore crosses on their necks. Whereas, as we have seen, Abraham’s account is unreliable when it comes to the date and the place of the event (and many other things as well), I am prepared to take his word on this particular detail: Kleyn’s Coram iudicio mentions that, after the discovery of the ritual, one of the anti-Sabbatian Jews “burned the cross”²⁴— an act otherwise inexplicable—and Frankist sources confirm that Frank and his followers used crucifixes in other ceremonies.²⁵

The Investigations

All the sources agree that non-Jews were involved in the Lanckoronie case from the very outset: on the request of their Jewish opponents, participants in the ritual were apprehended by magistrates and brought before the town’s governor. By the standards of eighteenth-century Poland, there was nothing unusual about this request: both the official Jewish leadership and individual Jews often called upon Polish authorities in internal Jewish matters, and sometimes they even had recourse to non-Jewish courts as an arbiter in conflicts among Jews.²⁶ What happened next, however, was highly unusual: the case became a matter of interest for not only the town governor and the magistrates but for the Catholic ecclesiastical authorities.

Only four days after the Lanckoronie incident, on 1 February 1756, the bishop’s consistory court of the Kamieniec Podolski diocese demanded that the books confiscated in Lanckoronie be submitted to it for inspection; three days later, the court ordered the arrested participants in the ceremony to be brought to Kamieniec for interrogation. The directives of the court touched upon a moot legal issue: following Sigmundus III’s privilege of 1592, the Jews of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were granted full legal autonomy and were not subject to the jurisdiction of the Church unless they lived on Church-owned estates. While individual members of the clergy sometimes violated this privilege and encroached on the rights of the Jews, Church tribunals normally did not hear cases in which none of the parties was a Christian. Ostensibly, the intervention of the Kamieniec episcopal court in the Lanckoronie affair constituted an open—and unprecedented—breach of jurisdiction.

At the time of the Lanckoronie incident, the Kamieniec diocese was headed by Bishop Mikołaj of Dębowa Góra Dembowski (1680–1757). Jewish historiography has routinely regarded Dembowski as a rabid anti-Semite (as exemplified, for instance, by his 1750 edict expelling the Jews from the city of Kamieniec) and maintained that the bishop “heard” about the events in Lanckoronie, overstepped his prerogatives, violated the laws granting Jews legal autonomy, and forced them to appear before his court. What is certainly true about this scenario is that the bishop indeed was a rabid anti-Semite. However, the scholars who have propounded this line of argument never bothered to explain how exactly Dembowski—head of a diocese the size of half of France—could have “heard” about an incident involving a few Jews in a remote townlet only three days after it took place.

The official protocol of the consistory court’s investigation was published in Franciszek Kleyn’s Coram iudicio and was already known to the first scholars of Frankism. While Kleyn’s tortuous Latin is not free of ambiguities, the protocol is clear and unequivocal in this particular case: the episcopal court took up the case because it was explicitly and directly asked to do so by the Jewish authorities. Immediately after the arrest of the participants in the ritual by the Lanckoronie magistrates, the “elders of the Satanów and Lanckoronie synagogues” brought suit against them at the Kamieniec consistory for “deviating from the Mosaic Law and the ancient [Jewish] traditions.”²⁷ This formulation of the accusation was fraught with consequences.

The canon law principle that the Catholic Church has supreme authority in the internal religious affairs of not only Christians but all peoples and all confessions has a long history. The popes claimed power to punish the Jews for deviations from Mosaic Law, exactly as they were empowered to punish pagans for transgressing natural law.²⁸ Innocent IV (1243–54) already stated that “the pope can judge the Jews . . . if they invent heresies against their own law.”²⁹ As Jeremy Cohen has noted, “Innocent’s line of thought quickly became the common opinion of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century canonists. It apparently guided the friars of the papal Inquisition. By the second half of the fourteenth century, the Dominican Inquisitor Nicholas Eymeric considered it a direct mandate to the Inquisition to defend genuine Judaism against internal heresy.”³⁰ The functionaries of Bishop Dembowski’s court followed Eymeric’s position. They invoked the bull of Gregory XIII Antiqua Iudaeorum improbitas,³¹ giving the Inquisition jurisdiction over the Jews of Rome in cases of blasphemy, protection of heretics, and possession of forbidden works, and stated that since the papal Inquisition did not operate in Poland, local consistories had the right and obligation to conduct proceedings in its place. Upon the request of the Jewish authorities, the consistory court of the Kamieniec diocese claimed general jurisdiction in cases concerning heresy (nobis quoque, . . . potestats inquisitionis contra haereticam pravitatem . . . de iure competat)³² and undertook to investigate specific allegations of heresy against the Sabbatians.

