Jacob Frank

Discussion about the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, Talmud, Dead Sea Scrolls, archaeology, etc.
User avatar
arnoldo
Posts: 969
Joined: Sat Oct 12, 2013 6:10 pm
Location: Latin America

Jacob Frank

Post by arnoldo »

Has anyone ever heard of Jacob Frank?

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14870.html
User avatar
DCHindley
Posts: 3401
Joined: Mon Oct 07, 2013 9:53 am
Location: Ohio, USA

Re: Jacob Frank

Post by DCHindley »

Arnoldo,

You might want to ask fellow member Stephan Huller, who in the past has claimed some sort of direct descent from the Jewish mystic based on his family's oral tradition (bear with me ... I'm trying to be diplomatic).

DCH
arnoldo wrote:Has anyone ever heard of Jacob Frank?

http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/14870.html
Duvduv
Posts: 97
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 5:07 pm

Re: Jacob Frank

Post by Duvduv »

Maciejko's book is extremely interesting. But it appears that much of who Frank actually was is still rather unclear, at least in relation to the beliefs associated with the Sabbatean followers of Shabtai Zvi.
andrewcriddle
Posts: 2806
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 12:36 am

Re: Jacob Frank

Post by andrewcriddle »

An English translation of Frank's writing is available Words of the Lord
Caution really weird stuff.

Andrew Criddle
User avatar
stephan happy huller
Posts: 1480
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2013 3:06 pm
Contact:

Re: Jacob Frank

Post by stephan happy huller »

I don't think we're actually related. If all the things my family has claimed were true you'd think there would be some supporting documentation. It is worth noting that the story that Karl Marx and the Marx brothers both came from the same Saarbrucken Marx family is known to the Marks and Spencer family (another alleged Marx relative I presume). What is more important is to see that the Sabbatian sectarian culture provides us with another more plausible model for the origins of Christianity out of Judaism. Among white people there is this idiotically inflexible notion of 'what a Jew is' - you know, the rabbanite. If Christianity is thought to have emerged from 'the standard' model f the Jew who 'loves Yahweh,' is 'strictly monotheist' etc it is hard to imagine Marcionitism and other heresies having Jewish roots. However if the Sabbatians are used as an alternative antinomian model for Judaism, the idea that the Marcionites emerged from a similar precursor vis a vis the heretics mentioned in the rabbinic literature we no longer have the asinine 'Jew versus Gentile' model that has been at the heart of early Christian origins forever.

I wish more regular people had friends from the fringes of Judaism. When I started work I happened to befriend a Sephardic guy at my job. His father was a typical middle eastern businessman. He had all sorts of pinball machines, rentals etc. I just googled his name the other day and saw that my friend went to jail for kidnapping a competitor in the hot dog cart business.

In any event when I went to his house for dinner you can see all the kabbalistic influences in their prayers and rituals. The whole Sephardic community turns out to be the same (I didn't know this when I was a teenager because I didn't hang around these people). The point is there is no such a thing as a monolithic 'Jew' throughout history. The other guys have stuck around and have been around long before Jesus.
Everyone loves the happy times
Duvduv
Posts: 97
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 5:07 pm

Re: Jacob Frank

Post by Duvduv »

I am still intrigued by how Stephan Huller could actually be a descendant of real Frankists or of Frank himself..........The Frankists really disappeared and the Prague Sabbatians were not actually originally Frankists at all, even if Louis Brandeis, whose family was from Prague, had a photo of Eva. Those "Frankists" affiliated with "Frankists" only after Frank was already dead........The Prague sect were not even Donmeh types either. They were mostly closet Sabbatians........
semiopen2
Posts: 64
Joined: Fri Oct 11, 2013 5:37 am

Re: Jacob Frank

Post by semiopen2 »

FWIW, this will be presented at the AJS convention in Boston next week.

Was Frankism the link between Kabbalah and Enlightenment?, or, What Scholem Got Unintentionally Right

http://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ ... 6ja85id164
User avatar
stephan happy huller
Posts: 1480
Joined: Fri Oct 04, 2013 3:06 pm
Contact:

Re: Jacob Frank

Post by stephan happy huller »

Of course. Frankism is the reason that Jews can go to a Chinese restaurant and eat barbeque pork and kung pao shrimp. People are so fucking stupid. The amount of history that gets taken for granted and never gets reported. If you are a Jew and you disobey most or all the commandments with a good conscience, you are a neo-Frankist or if you prefer the disguised name - reform Judaism.
Everyone loves the happy times
semiopen2
Posts: 64
Joined: Fri Oct 11, 2013 5:37 am

Re: Jacob Frank

Post by semiopen2 »

My link didn't work - here is the abstract
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.
I don't know if anyone would want to take credit for Reform Judaism.

One of my brothers mentioned that we might be related to a Mitnaged ( Mitnagdim) Rabbi in Lithuania who was responsible for forming an alliance with the Hasidim. This has to be related to the Petersburg conference.

http://www.chabad.org/library/article_c ... erence.htm

keeping in mind that virtually everything Chabad says is a lie -
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.
God forbid they would teach the boys to read Russian and do arithmetic.
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.
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.

This is another take

http://www.simpletoremember.com/article ... ettlement/

Still it has profuse criticism of Lilienthal.
In 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.)
The wiki states
An 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.
As the wiki notes Lilienthal moves to the US and becomes a reform Rabbi. Actually my Rabbi said that Lilienthal formed the Reformed Judaism movement
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.
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.

I'm looking forward to listening to the presentation.
Post Reply