Jacob Frank
Posted: Wed Nov 27, 2013 4:05 am
Investigating the roots of western civilization (ye olde BC&H forum of IIDB lives on...)
https://earlywritings.com/forum/
arnoldo wrote:Has anyone ever heard of Jacob Frank?
http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14870.html
I don't know if anyone would want to take credit for Reform Judaism.Gershom Scholem posited Frankism as the crucial link between Sabbateanism and modernity. Sabbateanism’s anti-authoritarian stance inspired the anti-authoritarian Haskalah, Scholem said, much more than did the non-Jewish Enlightenment. And Frankism, by way of Prague, is the missing link.
Yet Scholem’s conclusion was based on an incomplete understanding of Frankism. Like other scholars, Scholem regarded Frank as a false messiah, a Kabbalist, and a Sabbatean. Unfortunately, Frank is none of these things. By the recording of Zbior Słow Panskich (“The Collection of the Words of the Lord”), Frank is quite clear that he is not the messiah; his program is one of personal immortality, not communal redemption, even though his followers revived communal messianic rhetoric immediately after his death. Likewise, Frank reviles Kabbalah throughout ZSP, rejecting its other-worldliness in favor of this-worldly materialism and magic. And Frankism bears but one of Scholem’s five characteristics of Sabbateanism, while Frank mocks Sabbetai Zevi and insisting that his (Frank’s) mission is a different one.
Was Scholem wrong, then, about Frankism? Ironically, he was unintentionally right.
Scholem’s core thesis cannot be maintained. As Ada Rapoport-Albert has shown, the Prague Frankists did join Frankist myths of the feminine with a kind of proto-feminism, but this quixotic point of contact is hardly the historical trend Scholem proposed. Nor is there evidence that Frankism was regarded as rational and praiseworthy by the Haskalah; quite the contrary.
Yet as a species of Western Esotericism, Frankism is indeed a halfway-house between religion and secularism. Late Frankism was part of a Western Esoteric tradition that, in its materialist metaphysics and in its presenting of an alternative body of knowledge to religion, helped lay the groundwork for the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. Scholem was puzzled that Frankist superstition could persist at the time of the French revolution, but this “superstition” was in fact a set of Western Esoteric myths that helped lay the groundwork for the French Revolution itself. In sum, Frankism was, in fact, part of the movement that birthed modernity – the Western Esoteric movement – and Scholem got it unintentionally right.
God forbid they would teach the boys to read Russian and do arithmetic.In 1843 the Russian Government announced that a conference was to be held at Petersburg for the purpose of deciding important religious problems. It was the intention of the government, at the instigation of the Maskilim, to use the conference as a means to introduce into the school system innovations which would interfere with traditional procedures in Jewish education and prayer.
Anyway the evil guy who they had to unite against was Max_Lilienthal - note that the Chabad article doesn't mention him or even clearly state what was going on at the conference.The first meeting between Rabbi Menachem Mendel and Rabbi Yitzchok of Volozhin, the leader of the Mitnagdim, made a favorable impression on both of them. Observers remarked that the meeting proved to the Mitnagdim that the Chassidim were Torah scholars, and convinced the Chassidim that the Mitnagdim were pious. This rapprochement and communal cooperation had salutary effects on the general relationship between Chassidim and Mitnagdim. The antagonists were reunited and began to work together for the common cause of traditional Judaism.
The wiki statesIn this climate, in 1843, a conference was convened on the subject of Jewish education, which pitted Lilienthal against Rabbi Yitzchak of Volozhin and Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn, the Rebbe of Chabad Lubavitch also known as the Tzemach Tzedek. Lilienthal could not stand up to the arguments of these rabbis, who managed to win the right for Jews to retain their traditional school system in competition with Lilienthal’s new school system. (See Berel Wein’s Triumph of Survival, p. 157.)
As the wiki notes Lilienthal moves to the US and becomes a reform Rabbi. Actually my Rabbi said that Lilienthal formed the Reformed Judaism movementAn 1844 law which ordered the creation of schools in which young Jews would learn secular subjects as well as Jewish religion was a victory for the Lilienthal and the Jewish Haskalah, but Lilienthal left Russia shortly afterward. His motivation for the sudden exit remains a topic of debate among scholars.[3] According to traditional Jewish writers, particularly in the Chabad tradition, his departure was prompted by allegations from within the Haskala movement of the misappropriation of funds, leading to a Russian governmental investigation.
This is a good subject to book up on, if you want to piss off a Chabadnik. Just say a few words on how great Lilienthal was, etc.Lilienthal served as a rabbi for several years after his arrival in New York City in 1845, including at the Anshe Chesed Synagogue. He opened a Jewish school in 1850. In 1855, he moved to Cincinnati to become an editor of The American Israelite and serve as rabbi of Congregation Bene Israel.[4] As a rabbi in Cincinnati, he promoted Reform Judaism. He wrote for several publications and was an advocate for both Jewish and secular schools, teaching at Hebrew Union College and serving on the Cincinnati board of education.