"The Messiah must go down to the lowest possible place … where the humiliation will be the greatest. God sent him from the high to the low, to the world where giant serpents will mock him … He must close his ears in the face of these nasty objections, tread on the serpents … infiltrate all the false religions, convert to Christianity, wear a turban, permit all that is prohibited and cancel all commandments." (The Books of Jacob, page 469, in Hebrew).
This is the well-oiled machine that author Olga Tokarczuk works in her magnum opus, The Books of Jacob, a monumental historical novel about the controversial figure, Jacob Frank.
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Jacob Frank (1726-1791), was at best a heretic if not a false messiah, who managed to electrify herds of devoted followers in a chapter of messianic maneuvers in Jewish history.
Tokarczuk was born in Poland in 1962 and is an author, social activist and Jungian psychologist. Her oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, articles, essays, novels, and novellas. Her writing has been translated into many languages to critical and commercial acclaim, winning international recognition. She has won all the major literary prizes, including the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature, which she was awarded last year.
The book has been published in Israel, in Hebrew, by the Carmel Publishing House, in conjunction with the Center for the Study of Relations between Jews, Christians, Muslims at the Open University of Israel, thanks to the Polish Institute in Israel.
The events in The Books of Jacob came at a crossroads in time when Kabbalah, Sabbatianism, and Hasidism intersected. These movements had messianic components and a deep-seated feeling of revolutionary, spiritual exhilaration. Some viewed Frankism as an enlightened movement, a forerunner to nationalism.
In Tokarczuk's earlier works, such as Flights and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, one clearly notices the echo of the question of salvation, perhaps the "weak messianic power" that Walter Benjamin spoke of: That sense of a fragmented, imperfect human world where it is actually those fragments that create a multidimensional, infinite space.
The Books of Jacob, as Tokarczuk says in a special interview with Israel Hayom, is "an enormous journey across seven borders, five languages and three major religions to oust the marginal." This journey continues over seven books, dozens of characters and hundreds of pages, and took seven years to write.
Jacob Frank was born to a Jewish family in Korołówka, in Podolia in Eastern Poland (now Ukraine). He moved across the Balkans and Turkey and had connections to the Sabbatean sect of the Dönmeh.
The group of followers that amassed around Frank had the characteristics of Sabbatean groups and an affinity for the Zohar-Kabbalist world.
The cult developed its own radical symbols and rituals, and Frank was seen as their messiah – the direct successor to Sabbatai Zevi. Gershom Scholem wrote that Frank was at the forefront of one of the most startling periods in Jewish history, and described him as a "a truly corrupt and degenerate individual."
Nihilist Frankism cast-off rabbinical halakha and the yolk of commandments and prohibitions. The new world order that he proposed was founded on blasphemy, sexual liberty, idolatry and devotion to the cross. And were considered acts of redemption: "Divinity and sin are inextricably linked" ( page 342).
The beautiful translation of the book from Polish to Hebrew was done by Miriam Borenstein, with brilliant scientific editing by Avriel Bar-Levav and Jonatan Meir. There have been many monographs and articles about the esoteric figure of Frank. Meir carried out a comprehensive review, a summary of which is in the epilogue he wrote for The Books of Jacob.
In Pawel Maciejko's research (and his book, Mixed Multitude) much light is shed on Frank and his character. Maciejko uncovered new sources and manuscripts to present the events in a more complicated light, out of a desire to delve deeper into Frank's syncretic vision.
Tokarczuk goes back to this unique time in a way that few have managed to – as her book is the first to be written after a fresh wave of research.
The perspective she offers does not excuse Frank of his deviations, charlatanism, heresy or madness. Tokarczuk offers depth and insight into the lives, feelings and the complexity of lost-redeemed figures – to create an experience with pertinent meaning.
Her mission is to organize an endless amount of information and events, to link them to the past, and reveal their relevance to the future. Wit, tension, love, vulgarity, holiness, and impurity – it is all found in this novel. And with it, beautiful insightful writing, excellent editing, and human clarity.
A pre-Zionism event
Q: The story of Jacob Frank is part of Polish history – not just a chapter in the Jewish dynasty. Poland is presented to the reader as a colorful fabric of shtetls, cathedrals and mansions, bishops, priests, emperors, and rabbis. Who are the Jews to you in Polish history?
