Not the messiah
uring the 18th century, in the borderlands between present-day Ukraine and Poland, an extraordinary religious movement arose. It was a Jewish heresy invented by a man called Jacob Frank – “the most hideous and uncanny figure in the whole history of Jewish messianism”, according to the Israeli scholar Gershom Scholem. Frank claimed that the end times had come and conventional morality needed to be turned upside down. He bragged about defiling the Torah with his naked buttocks, encouraged his followers to break all sorts of sexual and
