Still Running Off at the Keyboard

FROM SABBATAI ZEVI TO MEDJUGORJE - CONNECTING THE DOTS

Sometimes in doing research all of the pieces suddenly click into place. That has happened in the last several days, and I'd like to share with you what has turned up.

The first dot is Sabbatai Zevi (1626 - 1676), a name that has enough spelling variations to keep a researcher busy for a whole day. I recently read Gershom Scholem's 900+ exhaustive study on Zevi (whom Scholem spells "Sevi"). Zevi was a Jewish manic-depressive rabbi. Many would put the word rabbi in quotes. During his manic phases he became the leader of a Jewish heretical religion called Sabbateanism. He did this with the help of a Jewish mystic named Nathan of Gaza. It was Nathan who first termed Zevi the "messiah". Zevi went along with it.

Zevi adhered to the teaching of the Lurianic Kabbalah, believing that the sparks of God had burst forth into the world and needed to be recovered and returned to God. His methods for recovery were antinomian. Zevi broke the laws of the Jewish religion while in a state of ecstasy and encouraged his followers to do the same.

He caused agitation within the Jewish community in the process. His base of operations was the mideast, particularly Symrna, but his fame spread "from England to Persia, from Germany to Morocco, from Poland to the Yemen." In fact the movement "engulfed "the whole of Jewry" according to the back cover of Scholem's book which quotes Cynthia Ozick of the New York Times Book Review.

The extent of the agitation eventually caused Zevi to be imprisoned and threatened with death unless he converted to Islam. Zevi converted in the way that other Jews in other places have converted under the threat of death. Outward appearances did not agree with inward belief. Zevi lived outwardly as a Muslim and inwardly as an heretical Jew. His beliefs continued to spread.

Jacob Frank burst onto this Sabbatean scene approximately 50 years after Zevi died--another dot.

A short biography of Frank can be read at the Yivo Institute website.

Yivo claims to be the "the world's preeminent resource center for East European Jewish Studies." It was founded in 1925 in Vilna, Poland, and focuses on the culture of Ashkenazi Jewry.

In the Yivo history of Frankism I discovered a number of connecting dots.

Ya'akov (Jakub) ben Yehudah Leib Frank (1726? - 1791) was born in Podolia or Buczacz, depending upon who is being asked. He was taken to the Ottoman Empire by his parents shortly after his birth. Some evidence indicates that his father was involved in the spread of Sabbateanism of the 1720s, and may have immigrated in a run from the Jewish Polish campaign against the Sabbateans. He spent his youth in Smyrna, Constantinople, and Bucharest. On his wedding night in 1752 he was initiated into a Sabbatean group. A year later he established contact with "the most radical branch of the Donmeh (Sabbateans) in Salonika. He made a pilgrimmage to the grave of Nathan of Gaza.

In 1755 Frank returned to Poland, presenting himself as a kabbalist and emissary of the Donmeh. He unified splintered Sabbatean groups. When his followers were "discovered conducting an antinomian ritual in Lanckoronie nad Zbruczem the local authorities arrested them at the request of the rabbis". Frank, a Turkish subject, was released and returned to the Ottoman territories. He converted to Islam.

Meanwhile those in Poland who had engaged in the ritual "were found guilty of breaking numerous halakhic prohibitions. They confessed that they had committed adultery, engaged in wife swapping, studied banned Sabbatian books, and professed the faith of Shabetai Tsevi." The assembly in effect excommunicated them.

The Rabbis contacted the Bishop of Kamieniec Podolski, Mikolaj Dembowski, in whose diocese the ritual had taken place, and informed him that the Sabbatean rites involved magic and utterly immoral conduct, requesting the bishop to join the Rabbis in condemning the Sabbateans. It backfired. The bishop, upon discovering that the Sabbateans were Contra-Talmudists, decided to try to convert them. In 1957 a disputation took place between the Rabbis and the Sabbateans, and the Sabbateans won. Copies of the Talmud were ordered burned. The "court defined the Sabbateans as Contra-Talmudist Jews and equated their rights, privileges, and obligations with those of other Jews living in the Commonwealth", essentially as a new "denomination" of Judaism.