"A huge amount. Hundreds of years of shared existence, mutual influence in the areas of culture, religion, genetics, cuisine and so on … A story without an end, a story of mutual fascination, but also a feeling of alienation. Hostility and closeness together… Assimilation and differentiation. Today, you cannot think of Poland without [thinking about] Jews. As though there is no Polish culture without Polish Jews.
For hundreds of years, these entities were involved, became interwoven and grew together, affected one another, creating a cultural blend that is unparalleled anywhere else in the world. It is worth examining this conglomerate, even if it is already part of the past – to emerge from the terrible shadow of the Holocaust and the waves of anti-Semitism in Poland after the Second World War."
Q: What would you like to say to Israeli readers?
"The fact that this book has been published in Hebrew is, in my opinion, the most important event that has happened with this book. I waited for this for quite a long time, and I am very happy that thanks to a huge effort by several people, including the translator Miriam Borenstein, and the scientific advisors Jonatan Meir and Avriel Bar-Levav, the book is finally being published in Israel.
"The book tells the story of the shared history of the Poles and the Jews. But first and foremost it is about people, with their own aspirations and dreams, who feel pain and anger, who strive for a better life and are curious about the world. They love and hate. They live and die.
"Many Israelis and Poles are apathetic about their shared history. After reading The Books of Jacob, many Poles were interested in their Jewish roots, and some saw me as a sort of 'genealogical research company'.
"I believe that The Books of Jacob is one of many chapters in the history of the Jewish Diaspora in Europe and Poland, and that it presents the infinite complexity of human relations, which only literature – probably – can really describe."
Q: What attracted you to Frank?
"In 1997 while rummaging through a bookstore I found a strange book. It was "The Collection of the Words of the Lord" [a biographical mythical collection containing Frank's teachings as recorded by his followers. The book provides a look at his world through memories, dreams, visions, and stories]. This text fascinated me so much that within a short time, I had an extensive collection of books on the subject. But I did not plan to write a book about it – it was part of my own private research. A years' long endless fascination.
"In the story of Jacob Frank, I saw some deeper dimensions. Firstly, his story demonstrates the growth and spread of 'lawless heresy' in the bosom of Judaism, as Gershom Scholem wrote. [Scholem] does not disguise his feelings when he writes about Jacob Frank. He sees him as a dark and foreboding figure, who spreads nihilistic teachings. But cannot deny the amplitude and descriptive power of his The Words of the Lord, the strangest of all religious writings.
"The chronicles of a group of people, driven by a hard to understand determination, embarking on a dramatic, dangerous, spiritual, identity and political path – this is a major event on any scale. And if we take into account Frank's stubborn, and unsuccessful, ambition to establish a fairly independent area within the borders of the Polish kingdom, we can talk about a kind of precursor to Zionism.
"I found it hard to believe that this amazing and unique story was so quickly lost to oblivion. Why? A major contributor to this must have been the attempts to silence by the Frankist descendants themselves who lived in a hostile, suspicious and sometimes anti-Semitic environment."
According to Tokarczuk's, "Orthodox Jews also refused to deal with the story. In their eyes, Frank was a dark traitor, a vile sort who took several thousand – maybe even more – believers away from Judaism. The Polish Catholic Church also preferred to stay quiet since it didn't exactly play an honorable part in these events, and furthermore, Frank made a mockery out of it when he managed, during his imprisonment in Jasna Góra [the monastery in Częstochowa], to turn that place that was so holy to Catholics into the center of his followers.
"In short, it was a huge challenge, to tell a story that had been forgotten, suppressed, twisted, and full of speculation and gossip."
'Crazy but practical'
Just as the Frankist episode in Polish history is filled with turmoil and contradictions, so too is Tokarczuk's saga. It has won the highest plaudits, but also attracted harsh criticism and derision. Polish nationalistic elements have exhibited hostility and enmity towards her. Her desire to deal with dark chapters of the past are seen as damaging to the good name of the Polish nation.
Q: Some writers get swept up by the figures they research. How was it for you to be steeped in the life of a crazy personality like Frank – how did the closeness affect your life?
"That didn't happen in my case. I was more involved with those telling the story, the moral voices of the story. Those are usually the ones the writer identifies with – the figure of Nahman of Busk, the figure of Yenta. I developed an emotional bond with some of the characters, like Asher or Gitla. I really loved writing about the priest Hamilovsky – I felt like I was sensing, together with him, the innocent hunger for knowledge, the sense of getting lost in the wider world of knowledge. This is one of the biggest secrets of literature – while writing, and while reading, we can leave our "me" and become someone else. When we finish the book, we're someone else – we've changed."
