Ours is a profoundly troubled time, and one with a few false messiahs as well. When Olga Tokarczuk set out to write her mammoth novel The Books of Jacob in 2014, these messiahs were perhaps less ...

Jacob Frank (born Lejbowicz) (1726-1791) was one of the worst rascals in Jewish history. A real paskudnyak. To say that he was antinomian, does not do him justice.

Owens encouraged her viewers to do their own research into Frankism — a task that, as late as 2011, when Pawel Maciejko released a major work on Frank, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the ...