The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Boundary Crosser Chapter 1.

About the Author :
Jay Michaelson is an affiliated assistant professor at Chicago Theological Seminary and a visiting scholar at the Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion, as well as a bestselling author and journalist. He is the author of nine books, including Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism and God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality, a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Outside the academy, Michaelson is a columnist at New York magazine and an editor at Ten Percent Happier, having previously been a columnist at The Daily Beast for eight years and at the Forward for many years before that. He is a frequent media commentator on issues of law and religion, has twice won the New York Society for Professional Journalists Award for opinion writing, and has been featured in the 'Forward 50' list of the most influential American Jews.

Review :
In the mainstream of Jewish collective memory, Jacob Frank was portrayed as an egomaniacal and depraved ignoramus, a false messiah, and a cynical serial convert-to Islam, then Christianity...Jay Michaelson makes a complementary theoretical argument in The Heresy of Jacob Frank, which received last year's National Jewish Book Award for scholarship...Michaelson, well known as a popular writer on religion and spirituality and an activist for gay rights both in Jewish life and the broader world, has been studying Jacob Frank for almost two decades...In a recent essay, he described being "seduced" by the "allure" of Frank's vigorous confrontation with traditional Jewish law and norms in The Words of the Lord, the late miscellany of Frank's oral teachings and anecdotes. Michaelson reconstructs Frank's teachings with critical methodology, tracing how Frank both followed and resisted the disciplines of reason, magic, Kabbalah, and esotericism. Using a phenomenological approach, Michaelson contextualizes and analyzes Frank's heresy in a new and original way and contributes to a richer understanding of the upheavals of Jewish early modernity. This book may offer researchers new ways to explore one of the most controversial and fascinating Jewish movements of the early modern period. This is an interesting handbook with a wealth of information that invites critical reflection on a number of issues.