410 A History of Judaism
values in which all prohibited sexual activities were to be treated as
positive commands. But such views were held by a small minority.^45
Those Sabbatians who declined to adopt Islam were also, like the
Dönmeh, divided in their ideas about the implications of Sabbetai’s car-
eer for the keeping of the halakhah. Some adopted extreme antinomianism,
in some cases explicitly claiming the authority of Baruchiah as ‘Santo
Señor’, but others practised an extreme asceticism, such as the ‘holy soci-
ety of Rabbi Judah Hasid’, a group of hundreds of enthusiasts led by
Judah Hasid and the Polish rabbi Hayyim Malakh, who went to Jerusa-
lem in 1700 in expectation of the expected advent in 1706 of the Messiah
(in the form, although Malakh did not state this openly, of Sabbetai Zevi,
returned to life after forty years). Expelled from Jerusalem, Malakh
seems to have met Baruchiah in Salonica, and may have been tempted
into antinomian views. At any rate, he was denounced in 1710 by the
rabbis of Constantinople and, on his return to Poland, formed a radical
sect in Podolia (in modern Ukraine and Moldova) from which was to
emerge, after his death, the even more extreme Frankist movement.^46
Jacob Frank was born in 1726 Jacob b. Judah Leib to a middle- class
father from Korolówka in Podolia, but was educated (although not to a
high level) in Czernowitz. For many years he was resident in Bucharest,
where he worked as a dealer in cloth. His studies in the Zohar gave him
a certain reputation among Sabbatians and in 1753 he visited Salonica
in the company of Sabbatian teachers from the antinomian group of
Dönmeh who followed the teachings of Baruchiah. In December 1755
he returned to Poland as a Sabbatian leader. After some twenty- five
years in Turkish lands, and speaking Ladino, he was suspected of being
a ‘Frank’, the Yiddish word for a Sephardi, and he adopted ‘Frank’ as
his family name, rapidly gaining a large following across Poland for his
teaching of the ‘Torah of Emanation’, which he presented as a spiritual
Torah which permitted transgressions on principle. He himself returned
to Turkey, where early in 1757 he became a convert to Islam (like his
Dönmeh teachers), leaving the ma’aminim (‘believers’), as his Sabbatian
followers in Galicia, Ukraine and Hungary referred to themselves, to
face intense persecution.
The rabbinic authorities in Poland at first just issued a ban against
members of the sect, confirmed by the Council of the Four Lands, but
then fatefully sought help from the Christian authorities to suppress
what they portrayed as a new religion, only for the Sabbatians to claim
the protection of the Church from their ‘talmudist’ persecutors,