The bishop died in 1757, leaving the Sabbateans in a no-man's-land between Judaism and Christianity, lacking support from either side, and the campaign against the Sabbateans resumed. Many fled to Turkey and joined Frank.

When the new bishop took office, he decided to prove some accusations that Jews used Christian blood for ritual purposes. For this purpose he used the Sabbateans. A letter of safe conduct was issued and the exiled Sabbateans returned to Poland and "established themselves in the estates of Bishop Antoni Sebastian Dembowski. The Sabbateans "called for a unity of all faiths, and promised to prove that Jews used Christian blood for ritual purposes" according to the article.

Advancing the clock, the article tells:

Although there is evidence that the Frankists as a distinct social group existed at least until the 1880s, it is very unlikely that Frank's doctrine was still taught in its original form. In nineteenth-century Warsaw, Frankism became a kind of a mutual aid association, in which the connections initially established within the sect were used to facilitate business enterprises. The gradual evaporation of the religious dimension of the movement made it possible for manuscripts expounding Frank's teachings to begin to surface and become available to scholars....

The only known Frankist manuscripts extant today are housed in the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow and in the H. Lopacinski Public Library in Lublin.

Sayings of Jacob Frank have been translated into English and are available online.

The morphing of Frankism from religious movement to businessman's movement was not the only development in Frankism. There was political action as well, and they play a part in the revival of Gnosticism here in America.

First, the amalgamation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is reminiscent of the activity of recent popes who unite all three under the "Abrahamic religion". Ideas do have consequences.

There is also the fact that the Masons are essentially a businessman's organization that unites all religions, an expansion of the Sabbatean ideal.

Second, the Frankists have apparently played a role in the history of the Ordo Templi Orientis. At the website of the Scarlet Woman Lodge, T. Allen Greenfield, Bishop of the Gnostic Catholic Church, offers an article on "Hermetic Brotherhood Revisited". Footnote No. 2 reads:

One of the most interesting is G.B. Smith. Smith is highly critical of O.T.O. and of our own work, but curiously provides the best evidence we have thus far found for a direct linkage between the unorthodox ecstatic Jewish sect of the Zoharists and the currents discussed in this paper. According to Smith, Thomas von Schoenfeld, also known as Mosheh Dobruschka and a cousin of Jacob Frank, was both an outstanding leader of the Frankist sect and a seminal figure in the creation of the Qabalistic character of the Fraters Lucis, or Asiatic Brethren. See my paper, “The Frankist Ecstatics of the Eighteenth Century” in Agape V1N2. The Frankists or Zoharists, we should remember, engaged in a form of sacred sexuality as part of their basic custom.

I would suggest that when we look at Rosicrucianism, we are in fact looking at Sabbateanism/Frankism.

In the political realm is Ante Pavelic--the third dot.

I first encountered Pavelic in Dr. E. Michael Jones' book THE MEDJUGORJE DECEPTION: QUEEN OF PEACE, ETHNIC CLEANSING, RUINED LIVES. Pavelic was the Croatian leader of the Ustasha, a Nazi affiliated organization that worked for Croatian independence in Yugoslavia during World War II. He is sometimes referred to as the "Butcher of the Balkans". Jones recounts the story of the breaking up of Yugoslavia during World War II; the atrocities perpetrated under Pavelic who murdered Jews and gypsies, and ran his own concentration camp. Pavelic had direct ties to the Vatican. Among his soldiers were members of the Franciscans. One priest in particular played a central role in moving the booty taken from the Jews into the Vatican Bank.

Details of his life are presented by Bruce Harris at moreorless.au.com.

E. Michael Jones writes:

In the period following World War II, the Franciscans went from being avid supporters of the Ustasha to being the first religious group to join Dobri Pastir, the communist-sanctioned priest's association. When Archbishop Stepinac was serving his term in jail at hard labor for not collaborating with Tito, the Franciscans had already become members of Dobri Pastir and were eligible for government pensions. Pius XII was so enraged at the behavior of the Franciscans in Herzegovina that he wrote an order excommunicating them, a decision which, for whatever reason, never got promulgated. (THE MEDJUGORJE DECEPTION, p. 2)

The Church feared the Communists who desired to destroy the Church. In a kind of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" scenario, Church leaders cooperated with Pavelic's Ustasha. It is a blight on Catholic history. The ratlines which were the conduit that facilitated Nazi escape to South America were part of that cooperation. The attempt to enable a Catholic Croatia, would appear to place the Church at odds with God. Geopolitics is a dangerous game. It can explode out of control, and in this case it did. Medjugorje was supposed to be the impetus for promoting the aims of the Church. But as Jones describes in his book, a Catholic Church should never have considered the events of Medj. worthy of belief.

Zevi's prophet Nathan of Gaza was a mystic. The messages he received were neither Jewish nor Catholic. Mystical Judaism promoted the channeling of angels, and Nathan was a channeler. There are fallen angels, and it would appear that Nathan found them, with catastrophic results wherever these messages took root.

At the University of Buffalo Info Poland website the following can be read:

Mickiewicz's mother, Barbara Majewska. is reputed to have been a descendant of a Frankist family. The Frankists were members of a Jewish religious sect founded by J.L. Frank in 1755. Ostracized by both rabbinical and secular authorities, the Frankists found a patron in the bishop of the Lwów-Kamieniec region, bishop M. Dembowski, who offered them protection in exchange for conversion to Christianity. Thus, Jews from the Frankist sect massively converted to Christianity, yet many secretly continued to practice their religion. Records have been found indicating that among the converts was a Majewski family. As Mickiewicz himself used the phrase "z matki obcej" ([born] from a foreign mother) in title autobiographical section of his drama Dziady (The Forefathers Eve) the Jewish origin of his mother is quite plausible. Such critics as Janina Maurer of the University of Kansas and Samuel Scheps of France find further corroboration of this theory in the fact that Mickiewicz married a woman who was also from a Frankist family, that he represented Jewish characters in a very positive light ( e.g.. Jankiel, the patriotic Jew, in Mickiewicz's masterpiece Pan Tadeusz), and that toward the end of his life Mickiewicz was actively involved in raising funds for and organizing the Jewish legion. In his political writings, moreover, Mickiewicz repeatedly referred to the Bible (a rather rare tendency among Catholic writers) and compared Poland's martyrdom and the dispersion of Poles after the November 1830 uprising to the suffering of the Jews and the Jewish diaspora.

George Weigel in WITNESS TO HOPE: THE BIOGRAPHY OF POPE JOHN PAUL II writes:

Karol Wojtyla's first exposure to Polish Romanticism probably came when his father read him the famous trilogy of Henryk Sienkiewicz, in which bold knights charge back and forth across the steppes of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in violent pursuit of glory and defense of faith and fatherland. ...

In Epic poems like Pan Tadeusz, in visionary poetic dramas like Forefathers' Eve (which had such an emotional impact on its audiences that czarist censors sometimes banned it), and in didactic works like The Books of the Polish Nation and of the Polish Pilgrims, Adam Mickiewicz insisted that history had a deep spiritual dimension in which suffering prepared the soul for glory. It was a familiar Christian theme--redemptive suffering as a personal spiritual discipline. For Mickiewicz, though, redemptive suffering was also the national destiny. Partitioned Poland was a Messiah among nations, a suffering servant whose time on Calvary would redeem the world and show it the path beyond Western materialism into a new, more spiritual form of freedom. ...

It was during this last, mystical period of his career that Slowacki [another Polish poet] wrote a poem about a "Slav Pope" who would be a "brother" to all humanity. ...

Karol Wonjtyla memorized Pan Tadeusz and acted in Kordian... (WITNESS TO HOPE, p. 33-35)

Mickiewicz's involvement with Gnostic movements in France is established.

The website Jew Watch News claims Karol Wojtyla's mother was Jewish. Was she also Frankist?