To the best of my knowledge, the Kamieniec investigation was the first case in early modern Poland in which a Christian ecclesiastical court looked into allegations of a Jewish heresy. It is not clear whether the bet din of Satanów knew what they were doing when they denounced the arrested Sabbatians to Dembowski and approached the bishop’s court. The explicit formulation of the nature of the crime as “deviation from the true teachings of Mosaic Law” would suggest that the accusers knew that the Church had prima facie jurisdiction in such cases, and it seems to be no coincidence that they approached precisely this court.

Very quickly, however, the rabbis realized that the voluntary renunciation of the Jewish judicial autonomy was not a good idea. A week after the commencement of the investigation in Kamieniec, they tried to backtrack; the consistory protocol noted that “on 9 February, the accusers withdrew their case and refused to continue the proceedings.”³³ But it was too late: the Catholic clergy had already gained the opportunity to meddle in what until then had been an internal Jewish affair. The consistory “decided to continue the proceedings for its own information,” demanded that the arrested parties be transferred from Lanckoronie to Kamieniec, and ordered that the inspection of books and manuscripts confiscated by the bet din be carried out by qualified priests.³⁴

The Kamieniec consistory also demanded more information. Detentions and interrogations of suspected Sabbatian heretics by local Polish authorities occurred in other locations in Podolia: on 1 March, four suspects were apprehended in Jezierzany, and three weeks later, a large group was arrested in Wielchowiec. The detainees were brought to Kamieniec for questioning and faced Bishop Dembowski.³⁵ Further incidents attesting to the antinomian behavior of the Sabbatians took place. One Shabbat, the Sabbatian Samuel of Busk “out of spite” rode a horse and smoked tobacco in front of the house of the chief rabbi of Lwów and the Land rabbi of Ruthenia, Hayyim Cohen Rapaport. He also publicly reviled the rabbi.³⁶ Rapaport’s response was similar to that of the elders of Satanów and Lanckoronie: he brought Samuel to the court of the archbishop of Lwów, Mikołaj Wyżycki.

The protocols of the Lwów consistory for 1756 are no longer extant, so we do not know the legal basis of the case; all that is left is an index to the protocols that attests that the bishop’s court indeed heard the case against Samuel in causa intuitu certarum cathegoriarum.³⁷ The Lwów trial was apparently similar to the one from Kamieniec and invoked the Church’s jurisdiction in cases of heresy against the Mosaic Law and natural law. Some information can be culled from a Latin letter sent in 1757 to the papal nuncio in Warsaw by the shtadlan of the Council of Four Lands, Baruch me-Erets Yavan. When describing the case to the nuncio, Yavan stated that Samuel “professed and disseminated new religious tenets contrary to the Ten Commandments, the Old [Testament] Law as well as the natural law.”³⁸

The shtadlan also mentioned that the delinquent was deemed a heretic by Bishop Wyżycki’s court and was delivered to the secular authorities for punishment (pro quibus criminibus fuit haereticus adinventus, et pro paenis ad forum saeculare remissus).³⁹ According to Emden’s anonymous informant, Samuel was condemned to death and hanged. Neither the Jews nor the Christians wanted to bury him, so the body lay under the gallows for days.⁴⁰ Emden’s informant seemed to have exaggerated: execution for heresy was extremely rare in Poland, and when it did occur (as in the 1689 case of the nobleman Kazimierz Łyszczyński, author of the tractate De non existentia Dei),⁴¹ it was widely publicized and discussed. The complete absence of any mention of Samuel’s case in Polish sources suggests that it did not end in any spectacular way. Ber Birkenthal (who mentioned a trial in Bishop Wyżycki’s court without giving Samuel’s name) reported that the defendant was accused of “inventing a new faith and new religion” (al hamtsa’ah emunah ve-dat hadashah) and that he was pronounced guilty but that bribery had saved him from any punishment.⁴²

