A herem(excommunication) issued against Frank in 1756 provoked perse-
cution of members of the Donmeh. At this point, the rabbis who issued the
heremconsulted Jacob Emden, who suggested that they use the Catholic
Church to persecute Frank and his followers, on the pretense that new sects
were not permitted by church law. This strategy backfired, as Frank found a
supporter in Bishop Dembowski of Kamieniec-Podolski. To insure this sup-
port, Frank instructed his followers to play up the similarities between
Sabbateanism and Catholicism.
Frank and the other Donmeh asked the bishop to convene a disputation
between Frank and local rabbis, and prepared a series of arguments against
the “Talmudists,” including the notions that the Torah and prophets were so
obscure that they could be interpreted only with the aid of divine inspiration
and not by human intelligence alone; that the rabbis’ interpretation of the
Torah and the Talmud was nonsense; and that Jews would wait in vain for the
Messiah to raise them above the world – instead, God would clothe himself in
human form and atone for their sins.
Dembowski decided in favor of Frank and the Donmeh, and ordered the
burning of the Talmud. However, he died before the decree could be carried
out, and support for the Frank in the church largely died with him. The
bishop’s death was viewed by communal leaders as a sign of divine interven-
tion, leading to renewed persecution of the Donmeh.
Several years later, Frank declared himself and his followers a separate sect.
He announced that he was the third and ultimate incarnation of a messianic
trilogy that had begun with Shabbetai Zvi, continued with Baruchiah Russo,
and culminated with himself. He and his followers, knows as Frankists, carried
Cardozo’s notion of a theological inversion to its extreme. They set out to vio-
late as many commandments as possible, conducting orgies and dancing naked
with the Torah. In place of the Passover Seder, the Frankists wrote a Haggadah
for their Ninth of Av Seder. In 1759, Frank was arrested. Eventually, the
Frankists converted en masse to Christianity.
The legacy of the Frankists, and more generally of Sabbateanism, reverber-
ated into the nineteenth century. The association of Sabbatean heresy with
Lurianic Kabbala cast a shadow over the latter. During the eighteenth cen-
tury, Kabbalists would increasingly emphasize the esoteric nature of these
teachings and withdraw from mainstream Jewish society and study Kabbalah
in a secluded kloiz(hermitage) so as not to expose and lead astray rank-and-
file Jews. Like crypto-Jews, moreover, Sabbateanism was an instance of Jews
living outside the realm of normative rabbinic Judaism, thus posing a second
challenge to the premodern notion that the Judaism of the rabbis was the
only authentic form of Judaism. Like Karaism, Sabbateanism posed a chal-
lenge that the rabbis labored for decades to eradicate.
Moreover, the prolonged fight against Sabbateanism bred among many
rabbis a sort of messianic paranoia. From this point on, there would be rabbis
132 World Jewry in flux, 1492–1750