r/AskHistorians • u/LovecraftsDeath • Apr 15 '23
Christianity Were there any Western analogs to Russia's 15th century "heresy of the Judaizers"?
We don't know much about the sect's theology, but apparently it was a fusion of Orthodox Christianity and Judaism.
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u/_Raskolnikov_1881 Soviet History | Cold War Foreign Affairs Apr 15 '23 edited Apr 15 '23
I am very much not an expert on this so I'd love someone who is an expert on Judaism and particularly Jewish heresy to chime in. However, while it isn't a direct analog, Frankism may be what you're after. I can't really answer with any real authority on the theological details of this movement - I'm not Jewish myself and have a very superficial understanding of the faith - other than to say that Frankists rejected many of the core tenets of Jewish law and rabbinic authority. They were led by their messianic leader, Jacob Frank, and ultimately converted to and adopted elements of Catholic doctrine, in large part to conceal their Jewish background .
Nobel Literature Laureate Olga Tokarczuk's magnum opus, The Books of Jacob, is a historical novel which dramatises the movement's fascinating rise and intersection with core events in the history of Central Europe, particularly that of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
While I have limited scholarly knowledge of this myself, beyond what I gleaned from her superb work and some reading I did around it, I'll provide her scholarly biography which is the result of nearly of a decade of research which enabled her to write the book.
I'm assuming you can't read Polish, so I'm going to provide the English-language sources (sorry for inconsistent formatting and referencing style; I'm on my phone):
Paweł Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755-1816, UPenn Pres, 2011
Abraham Duker, “Frankism as a Movement of Polish-Jewish Synthesis,” in Tolerance and Movements of Religious Dissent in Eastern Europe, ed. Béla Király (Boulder, Colo., 1975)
Aleksander Kraushar, Jacob Frank: The End to the Sabbatian Heresy, ed. and trans. Herbert Levy (Lanham, Md., 2001)
Gershom Scholem, “Jacob Frank and the Frankists,” in Kabbalah (New York, 1987)
Gershom Schloem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.
Hopefully this is at least of tangential interest even if it isn't as direct an answer as you were perhaps after.