“The longer I was involved with, the more he aroused my sympathy,” she says. It took Tokarczuk – who says she has “an unflagging fascination with every kind of heterodoxy” – a decade of painstaking research to exhume the strange truth before breathing life back into its bones. Neither the Jews nor the Christians wanted anyone to remember this story. The Roman Catholics agreed to baptise and protect them if they denounced the Talmud as full of lies and confessed to the anti-Semitic myth that Jews drank the blood of Christian children. “I came not to elevate your spirits,” he said, “but to humiliate you to the bottom of the abyss, where you can get no lower, and where no man can rise from by his own forces, but only God can pull him with his mighty hand from the depth.” Their wild and nihilistic practices (including sacred orgies, incest and adult breastfeeding) saw the Jewish community condemn them as heretics. He told his 2,000 followers that certain “elect persons” were freed from moral law. He’s a trickster – a charmer and a fraud.”īorn in eastern Poland, Frank was a Jewish merchant who briefly embraced Islam before declaring himself the saviour around 1751. He’s the self-proclaimed messiah whom Tokarczuk calls “a charismatic man, and also a psychopath. The story of Jacob Frank – the 18th-century Judeo-Christian cult leader at the heart of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob – is a story that has long been inaccessible to the world.
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