FRANK, JACOB. Yakov ben Lev (1726–1791), cynosure of the last large Jewish messiah-event, took the surname Frank at his baptisms in Poland in 1759 and 1760, when he also added the name Joseph and became Jacob Joseph Frank. The surname had become attached to him as an epithet that in Yiddish denoted a Turkish Jew and in Turkish denoted a European Jew. He himself never explained which he was, contenting himself with the ambiguity of the reference. Frank acted out the role of a Jewish messiah in the territory of the Ottoman Empire in Poland and in Bohemia and Germany from about 1750 until he died in a fit in Offenbach, to be succeeded by his daughter, Ewa.

Though Frank presented himself as the inheritor of Shabbetai Tsevi (1626–1676) and Barukhya Russo (d. 1721), his forerunners in this tradition, he did not do so in their urban Turkish environment, nor was his...