A Parable of Pluralism
Sandra Valabregue. ‘Totem Tree III-3’ 2020
Adam Kirsch
Adam Kirsch is a poet and literary critic. He is the author of The Blessing and the Curse: The Jewish People and Their Books in the 20th Century (2020), among other books.
BOOKS
The Books of Jacob
By Olga Tokarczuck Translated by Jennifer Croft
Riverhead, 993 pages, $35
When the Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in literature, the citation gave special notice to her “magnum opus,” The Books of Jacob. The Nobel committee called the novel, which tells the story of the false messiah Jacob Frank, “a remarkably rich panorama of an almost neglected chapter in European history.”
It is an unlikely choice of subject for Tokarczuk, who is not Jewish; Frank’s story is little known in Poland, where the most dramatic episodes of his career took place, and for a long time had been equally neglected, or suppressed, in Jewish historiography. In the Jewish Encyclopedia, published in 1901-06, the great historian Simon Dubnow wrote that “the sect disappeared without leaving any traces in Judaism.”
Since the mid-twentieth century, however, Frank has received renewed attention, largely thanks to Gershom Scholem. If earlier historians tended to regard apocalyptic mysticism like Frank’s as obsolete nonsense, Scholem insisted on its centrality to the story of modern Judaism. Without admiring Frank in the slightest—he described him as “depraved and unscrupulous,” and “a deranged individual”—Scholem insisted that the faith of the Frankists, which “penetrated to the hidden depths and abysses of the human spirit,” merits serious study.
In The Books of Jacob, which has now appeared in a deeply impressive English translation by Jennifer Croft, Tokarczuk doesn’t quite reach the bottom of the abyss, but she takes the reader a long way down.
The novel closely follows the facts of Frank’s biography. Born in Poland in 1726, he spent most of his first thirty years in the Ottoman Empire, where “Frank” was a generic name bestowed on Westerners. As a young merchant in the Sephardic communities of Salonica and Smyrna, he absorbed the teachings of Sabbatai Zevi, the false messiah who had convulsed the Jewish world a century before. When Frank returned to Poland in 1755, he declared himself Sabbatai’s successor, emphasizing the most subversive, antinomian elements of Sabbatean belief. The Torah had been given to bring order to a fallen world, but now that the messiah had arrived its laws were no longer binding. On the contrary, by eating unkosher food, violating the Sabbath, and engaging in orgies, the Frankists would hasten the redemption.
It was an explosive message, and after a sexual scandal in 1756 Frank was excommunicated by Poland’s rabbinic establishment. In response, Frank followed a long-established playbook for Jewish renegades: he denounced the Talmud and accused his former coreligionists of ritual murder. He then raised the stakes still further by calling upon his followers to convert to Christianity. Prominent Polish bishops and aristocrats, seeing a chance to win Jewish souls for Christ, took Frank’s “contra-Talmudists” under their protection. Thousands were received into Catholic Church, starting with Frank himself.
But the political tide soon turned, and in 1760 Frank was arrested and confined to the monastery-fortress of Czestochowa, where he would live in a certain degree of style for the next thirteen years. When the Kingdom of Poland was partitioned between Russia, Austria, and Prussia in 1773, Frank was released and settled in Brno, in today’s Czech Republic, and then in Offenbach in western Germany, where he died in 1791.
“For the Frankists, the biblical God is malevolent or missing, but there is also a good God, a hidden one, and Jacob Frank was his prophet.”
In recounting these events, The Books of Jacob seems to acknowledge that there is something finally inscrutable about Frank and the people who put him at the center of their universe. We know what happened, but it’s impossible to fully grasp how and why.
Tokarczuk builds this impossibility into the novel by keeping Jacob Frank at a narrative distance. Much of the novel is narrated by characters in the story, in the form of letters, diaries, or internal monologues; we see Frank and his followers through the eyes of his amanuensis Nahman, a complacent Polish bishop, and others, each with their own limited perspective.
Even when Tokarczuk is narrating directly, she seems to view Frank from the outside. We learn what he looks and sounds like, we see the bizarre acts he practices, from publicly suckling a woman’s breast to committing incest with his daughter Eva. But Frank’s thoughts remain obscure. Does he sincerely believe he is the reincarnation of the Biblical Jacob, that the cave under a Polish village connects with the cave of Machpelah in Hebron, that he can revoke the Exile and grant his followers “eternal life”? Is he a deluded idealist, a cynical manipulator, or a madman? Tokarczuk leaves the question open, much as Frank himself did.
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Early in the novel, we meet an old woman named Yente—later revealed to be Jacob Frank’s grandmother—who falls ill on the way to a wedding at the home of her relative Elisha Shorr. Worried that she might die and spoil the simcha, Elisha writes out a Hebrew amulet—as matter of factly as a doctor today might write a prescription for painkillers—to magically delay her death. When Elisha goes on to become one of Frank’s chief disciples, then, the reader is not surprised: the distance between folk religion and cultish magic isn’t as great as it might seem.