Regardless of what the true outcome of Samuel of Busk’s case was, it is clear that a new paradigm of the struggle between the Sabbatians and their opponents was being established in Podolia. Provocative public violations of normative Judaism and challenges to rabbinic authority became a daily matter. The standard response of the rabbinate became denunciation to Christian ecclesiastical authorities and the accusation of heresy. The involvement of episcopal courts and of such prominent and powerful clergymen as Dembowski and Wyżycki constituted a mortal danger for the Sabbatians (even if the testimony about Samuel’s hanging is probably untrue), but it also gave them a chance to argue their case before the state and the Church authorities. In mid-March, during the Fast of Esther, Frank gathered the Sabbatians in Kopczyńce and announced: “‘If we have the True God and you believe in him, why should we hide? Let us go in the open and do public damage. Whoever wants to give his body and cling to the love of the Faith, let him walk with me.’ And they went. . . . The Lord himself had jam and vodka in his hand and gave everyone in public in the streets something to eat.”⁴³

Open violation of the Fast of Esther must have been part of Frank’s wider strategy of instigating public confrontation with the rabbis. The account fits nicely with the claim that he deliberately opened the windows in Lanckoronie; Frank apparently sought to provoke the Jewish authorities in hopes that he would be given access to the bishop and thus gain the support of the Christians. He succeeded: two days after the Kopczyńce incident, he was arrested, together with several other participants, and brought to face Dembowski. Those arrested were released after a week and granted salvus conductus for the duration of the consistory’s proceedings.⁴⁴ The Sabbatians dispersed to their homes; Frank left the Commonwealth and headed for Salonika.⁴⁵

While the cases were being tried before the consistories of Kamieniec and Lwów, Jewish authorities conducted their own investigation. The rabbinic council of the Land of Ruthenia gathered in Lwów on 10 May⁴⁶ and obliged the rabbi of Satanów to collect testimony concerning Sabbatianism in the area of his jurisdiction. The Satanów bet din sat between 31 May and 13 June; the testimony that it collected (along with the testimony from the Lwów case of Samuel of Busk sent to the nuncio by Baruch me-Erets Yavan) is the fullest extant account of Sabbatian antinomianism.

The Satanów rabbinic court collected twenty-seven short depositions and one long confession from a repentant Sabbatian. The vast majority of the short depositions were given not by the Sabbatians themselves but by people who saw their misdeeds (on one occasion, spying through a keyhole)⁴⁷ or even by those who had only heard about them. Most deponents took great pains to emphasize that they themselves did not participate in the crimes ascribed to others; some claimed that they had been given the opportunity to participate but had declined to do so or escaped at the last minute.⁴⁸ The offenses attributed to the Sabbatians pertained to three main spheres of activity. First, they involved violations of Shabbat and dietary laws. Thus Joseph of Rohatyn, who did admit to having taken part in prohibited rites, described in detail how during Passover he had eaten a slice of bread with “the other thing” (pork) and butter and had drunk nonkosher wine; he also stated that it was customary among the Sabbatians to include a piece of pork and a piece of cheese in a Shabbat meal.⁴⁹

Second, they touched upon theological issues. For instance, Samuel of Busk professed his belief that “there is One God in the Trinity, and the Fourth Person is the Holy Mother”;⁵⁰ others mentioned the belief in the annulment of the Torah of Moses and its replacement by the new Torah of Sabbatai Tsevi⁵¹ and admitted possessing and copying heretical books and manuscripts.⁵² Third, they constituted sexual transgressions. Samuel of Busk stated that “it is permissible to have children and to have sexual intercourse with someone else’s wife or one’s own sister, or even—though only in secret—with one’s own mother. As I am old now, I no longer do it, but twenty years ago (and I have professed this faith for twenty-four years), I had carnal relations with the wife of my son. . . . And I believe that all this is permitted because God commanded us to do thus.”⁵³