'Everything is created in two,' wrote Frank, 'so in every place; there is a thing, and its opposite' (The Words of the Lord). Frank is a polar figure while simultaneously creating rules."
Tokarczuk explains: "I believe that writing a book involves showing a world its greatest complexities, and there is no room here for submission to simplistic assessments. Frank was undoubtedly a charismatic man, and also a psychopath. He had a forceful personality, was intelligent and had a personal charm that drew in both the greats and the lowly of that world.
It's difficult to understand such a persona by only reading what has been written in fairy tales and parables.
For a long time, I had trouble understanding how such a person functions. So I decided to present him through the eyes of others while daring not to get too close. This character made me feel conflicted."
Q: In what way, if at all, did your observations as a psychologist of Frank's complex character help you?
"I never deal with the protagonists of my books through psychological theories. I try wherever possible to take a clean, simple and intuitive approach. Theories are tools we use to digest the world, but they themselves are not the food. It is quite difficult for me to judge whether my consciousness as a writer has been sharpened by psychology."
Enduring heresy
In addition to Jacob Frank, we meet a range of secondary and supporting figures in the book who are conflicted: His wife, his daughter Eva, the Sabbatian Shor family, the local priest, Hamilovsky, who is writing his encyclopedia, Rabbi Nahman of Busk and his wife, Moses Dobruschka (about whom Gershom Scholem wrote The Career of a Frankist), Yenta – the old woman who yearns for eternal life and swallows a kabbalist charm and "is dead yet isn't dead" (page 114). In this movement between life and death, she looks on from above over the rise of the cult of her granddaughter – which is also part of the mediation: between redemption and exile, between Judaism and Christianity, between the internal and the external.
Following Sabbatai Zevi's conversion to Islam, the movement developed practices whereby it was a mitzvah to carry out a transgression. This heretical paradox formed the basis of Frankism and the nefarious acts required for the revelation of the messiah.
"I came across these ideas earlier with gnostics like Carpocrates, a gnostic from Alexandria, and I was amazed to see how long these heretical ideas had survived. In their most general sense, they were acting against a world order which they saw as evil and unjust. A revolutionary idea always casts doubt on the existing order, tries to dismantle it down to its foundations, and to build a new order.
In the figure of Frank, ideas from the 18th-century social enlightenment met mystical and polar ideas – and this combination is explosive. I think that today, it is harder for us to grasp the exciting idea of salvation through sin," she says.
The few prosaic writings on the subject latched on to the sexuality in the cult, viewing it as flagrant libertarianism. Frank espoused mass sex, in public, overturned prohibitions on modesty, family purity, and incest. He believed that in the polygamous biblical world – which is a reflection of the Kabbalistic world – incest was permissible. Liberal sexuality is considered holy sexuality.
"Every revolution is also an exception that occurs on different levels and touches on different areas of human life. I would not class the Frankist permissibility as 'libertarian sex'," Tokarczuk clarifies. "It rests on completely different reasons. The main one was, to my understanding, the mechanism of the cult. A certain degree of sexual openness unites the group, everyone takes part in breaking the rules of behavior and morals and therefore feel collective guilt – and that is a unifying feeling.
"There were also religious reasons – the Frankists believed in redemption through sin. In order to be reborn, you must sink to the lowest place. This radical thinking sometimes appears too in other religions, or more correctly, other forms of heresy. The Orthodox do not allow themselves this type of radicalism. Therefore, the sexual practices should not be treated as a dubious scandal, but should be understood in their wider context."
'Building a bridge, filling the holes'
"All the caves of the world are connected … the Tomb of the Patriarchs is the center of the world … and Jacob is the one who knows the layout of the cave," (page 515).
An entire mythical world is weaved into the earth. The Frankists bury their dead in a cave near Frank's birthplace. This cave will come in use to their descendants: During the Holocaust, some 38 Jews hid there and survived (page 689).
The cave necessitates recognition (Plato), it is the womb, a conscious passage. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai (the Rashbi) hid in a cave, the cave is a sacred space where the Zohar was created.
In Hebrew, the word for cave (ma'ara) is now steeped in sexuality due to the slang use of the word "awake," which shares three of the same letters. It's used as a suggestive text message for a fling.
