Discovering my Frankist Roots

Jaan Kaplinski

I was born in Estonia of an Estonian mother and a Polish father. As for my father, Jerzy, I really never met him: He was arrested when I was six months old and later perished in a gulag labor camp. I grew up as an Estonian without knowing much of my father. I suppose even my mother didn’t know he had had Jewish ancestors. Much later I was told by an older friend of mine, a professor of Old Testament theology, that the family name Kaplinski was most probably Jewish. He said Kaplinskis were Jews living on church-owned lands in Poland. He was only partly right: Most, if not all Kaplinskis, like Kaplins, Kaplans, Kaplanskis, and Kaplens are originally Cohens, members of the extended priestly family. But this is something I found out much later, as a middle-aged man. I’m sure my father knew much about his ancestors; he was even fluent in Yiddish, but he was wise enough not to talk about it in the 1930s. Still, there had been rumors about him being a Jew; at least once he was attacked in the street by some nationalist thugs, and one of his acquaintances had called me this “Jewish boy.”

I was somewhat puzzled by what the professor had told me about my family name, but didn’t care too much about it. I studied linguistics and tried to learn some Arabic and Hebrew. And purely by chance, I bought a book from an elderly man liquidating his mostly esoteric-theosophic library. This was Erotik der Kabbala by the once well-known author Jiři Langer, a friend of Franz Kafka. There I read for the first time about Jacob Frank and his sect. Like most of what is written about Frank and the Frankists, Langer’s book is somewhat biased. For him, Frank’s understanding of the Kabala was erroneous and he misled his followers. Like most writers, Langer too pays a lot of attention to the orgiastic rites of the Frankists, interpreting them as the practice of free group sex, no different from similar practices of the twentieth-century hippies and other ancient and modern adepts of free love. Here, I cannot completely agree. But on this topic, a bit later.

In the late 1990s I was given a book in Polish about my great-granduncle, Polish painter and emigrant political activist Leon Kapliński, where I found out that our family had really been Frankist, like many other families of Polish intellectuals. And during a visit to the United States in 1999 I was able to spend some time in the libraries at Stanford and Columbia universities. It was there that I found that our family was quite closely connected with Jacob Frank himself. I have strong reasons to believe that our direct ancestors were the father-in-law and brother-in-law of Frank—the rabbi Toviah Cohen from Nikopol, in present-day Bulgaria, and his son Jacob, brother of Hannah, Frank’s wife. Here, I have a different view from that of the man I consider to be the most competent contemporary scholar in the field of Frankism—the Polish researcher Jan Doktór. In his opinion, Jacob Kapliński was the husband of Frank’s sister, a Sabbatean erudite, Yehuda Levy Tova.[1]  I have no information indicating that a Levy descendant could have had the family name Kaplinski. And in a Polish bookit is written that Frank married a woman from the priestly family of Aharon.[2]  But here, I haven’t been able to find out as much as I would have wished. I have no close relatives in Poland, and even nowadays, people do not want to speak or even to know about their Frankist ancestors. And sometimes they are harshly reminded of them, as happened in the 1930s to my distant relative Tadeusz Żeleński (whose pen name was Boy), a translator and controversial publicist. A critic found “ghetto spirit” in Boy’s writings, although his ancestors had converted nearly two hundred years before. And the question of the renowned Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz’s possible Frankist background is still largely taboo. My great-great-grandmother’s maiden name was Magdalena Brzezińska. I once wrote to Zbigniew Brzeziński, whom I had met earlier, asking whether we might be related; he answered that he didn’t know much about his ancestors, who had probably come from somewhere in Volhynia… Our family archives went up in flames during the war, and thus I know little about my distant ancestors, except the fact that my grandfather’s great-grandfather, Eliasz Adam Kapliński, tried to organize a Frankist congress in Karlsbad in 1823.[3]

Although, as I have written above, I grew up without any knowledge of my ancestors’ ideas and doings and with a very vague idea of Judaism, even without knowing it I had some contact with ideas possibly born under the influence of Frankism and Sabbateanism. As a student of linguistics, I discovered the philosophical works of Fritz Mauthner, who invented the expression “critique of language,” which was later developed by Wittgenstein and other philosophers. Much later I discovered that Mauthner’s grandfather had served in Frank’s court in Offenbach, and that there had been some relics—including a portrait of Eva Frank, Jacob’s daughter—in the possession of the Mauthner family. As Mauthner writes, some Frankist emissaries later took these things away, as seems to have been the case in other families too. I can well understand the desire of upper-middle-class Poles to hide their origins, but it is hard for me to understand why the last Frankists willingly or unwillingly helped them in this. Could we take it as a special case of what the Islamic sectarians, first of all the Ismailiyyas, call taqiyya—a tactic to hide some controversial points of their belief? And certainly there were many controversial aspects in the teaching and activities of Jacob Frank and his entourage. His rhetoric is sometimes fiercely negativistic, and his sexual practices are blatantly unconventional: There were indeed things people integrated into the normal bourgeois life of the mid-nineteenth century that they had good reasons to hide and/or forget.

