This is a sprawling tome, which many view as Tokarczuk’s masterpiece. It is a historical novel based on the life of the mystical Jewish prophet Jacob Frank, who was, in turn, a follower of Sabbatai Zevi. Their devotees, the true believers, were heterodox Jews, who divined a mystical interpretation of the Talmud, steeped in Kabbalah. “All this is to teach the children that the Torah’s structure is the same. The shell is the simplest meaning of the Torah, its description of what happened. Then we start to get down into its depths…. P, pshat, that’s the literal meaning, R, remez, that’s the figurative meaning, D, drash, that’s what the learned say, and S, sod, that’s the mystical meaning…. “There were once four great sages, whose names were Ben Asai, Ben Soma, Elisha ben Abuyah, and Rabbi Akiba. One after the other they say they went to paradise,” begins the old man. “Ben Asai, well, he saw it, and he died…. Well, it means that he got into the River Pishon, a name that can be translated as: lips that learn the strict sense…. Ben Soma, well, he saw it, and he lost his mind…. That means he got into the River Gishon, a name that tells us that the person is only seeing the allegorical meaning…. Elisha ben Abuyah,” he goes on, “looked and became a heretic. That means that he got into the River Hiddekel, and he got lost in the great many possible meanings…. Only Rabbi Akiba went into paradise and came back out unscathed, which means that having plunged into the River Phrath, he got the deepest meaning, the mystical one…. And those are the four paths to reading and understanding.””
As soon as the young Jacob enters the plot, the other Sabbateans almost immediately regard him as the Messiah. “Jacob scolded them, “Don’t be such a fool. If a person wants to storm a fortress, he won’t get in by talking. Words come and go. A person’s got to have an army. We, too, must act, and not just speak. Did our forefathers not chatter, not pore over written words long enough? What did all that talking do for them? What came of it? It’s better to see with your eyes than write down a bunch of words.”” Jacob’s righthand man, Nahman, though, cannot help but be a scribe, in the dark of night recording their people’s history for posterity, “Now, to create the world, God had to withdraw Himself, leave within His body a blank space in which the world could take up residence. God vanished from this space. The word disappear comes from the root word elem, and the site of that disappearance is known as olam: world. Thus even the name for the world contains within it the story of God’s departure. The world was able to arise solely because God was not in it. First there was something, and then that something was gone. That is the world. The world then, in its entirety, is lack.” Another true believer, Reb Mordke, continues, “Every place has two characters—every place is double. What is sublime is also fallen. What is clement is at the same time base. In the deepest darkness lies the spark of the most powerful light, and vice versa: where omnipresent clarity reigns, a pit of darkness lurks inside the seed of light. The Messiah is our doppelgänger, a more perfect version of ourselves—he is what we would be, had it not been for the fall.”
Some Frankist followers seem to have converted to the heterodox faith more for possible secular rewards. “Shorr thinks that it is bad to be a Jew, that Jews have it hard in life, but that being a peasant is harder. There really is no fate worse than theirs. In that respect, Jews and peasants are equals, in the sense that they share the lowest rung in the hierarchy of creation. Only vermin might be ranked beneath them. Even cows and horses, and especially dogs, get better care.” The Frankist Jews are considered heretics within their own faith and so must hide their true religion. Mayer teaches his young daughter, “When the last little spark of divine light returns to its source, the Messiah will appear to us. All laws will be invalidated. The division between kosher and non-kosher will disappear, like the division between holy and cursed. Night will cease to be distinguishable from day, and the differences between men and women will disappear. The letters in the Torah will rearrange themselves so that a new Torah will come to be, and everything will be opposite…. Between the heart and the tongue lies an abyss…. Remember that. Thoughts must be concealed…. Think so that they think you are not thinking. Behave in such a way that you mislead others…. We don’t do that because we ourselves are like women. We survive by hiding. We play fools, pretend to be people we are not. We come home, and then we take off our masks. But we bear the burden of silence: masa duma.”
In Poland, both the traditional Jews and the Frankists live under the thumb of the king, the landowning nobility, and the Catholic Church. Bishop Dembowski has a hard time figuring them out. “If only he could understand these Jews the same way he can more or less comprehend the intentions of a peasant! Yet here you have their tassels, their hats, their bizarre speech… their suspicious religion. Why suspicious? Because it’s too close. Their books are the same, Moses, Abraham, Isaac on the stone under his father’s knife, Noah and his ark—all of it’s the same, and yet, with them it appears in some strange new context. Even Noah doesn’t look the same, exactly—he’s disfigured, somehow, and his ark is not the same, but rather Jewish, more ornamental, Eastern, bursting at the seams. Even Isaac, who was always a blond little stripling with rosy skin, has now transformed into a wild child, sturdier, not quite so defenseless…. Their faith is dark and concrete, almost uncomfortably literal. Their Moses is an old pauper with bony feet; ours a dignified elder with a flowing beard…. The worst is when a foreign thing is disguised as something that belongs. As though they were mocking us. As though they were making a joke out of the Holy Scriptures…. After all, the Jews have been around for longer, and yet they persist in their error. It is certainly not unreasonable to suspect that they must be up to something.”
The traditional Jews despise the Frankists even more than the Christians. “Pinkas is profoundly convinced that the old tradition of their forefathers was the right approach, to pass over all matters connected with Sabbatai Tzvi in silence; nothing good, nothing bad, no cursing, no blessing. A thing that is not talked about ceases to exist…. So great is the power of the word that wherever it is lacking, the world just disappears…. Why talk? If you want to rid the world of someone, it does not take fire and sword, nor any type of violence. You just have to pass over that person in silence and never call him by name. In this way, he will gradually recede into oblivion. If another person insists on inquiring into the matter, you must threaten him with herem.” The Frankists, however, have faith even in their darkest hour. “The Messiah must stoop as low as possible, down into those dispassionate mechanisms of the world where the sparks of holiness, scattered into the gloom, have been imprisoned. Where darkness and humiliation are greatest. The Messiah will gather the sparks of holiness, which means that he will leave behind him an even greater darkness. God has sent him down from on high to be abased, into the abyss of the world, where powerful serpents will mercilessly mock him…. The Messiah is something more than a figure and a person—it is something that flows in your blood, resides in your breath, it is the dearest and most precious human thought: that salvation exists.”
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