Other testimonies described the breaking of the prohibition of incest,⁵⁴ having sexual relations with menstruating women,⁵⁵ masturbation (also in public),⁵⁶ as well as the practice of “sexual hospitality,” whereby a host offered his wife or daughter to a stranger coming as a guest to his house. This custom was known to the Hebrew Bible, as attested by the episodes with Lot’s daughters (Gen. 19) and the Levite and his concubine (Judg. 19:22–30); it had been widespread in the ancient Middle East and Central Asia and was known to survive in tribal societies until modern times.⁵⁷ The Dönmeh branch led by Frank’s putative father-in-law, Yehudah Levi Tova, also was rumored to practice sexual hospitality,⁵⁸ and it seems that the custom filtered down to the Podolian Sabbatians as well. Thus, the women interrogated by the Satanów bet din reported that they slept with strangers “upon the wish of the[ir] husband[s],”⁵⁹ who “told [them] it was a positive commandment.”⁶⁰ One deposition dealt with a woman who had had intercourse with a stranger without her husband’s permission and thereby provoked his ire, “for such a deed is not considered by them a commandment.”⁶¹ Another mentioned a complaint voiced by a Sabbatian who came to a house of a fellow believer: “Why did we come here? He would not honor us with his wife.”⁶²

After completing the proceedings, the Satanów bet din imposed penalties. Joseph of Rohatyn made a public confession of sins and described his deeds in front of the entire congregation (a matter uncommon in Jewish tradition, which normally forbade public description of one’s sin). Then he received thirty-nine lashes and prostrated himself on the threshold of the synagogue so that those coming and going would tread upon his body. He divorced his wife (because she had had sexual relations with others)⁶³ and declared his children bastards. He was banished from the Rohatyn community and was prohibited ever to make any contacts with other Jews. He was supposed to wander alone for the rest of his days.⁶⁴

Herem

The humiliating ceremony undergone by Joseph of Rohatyn in his hometown synagogue—public confession followed by thirty-nine lashes with the congregation treading upon the penitent—is not unknown in early modern Judaism: Uriel da Costa underwent exactly the same ordeal in Amsterdam in 1639.⁶⁵ In da Costa’s case, the ceremony was expiation preceding the annulment of a ban of excommunication previously imposed upon him. In the case of Joseph, the Satanów documents make no explicit reference to such a ban, but the banishment and prohibition of communicatio civilis were typical sanctions associated with excommunication.

Jewish sources describing the Lanckoronie incident mention that the participants in the rite were placed under a ban; we also know that on 26 May 1756, a week or so before the launching of the proceedings of the Satanów bet din, the rabbinic assembly of Brody pronounced a herem on the Sabbatians. “The wicked men” belonging to the sect of Sabbatai Tsevi were to be “excluded and repudiated by the community of Israel; their wives and daughters were to be regarded as harlots, their offspring as bastards.” Other Jews were forbidden to have any dealings with them or to assist them in any way. The ban restricted the study of printed kabbalistic works, which had an official rabbinic approval, to those over the age of thirty, and manuscript works (including Lurianic writings) to the age of forty.⁶⁶ It is highly interesting that on the very same day, the very same assembly also issued a pro-Eibeschütz proclamation.⁶⁷ The “Sabbatian” and “anti-Sabbatian” camps, often depicted as monolithic, had much more fluid boundaries: the same rabbis simultaneously exonerated the alleged Sabbatian Eibeschütz and vigorously condemned the Frankists, thereby drawing a clear line between the two cases.⁶⁸

Herem (the Jewish ban of excommunication) developed from the biblical anathema and became one of the chief means of social control and coercion available to the leadership of medieval and early modern Jewry. Technically, the herem could have been imposed by an individual Jew (especially in matters relating to debt settlement), but it was normally used by rabbinic tribunals as a judicial measure for certain prescribed offenses. The Talmud lists twenty-four such offenses (the list ranges from speaking ill of a learned man to failure on the part of a ritual slaughterer to show his knife to the rabbi for examination), but common practice substantially extended the applicability of the herem. The scope of its authority also increased over time: initially, the ban was applicable only in the area under the direct jurisdiction of a given bet din; but later times increasingly saw instances of pronouncing a herem on foreigners. As with Christian excommunication, a procedure developed for informing other communities that a herem had been imposed so that it could be repeated and enforced in other localities.⁶⁹