The most impressive thing about The Books of Jacob is how profoundly Tokarczuk grasps the appeal of Frank’s message. Life in eighteenth-century Poland was difficult and dangerous for Jews—the novel is studded with episodes of blood libel, persecution, and torture—but no more so than many earlier times and places. What was new was the Sabbatean idea that Jewish suffering was owed not to God’s stern decree but to God’s absence. “The world doesn’t come from a kind or caring God,” declares Reb Mordke, a Sabbatean believer and one of Frank’s teachers. “God created all of this by accident, and then he was gone. That is the great mystery.”
For the Frankists, the biblical God is malevolent or missing, but there is also a good God, a hidden one, and Jacob Frank was his prophet. If he sinned and blasphemed, it was because his mission was to invert the existing moral order. “The Messiah will come quietly,” Reb Mordke instructs, “when the world is submerged in the greatest darkness and the greatest misery, in evil and in suffering.”
In this way, The Books of Jacob can be read as a massive dramatization of Gershom Scholem’s landmark 1937 essay “Redemption Through Sin,” which argues that Jewish modernity came not from the outside, with Enlightenment ideas and the French Revolution, but from inside Judaism, with the radical new thinking of the Sabbatean movement and its Frankist offshoot.
While they spoke the traditional language of Lurianic kabbalah, these heretics posed radically new questions about faith, history, and power. Must the Jews simply endure exile until God decides to redeem them, or can they take active steps to redeem themselves? Is halakhah permanently binding, or can historical progress render it obsolete? Will humanity always be divided into Jews, Christians, and Muslims, or is there a sphere in which all faiths can be reconciled? By asking such questions, Scholem writes, “the nihilism of the Sabbatean and Frankist movements… helped pave the way for the Haskalah and the reform movement of the nineteenth century.”
Of course, the idea that modern Judaism was prefigured in a “deranged individual” like Jacob Frank isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of modernity.
In the same year that Scholem wrote “Redemption Through Sin,” Polish-born Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (awarded the Nobel prize for literature exactly forty years before Tokarczuk) published his first novel, Satan in Goray, dramatizing the arrival of the Sabbatean movement in a small town in seventeenth-century Poland. The shockingly lurid tale culminates in scenes of sexual depravity and demonic possession that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror movie. When traditional faith is overthrown, Singer suggests, the result is spiritual corruption that disguises itself as progress.
Tokarczuk’s verdict is more hopeful, if bemusedly so. The Books of Jacob begins in 1752 in the Polish town of Rohatyn, where Jewish life is defined by piety and poverty, tradition and superstition. By the time Frank dies in 1796, the descendants of the Rohatyn Frankists are living in Paris and Vienna, making successful careers in science and philosophy and high finance. For them, Frankism turned out to be a shortcut to secular modernity.
Perhaps, Tokarczuk suggests, what the Frankists wanted all along was simply to assimilate, as millions of respectable Jews would do in Europe and America not long after Frank’s death. Near the end of the novel, Asher Rubin, a Rohatyn doctor who moved to Vienna and changed his name to Rudolf Ascherbach, says that his hometown “seems to him now like a long-ago, faraway dream, one in which he was totally unlike himself but rather an old, embittered person, as though time worked in the opposite direction for him.” That view epitomizes the promise of modernity: by unburdening the Jews from tradition and prejudice, it would release powerful new energies.
Tokarczuk numbers the pages of the novel in reverse, so that it starts on page 993 and ends on page 1. She calls this “a nod to books written in Hebrew,” which run in the “wrong” direction from the point of view of a Polish (or English) reader. But as with Asher Rubin, the reverse pagination can also be seen as a symbol of the way the Jews of Eastern Europe became “younger,” closer to a new beginning, as they moved forward in time.
Like many modern writers, especially Jewish ones, Tokarczuk sees cultural alienation like the Frankists’ as an advantage. “To be foreign is to be free,” Frank says in the novel: “Not to understand the language, and therefore to register gestures and faces better, the expression in people’s eyes, the emotion that appear on faces like the shadows of clouds…This state of foreignness must be carefully guarded, for it gives enormous power.”
Throughout the novel, Tokarczuk implicitly contrasts today’s ethnically homogenous Poland with the historic Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, which was full of “foreigners.” In addition to Jews, the novel is populated by Orthodox Christians and Muslims, Ruthenians (later known as Ukrainians) and Wallachians and Turks. This cosmopolitanism earned Tokarczuk the hostility of some Polish nationalists, but also helped make The Books of Jacob a bestseller, first in Poland and more recently in Israel, where it appeared in Hebrew (translated by Miriam Borenstein) last year. In turning what might seem like a narrowly Jewish tale into a parable of pluralism, Tokarczuk shows that stories, like countries, belong to everyone who can inhabit them fruitfully.
This article appears in Sources, Spring 2022.