"I was aware of the widespread symbolism of the cave in various cultures," says Tokarczuk. "Jacob Frank often used images of the cave, and it was an important foundation for him in the metaphorical system he built. I tried to follow suit and use it as one of the important motifs in this book. I did that even before reading the amazing story of the cave in Korołówka, Frank's birthplace, and its role during the war in saving a few dozen people. The cave motif is also strongly linked to Częstochowa, which on the one hand is the holiest place for Polish Catholics and on the other the place where Jacob Frank was imprisoned for 13 years and the center of activity for his followers.
"This is where Frankists bury their dead, in caves around this place. This is where his wife, Hannah Frank, is buried out of a belief that its passageways lead to Israel and it is actually the wandering Tomb of the Patriarchs of the forefathers. Frank would go into solitude in caves often, and after a while come out different. Going down into the ground would be to give him strength and wisdom, and it is a going into the depths of the ground and that's where the transformation would happen."
She says that these motifs in her book gave her a sense of creativity. "I often felt like I was following them, being led by coincidences, associations, and connections which were not self-evident. When you work on something really hard, you develop a kind of attention, awareness and heightened sensitivity for this kind of synchronicity."
Although Tokarczuk draws on the traditions of a documentary novel, she goes beyond it. The book is rich with researched information as one would expect of a chronicler, and filled with parallaxes as one would expect of fictional imagination.
The line between fantasy and reality is blurred – even fabrication is a type of truth.
When I ask her to tell of her poetic way of mixing science with wild imagination, she admits that the book forced her to conduct deep multilingual research.
"For years I gathered historical facts, I learned how people lived in the 18th century, Jews and Christians, how their daily life was, what they wore, what they ate. But all that knowledge was nuclear. Those facts had to be threaded into a whole flowing story, to make that knowledge turn into pictures and events. The imagination is what filled the holes between the facts... Between the facts were regular, human spaces; I tried to fill them with the sensuality of life. And of course, I was aided by the advice and corrections from researchers."
A feminine sense of justice
Q: What is the modernist message of the book?
"The Books of Jacob is a historical novel written with full awareness that the binding historical narrative is something that was put together and is being put together continuously. I will never believe, for example, in the weak presence of women in historical events, but yet in the primary historical sources they are always on the sidelines, without significant meaning. Anyone alive who has a mother, wife, sisters or daughters must know that their place in life's events cannot be ignored. Unless it's a story about the army or a monastery.
I also tried, as much as psychologically possible , to ignore the current feeling of morality. I remembered that I am describing a pre-Victorian world where life principles were much different. For many of the austere readers, these may seem too liberal.
Q: What are your ambitions after winning the Nobel Prize?
"As part of the Nobel Prize, I'd like to give myself a prize – a year off. I'd like to read a lot and draw a lot. I'm about to move flat and go on a few journeys. At the same time, I'm working on a collection of essays that will be published at the end of the year and a novel that will come out at the beginning of next year."
Q: Following a process that lasted seven years, how have you changed since you started writing this book?
"Since the book was written six years have passed, and for me, it's the past. But it was my greatest literary effort. For seven years I lived in the world of The Books of Jacob, I was tied to its heroes, and to a certain extent, I even lived in the 18th century.
"I accompanied my heroes for 50 years and witnessed their changes. All is a process and change – and that is the most difficult challenge for a writer. The art of describing a complex reality is finding many viewpoints.
"When I finally finished writing half a century of Jacob Frank and his friends' adventures, I understood how much prowess the story had. I stopped seeing them as dark, evil cult members. Instead, I saw the universal story of intuitive ambition for emancipation in the middle of a feudal reality. Frank and his flock made a multi-level and multi-sided revolution."
The Books of Jacob speaks to us as an age of the collapse of orders and disruption of frameworks – in a multinational and multicultural story. For the contemporary reader, it tells of the different and of the fringe, as if asking to comment on the passage through religions, breaking of cultures, and identity fluidity.
Q: In the epilogue, you write that a person who deals in messianic issues, even just telling their story, "is like a researcher who studies the lofty secrets of light" (page 690). Do you feel this book brought you out of some sort of darkness?
"I believe that literature is a good deed since it opens a gate for the world and the people living in it. It allows us to live the lives of others and understand how little differentiates us as human beings. It exposes the similarities between us and brings people closer together. Reading expands the mind – we know more and feel more.
"For me, writing is a challenge, it's work, but also a pleasure. When I describe something I feel that I am saving it from extinction. Yes, writing has something to do with light."