There were several levels of severity of the ban (with some forms specifying the duration of the punishment from the outset and limiting the harshness of the sanctions imposed) as well as different levels of formality in its imposition. The most rigorous form, called “the great herem,” “the solemn herem,” or “the herem of Joshua son of Nun,” encompassed an elaborate ritual that demanded the presence of the entire congregation and included sounding the ram’s horn, extinguishing black candles, and blowing hoses made of animal intestines until they burst with a bang; such a herem was imposed for an indefinite period. The sanctions of the great herem amounted to the civil death of the excommunicated: other Jews were prohibited to associate with him or to benefit him or benefit from him in any way; he was not be counted among the ten men necessary for the performance of a public religious function; his sons were not to be circumcised; his bread and wine were to be considered nonkosher; and after his death, he was not to be accorded any honor due to the dead.

In the words of the most comprehensive study of the herem in premodern Poland, “from the historical point of view, excommunication formed the very basis of communal organization of Old Poland’s Jewry.”⁷⁰ In addition to its function as a punitive measure in cases concerning both religious and secular matters, herem (or the threat of a herem) was invoked in guaranteeing contracts and in the execution of judicial verdicts, and it was tantamount to an oath in legal proceedings.

From the sixteenth century onward, the kings of Poland recognized in the herem the prime means for implementing the tax regime among the Jews and therefore granted the rabbinic authorities an unparalleled measure of bracchium saeculare: only one month after the pronouncement of the ban, the delinquent who failed to repent was to be delivered to secular authorities and executed, and all his property was to be confiscated (in the case of Christian excommunication, similar measures were to be implemented only after a year).⁷¹ This ultimate step was virtually never applied; however, rabbinic courts often called on Polish secular authorities to enforce their bans, and excommunication remained the most powerful tool of social control accessible to the Jewish establishment. Writing in 1797, the maskil Jacob Calmanson still described the use of the herem as “the most efficacious measure used by the rabbis [doktorowie żydowscy] to keep the people in slavish subjection and to reinforce the command they had usurped over the people’s minds.”⁷²

Most rabbinic bans of excommunication did not target religious dissenters, but instead targeted those who violated community ordinances, those considered disruptive to communal discipline, or even common criminals. The first herem against the Sabbatians in Poland was issued in 1670. In September of the following year, the Council of Four Lands announced that “a great herem with sounding of the ram’s horn and extinguishing the candles” was pronounced upon the “criminals and reckless people belonging to the sect of Sabbatai Tsevi.” The council ordered—on pain of a heavy fine—the reading of the text of the ban in all the synagogues of Podolia and gave the leaders of the provinces and individual communities the authority to persecute the Sabbatians and to punish them with “infamy, fines, jail, and even to deliver them to the justice of the Gentiles [afilu ba-dine amim].” The delinquents should be expelled from every community and every province for all their days, they should not be assisted in danger, and all the curses of the Torah should fall upon them.⁷³

In 1671, the council forbade the dissemination of manuscripts said to contain Sabbatian secret lore;⁷⁴ in 1687 or slightly earlier, it placed restrictions on the printing of homiletic works that might have contributed to spreading the heresy.⁷⁵ In 1705, on the request of Jerusalem rabbis, the body pronounced a ban on Hayyim Malakh. The 1670 herem was renewed by the council in 1722.⁷⁶ In October 1753, the rabbis ordered the burning of the writings generated by the Emden-Eibeschütz controversy, including the latter’s allegedly Sabbatian writings.⁷⁷ In the same year, “the sages of Brody” banned the “secret writings” of the Sabbatian Leibele Prossnitz⁷⁸ as well as manuscripts ascribed to Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz: Va-avo ha-yom el ha-ayyin, commentaries on the Song of Songs and the Book of Esther, and the kavvanot accompanying the blowing of the shofar.⁷⁹

Both contemporary sources and modern academic scholarship disagree on the true meaning and real effect of the bans of excommunications. Gershom Scholem has emphasized that the text of the 1670 ban was the first instance of the appearance of the term “sect of Sabbatai Tsevi” (which, in his view, proved that four years after Sabbatai’s conversion to Islam, the Polish rabbis already saw the Sabbatians as an organized group) and that it was unusually harsh in tone (which demonstrated that the Sabbatians were recognized as a strong and dangerous force). On the other hand, Scholem noted that the pronouncement of the herem had little practical consequence: a few weeks after drafting the text of the ban in another document, the same scribe referred to Sabbatai Tsevi as the messiah.⁸⁰

According to Scholem, the first excommunications “did not work for the simple reason that the Sabbatians did not recognize the authority of the rabbis.” From the Sabbatians’ perspective, the rabbinic bans were invalid, since their authors, rather than those targeted, were the “mixed multitude,” “heretics,” and “enemies of the faith of Israel.”⁸¹ Later excommunications were said to have more impact, and a few contemporary testimonies claimed that in consequence of the series of bans, “the wicked sect was uprooted in the entire country of Poland.”⁸² Some scholars have accepted this uplifting conclusion; others have argued that the very frequency with which the excommunications were repeated proves the contrary and only demonstrates the strength of the Sabbatians. It has also been pointed out that the repeated and indiscriminate use of the bans led to the weakening of their authority: “the force of the herem diminished with frequent use, and the image of rabbinic contentiousness was heightened. . . . By the late eighteenth century their use—by any authority—was a formality with very little real impact.”⁸³

While agreeing with the analyses noting the inflation of the power of the herem, I wish to emphasize another aspect of the issue. I believe that prior to the eruption of the Frankist affair, there was no organized effort to eradicate Sabbatianism in Poland. Scholars who have described the systematic rabbinic “persecution” of the heretics took rhetoric for reality: the harshness of the language of the bans should not overshadow the fact that there is no evidence of any attempt to put them into force (and, while we are on the subject, even the harshness of language so emphasized by Scholem should not be overestimated and might be largely attributed to the formulaic character of the herem; the 1671 ban against the Sabbatians is in no way “harsher” than a ban against common thieves coming from the same period).⁸⁴

I would suggest further that this failure to enforce was not due only to the “crisis of authority” and the limits of the rabbinic power but also stemmed from the very nature of the anti-Sabbatian excommunications: with the sole exception of the 1705 ban against Hayyim Malakh, no herem issued in Poland mentioned any Sabbatian by name. Essentially, the Polish rabbis’ anti-Sabbatian excommunications fell into two broad categories: those imposed on books and other writings; and those against the unspecified “people of the sect of Sabbatai Tsevi.” The first might have signified attempts to stop the spread of Sabbatian propaganda but might equally well have been intended to appease the general Jewish opinion: we have ample evidence that despite the excommunications, forbidden writings were in the possession of many rabbis, including some of the signatories of the bans.⁸⁵

As for the latter, as long as “the people of the sect of Sabbatai Tsevi” remained unnamed and did not purposefully provoke the rabbinate, they could go untroubled by the authorities. Within the framework of crypto-Sabbatianism, this amounted to a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy; in the case of the more overt Sabbatianism of Podolia, it signified a shaky balance of power where some localities were effectively outside the control of the rabbinic bodies (and, in some cases, under the control of Sabbatian rabbis). The Satanów testimonies and the confession of Samuel of Busk might sound shocking, yet it is clear that they depict a state of affairs that had existed in Podolia for a long time (Samuel of Busk goes back twenty years for his account, while Joseph of Rohatyn, author of the longest testimony, described events that took place nine years before the Satanów investigation). The famed Frankist “orgies” were, in fact, the custom of sexual hospitality, which was not a singular ritual but a daily practice; according to the testimonies, it was upheld by the Sabbatians for years before Frank’s appearance in Poland and was in no way connected to his activity. It is highly unlikely that none of this had come to the attention of the rabbis prior to the Lanckoronie incident; even less likely is that it would not have came to their attention had they really wanted to pursue the matter.

As for the specific practices involved, stories about a Sabbatian who wanted to “copulate with a married woman while she was menstruant” and another one, who publicly masturbated in the study hall, had already emerged in 1725; the concerned congregants went to their rabbi who “replied that he knew of many worse acts” and did nothing.⁸⁶ None of the earlier cases gave rise to a public investigation like the one in Satanów; in none of them were the Sabbatians forced to describe their misdeeds in public.

