new certainties and new mysticism 411
providing the local bishop with an opportunity to use them as weapons
against the rabbinic Jews in his diocese. On 2 August 1756 the Sab-
batians presented to the bishop a demand for a public confrontation
with the rabbis in which they would argue that their faith was in essence
compatible with Christianity. In the ensuing debate, at Kamienice from
20 to 28 June 1757, the Sabbatians proved victorious, and in October
and November 1757 huge numbers of copies of the Talmud were burned
in the public squares. When the bishop responsible died on 9 November
in the middle of these events, the rabbinic Jews recognized divine venge-
ance and turned on the Sabbatians, so that many fled to Turkey.
Such was the state of mutual antagonism between the ‘talmudists’
and the ‘believers’ when Jacob Frank returned to Poland, in December
1758 or early the following year. He revealed himself in Iwanie to his
followers as ‘the true Jacob’ who had come to complete the work of
Sabbetai Zevi and Baruchiah by requiring them to adopt Christianity
outwardly, as the Dönmeh had done with Islam, in order to keep the
true faith in secret. A year later, Frank and many of his followers were
duly baptized in Lvov, and Frank and his wife were baptized a second
time, under the patronage of the king of Poland, with great pomp in the
cathedral in Warsaw on 18 November 1759. The Frankists had requested
that they be allowed to continue to live separately from other Chris-
tians, and that they be permitted to wear Jewish clothing, to keep their
sidelocks, avoid pork, to rest on Saturday as well as Sunday, and to
retain use of the Zohar and other works of the kabbalah, but the Church
had refused, requiring baptism without preconditions. As a result, the
baptism did not end well- founded Christian suspicions about the inten-
tions of the new converts, and in 1760 Frank himself was accused of
heresy. Held in captivity for thirteen years, he was treated by his fellows
as the ‘suffering messiah’, holding court from his incarceration in the
fortresses of Cze ̨stochowa until it was captured by the Russians in
August 1772 after the partition of Poland. From 1773 to his death in
1791, Frank lived as a Christian in Brno and then in Offenbach, sur-
rounded by an exotic household and making extravagant claims about
the origins of his daughter Eva, believed by some of his followers to be
a royal princess of the house of Romanov. The complex mix of Judaism
and Christianity he advocated proved impossible to sustain, and the
Frankists in Poland merged into wider Christian society.^47
Against the background of such upheaval it should not surprise
that suspicions of Sabbatian sympathies were rife within Jewish com-
munities right across Europe in the first half of the eighteenth century.