There are publications on Jacob Frank in the United States and Poland; the book by Alexander Kraushar on him has been published in English translation.[4] Unfortunately, the best studies on Frank and Frankism are by the Polish scholar Jan Doktór and seem to have been ignored by the academic world in America. Dr. Doktór has published a critical edition of the The Sayings of the Lord in Polish and some books about Frank.[5] While we know much about Frank’s relations with the Catholic Church, there is not much clarity about Frank’s contacts with Islam. His conversion to Islam seems to have had little impact on his views, although several papers, among them Gershom Scholem’s article on the Dönme, mention close connections between some Sufis from the Bektashi order of dervishes and Jacob Frank, as had been the case with leading Sabbateans. This fact suggests that it would be worthwhile to find out more about the parallels between the Sabbatean-Frankist teaching and practices and those of the Bektashis. Unfortunately, as far as I know, no one has done this, and I am not able to do it. Still, an academic from a Bektashi family in Turkey has told me what she could recall from what one of the eminent Bektashi spiritual leaders, a family friend, had told her when she was still an adolescent. I quote from my diary from December 10, 1994: “There are no more true sheikhs among the Bektashis. One of them whom she knew best had been a merry person, always laughing. He had said that one must get rid of religion (dīn), the outer shell, but also of faith (īmān). He had sometimes read the Bible, loving especially stories that made him laugh as, for example, David dancing in front of the Ark of the Covenant. In his opinion, the three ‘abrahamic’ religions are of equal value. When she asked him about the other religions, the old man laughed and said that he had had enough trouble because of the three.”

I cannot but feel that such an inside view was a nice addition to what is written on the Bektashis on books and websites I have had access to. I wonder whether what the old sheikh (or baba?) had told her could perhaps give some new nuances to the interpretation of Jacob Frank as a radical antinomian preaching “redemption through sin,” as expounded by Gershom Scholem.[6] Certainly, both Jacob Frank and radical Bektashis like the old sheikh were terrible sinners from the point of view of orthodox Judaism or Islam. But their aim was not to be good Muslims or Jews, but to attain the Ultimate, the Divine, the “naked” Truth. And in their view, any orthodoxy, any religion, was or could become an obstacle on the way to attaining it. Thus, it had to be cast away, like the shell of an oyster or a nut.

We could perhaps even ask whether Frank didn’t follow in all seriousness the precept of Deuteronomy that every practicing Jew repeats in his Shema prayer: “You must love God your Lord with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might.” If you love God in this way, you can’t love your religion with the same fervor. The teaching of the “anti-Talmudist” Frank could have given birth to a different type of Talmud, if his movement had survived longer and gained some recognition outside the rather limited circle of his followers.

It is interesting that Frank too spoke of shells, probably inspired by the Zoharist tradition: “This help [given by God to save his kingdom] is like a walnut from which we take away the green shell; then, the nut itself is seen, but it is still covered with a hard shell that has to be broken in order to get to the core inside it.”[7]

There is no essential difference between the sayings of the Bektashi sheikh and Jacob Frank’s. This means that they share a common mystical tradition. It has probably been better preserved in the Near East, which up to the present day is an ethnic and religious mosaic where different communities interact both in antagonistic and friendly ways. Both the Sabbatean-Frankist movements and some Sufi orders have certainly had more similarities than is often acknowledged. This means that in order to understand the genesis and development of these movements we must not study them in isolation but in their mutual interaction. I don’t think that we should try to explain cultural, even linguistic, phenomena primarily in their own context, avoiding or even ignoring the influences of other cultures, languages, or religions. Here, I think Moshe Idel is right when he writes that “there is indeed no categorical difference between the manner in which Jewish and other mystical symbolisms have emerged.”[8]

One of the basic ideas we find in Frank’s sermons is his devotion to the Shekhinah, which he calls “the Maiden” (Panna) and at least partly identifies with the Holy Virgin of the Catholic tradition. Here it is perhaps reasonable to keep in mind the fact that among the Bektashis, women are considered equal to men and take part in all important rituals. The person to whom the old sheikh told his unorthodox views was a girl…

Most authors take for granted that Frank was a libertine, a kind of precursor of the hippy-era sexual revolution. But his acts can be interpreted somewhat differently. Reading the chronicle of his deeds and sayings we can conclude that he and his disciples certainly practiced ritual sex.[9]  Here we find a description of the ritual of “extinguishing the candles,” something the Turkish heterodox religious groups are, justly or unjustly, accused of practicing. But ritual sex is not free sex. When Frank chose a man and a woman whom he ordered to fornicate, most often he did not ask them about their own wishes or sympathies.