Before the Lanckoronie incident, the Polish rabbinate’s standing policy toward Sabbatianism was to let sleeping dogs lie. There seems to have been a tacit agreement between the Sabbatian and anti-Sabbatian factions within Polish Jewry, and even the anti-Sabbatian rabbis clearly thought that open scandal was not a price worth paying for the eradication of heresy. This agreement was broken only if one side failed to keep to the bargain. Until the eruption of the Frankist affair, the so-called anti-Sabbatian campaigns were, in fact, individual campaigns of zealots such as rabbis Moses Hagiz or Jacob Emden. During Hagiz’s campaign against Hayon, the Council of Four Lands refused to get involved and did not answer his pleas for Hayon’s condemnation.⁸⁷ During Emden’s controversy with Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz, the council put much more effort into silencing Emden than into censuring Eibeschütz: the October 1753 herem of the council targeted not so much Sabbatian manuscripts as it targeted Emden’s anti-Eibeschütz pamphlets. The council’s explicit intention was to hush up the quarrel and to avoid spreading public discord among the Jews; silence, not loud condemnation, was seen as the most appropriate response to heresy.

The very first known event involving Frank, the Lanckoronie incident, shattered the status quo between the Sabbatians and the rabbinate and caused the abandonment of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, preferred up to that point by most Polish rabbis. The question remains as to why, in this particular instance, the Polish rabbinate discarded its standard (and largely successful) policy of appeasement, embarked upon a public investigation in Satanów, and reported the Sabbatians to the Catholic Church. I suggest that at least some of the rabbis recognized that the Lanckoronie rite had transgressed the boundaries not only of normative Judaism but also of earlier Sabbatian antinomianism. This, I believe, was not due to the sexual element of the rite: as noted, the sexual misdeeds of the Sabbatians had been known before and never caused such an upheaval.

What really troubled the rabbinate was the use of Christian symbols in the ritual: regardless of the Frankists’ intention (be it antinomian or syncretistic), the use of a cross in a Jewish rite put all the Jews in danger and exposed them to Christian charges of desecration and blasphemy. The participation of several communal rabbis in the rite further complicated the situation. While rabbis (and even prominent rabbis) had previously been accused of Sabbatianism, the illusion of the unity of the Jewish religious establishment in opposition to heresy remained. Both halakhah and widespread practice were reluctant to excommunicate rabbinic scholars: the accused rabbis loudly denied any involvement in heresy and quickly made appropriate anti-Sabbatian gestures. Yet, in contrast to the earlier cases of banning the unspecified “people of the sect of Sabbatai Tsevi,” the post-Lanckoronie rabbinic reaction targeted five specific communities: Lanckoronie, Busk, Jezierzany, Opoczna, and Krzywcze;⁸⁸ one cannot fail to notice that the rabbis of three of these communities (Lanckoronie, Busk, and Krzywcze) figured in testimonies as alleged participants of the Lanckoronie ritual.

While the text of the May 1756 herem of Brody did not depart from standard texts of earlier anti-Sabbatian bans, the form of its imposition significantly differed from the established pattern: according to the testimony of Isaac of Biała, before imposing the herem the chief rabbi of Lwów, Hayyim Cohen Rapaport, “stood before bishop [Wyżycki] . . . and obtained permission to excommunicate them and put them in prison.”⁸⁹ Rapaport did not need permission from the bishop to pronounce a ban of excommunication on Jews, and such a practice had never been employed by Polish rabbis: he was apparently trying to hedge his bets by ensuring that he had Church backing for his herem. Yet Christian involvement was a double-edged sword. Initially, it might have given the author of the herem unprecedented power. But before long, the Sabbatians bribed the bishop to pressure the rabbi to cancel the ban, and Rapaport was forced to have a beadle pronounce in the synagogue that “people of the sect of Sabbatai Tsevi are no longer excommunicated.”⁹⁰ Like the elders of the Satanów synagogue who approached Bishop Dembowski, the rabbi of Lwów overplayed his hand.