Fate: Excommunicated by the Council of Four Lands (the central body of Polish Jewry) in 1756 — one of the most sweeping cherem decrees in modern Jewish history. Frank then allied with the Catholic Church and staged public disputations against the Talmud (1757, 1759), leading to Talmud burnings in Poland. In 1759 the Frankists accused Jews of ritual murder (blood libel). Frank was eventually imprisoned by the Church itself for suspected heresy (~1760–1773). After his release he held court as a quasi-messianic figure in Offenbach, Germany, supported by his followers until his death (1791). His daughter Eva Frank continued the movement after his death. Most Frankists eventually converted to Christianity or assimilated; the movement dissolved by the early 19th century.

Jacob Frank (~1726–1791) was the most radical successor of the Sabbatean movement, which had been shattered but not destroyed by Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion to Islam in 1666. Frank taught a nihilistic mysticism derived from Sabbatean Kabbalism: since the Messiah had descended into the realm of impurity (klipot) to redeem the divine sparks trapped there, his followers must follow him — meaning that transgression of religious law (antinomianism) was not sin but sacred necessity. The Frankists engaged in ritual sexual transgression as a deliberate inversion of Torah law, believing that the descent through impurity was the path to redemption. Frank ultimately led his followers into mass baptism as Catholics (~1759), claiming Christianity was merely a stage toward his own hidden teaching. The Frankist episode is one of the most extreme expressions of the antinomian potential latent in certain strands of Lurianic Kabbalah, and a trauma that shaped the rabbinic response to Hasidism (initially suspected of similar tendencies) and the emergence of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment).