Jacob Frank drilled his followers in armour for a future kingdom of their own
In the 18th century a self-declared messiah named Jacob Frank gathered perhaps 50,000 followers across Poland-Lithuania and beyond, then told them to break every law. He organised believers as soldiers in companies at four bases, from Częstochowa to Offenbach, requiring plate armour, shields and helmets, and preparing for a Frankist country.
Frankism grew from Sabbateanism, the movement around Sabbatai Zevi, the most famous self-proclaimed messiah in Jewish history. Zevi taught that breaking the commandments could release divine sparks trapped inside them; he ate forbidden food, turned fasts into feasts and ultimately converted to Islam rather than be executed. Frank, from Podolia, claimed to be Zevi reincarnated and pushed the idea to its limit, teaching that transgressing every boundary was humanity's chief duty, and his movement became notorious for sexual rites that scandalised contemporaries.
His secret teachings went only to an inner circle of Brothers and Sisters, from whom he demanded blind obedience. Worldly laws, he said, belonged to three evil rulers, the Pope, the Tsar and the Sultan, and could be worn like an empty shell. Religions could be adopted for convenience, so his followers were urged to convert to Catholicism en masse. Frank described the path to salvation as a V, like Jacob's ladder: first a descent to the lowest humiliation, then a climb back up to life.
At the centre stood the Virgin, his name for the Shekhinah, the Kabbalistic presence of God, imagined as a female messiah. Frank cast himself merely as her helper and guardian, and eventually identified her with his own daughter, Eve Frank, who served at his side. Catholic devotion shaped the image: he said the Black Madonna of Częstochowa would guide followers to the Virgin, and he commissioned miniature portraits of Eve in the manner of Marian icons, which are now held by the National Library of Israel.
The main scripture, the Words of the Lord, was compiled by the Brothers between 1755 and 1791 and circulated only by hand. Written in plain Polish, it mixes sayings, dreams, parables and long fairy-tale narratives, drawing heavily on the Zohar and other Kabbalistic literature despite rejecting Jewish tradition. The last complete manuscript, running to 2,192 sections, was destroyed with much of Warsaw in the Second World War.
Source: Frankism