The chronicle mentions several times that Frank used to send some men from his entourage (including my ancestor Jakub Kapliński, brother of Hannah Frank) to Istanbul. Jan Doktór sees this as a sign of Frank’s continuing ties with some heterodox Muslim groups, citing one of his sayings about his future reconversion to the “mahometan faith.”[10]

Jacob Frank lived between two eras. Like most important leaders of mass movements before him, he was a mystic, a visionary; his talks are sermons. But at the same time, he used religion in a pragmatic way, helped by his probable understanding of the three religions having the same inner core, the real “nut” inside several shells. This relativistic attitude gave him a free hand to use any of them as means to achieve his aims. And one, perhaps the foremost, of these aims was to establish a state for his people, a Jewish state. This he attempted to achieve with the help of conversion and negotiations with rulers and religious leaders in Turkey, Austria, and Russia. Still, in his time it was possible only if the Jews converted to a state religion, be it Islam, Catholicism, or Orthodoxy. And in his own strange way, he achieved something. Frank’s estate in Offenbach was an ephemeral micro-state, but still the first Jewish state in the modern world, Frank being its sovereign ruler, although the extent of his sovereignty is still not fully clear. As a ruler, he was both an eccentric and a realist. As a realist he understood the necessity of giving “his Jews” military training, and some of the Frankists later became military men. But his eccentricity, his waste of money on luxury and pomp, undermined the finances of his state, leading it quickly to bankruptcy. It would be unjust to write off Frank’s achievements completely. Still, I think we can call him a precursor of the Zionists, most of whom were also not Orthodox Jews anymore, having gone further in their emancipation, a process certainly influenced by the Frankist heresy.

It would also be unjust to Frank to deny that some of his sermons are quite interesting and impressive, even to modern readers. As his story is intimately connected with my family story, I cannot read without being moved the account of a ceremony that took place roughly a year before his death, when he was already seriously ill. We can perhaps call it baptism, and the child “baptized” by Frank was my ancestor Eliasz Adam Kapliński.

When the Lord was dressing the first child of the Turk, who was the middle Kaplinski, he made with him the following ceremony: He himself took water in his h[oly] hand and after having washed his head he put the turban on it and after having put around his neck a silk scarf he began to weep so bitterly that tears streamed down his holy face. Afterwards the Lord said to [the wife of] Kaplinski, who was present, ‘There will be three ships on which True believers will be: The first ship, on which I too will be, will be most fortunate and they will always be together with me; the second ship will be near me, will be also greatly fortunate and [people there] will also be able to see me; but the third will be very far away. May God grant that [people there] might see my face once in three years, but perhaps never at all. Those words the Lord ordered all those here at the gathering to annunciate to the Company.’[11]

I don’t know and nobody really knows what exactly Frank meant by talking of the ships. But his vision is quite poetical and poetry keeps some of its lure even when it’s not really understood. Like the poetry in sacred books.

Notes:

[1]     Jan Doktór, Rozmaite adnotacje, przypadki, czynności i anekdoty pańskie, opracował, przygotował do druku i opatrzył wstępem (Warszawa: Tikkun, 1996), 107.

[2]     Historya Franka i Frankistów, napisał Zygmunt Lucyan Sulima, (Kraków: 1893).

[3]     Abraham G. Duker, “Polish Frankism’s Duration: From Cabbalistic Judaism to Roman Catholicism and from Jewishness to Polishness,” Jewish Social Studies 25 no. 4 (1963): 289.

[4]     Alexander Kraushar, Jacob Frank: The End to the Sabbataian Heresy , (Lanham: University Press of America, 2001).

[5]    Jan Doktór, ed. Księga słów pańskich, ezoteryczne wykłady Jakuba Franka, vol 1-2 (Warszawa: Semper, 1997).

[6]     Gershom Scholem, “Redemption through Sin,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 78-141.

[7]     Jan Doktór, Księga słów Pańskich, ezozteryczne wykłady Jakuba Franka, opracowanie naukowe i komentarze , (Warszawa: Semper, 1997), 2:15.

[8]     Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 270.

[9]     Jan Doktór, Rozmaite adnotacje, przypadki, czynności i anekdoty pańskie, opracował, przygotował do druku i opatrzył wstępem (Warszawa: Tikkun, 1996), 60-61.

[10]    Rozmaite adnotacje, p. 101 and 109.

[11]    Jan Doktór, Rozmaite adnotacje, 92. Also see Kraushar, 337. There is also a translation of this document by Harris Lenowitz that I used in part: http://www.scribd.com/doc/58894013/Jacob-Frank-The-Master-s-Words. Unfortunately, there are many mistakes in this translation that I had to correct.