The Books of Jacob
In mid-18th century Poland, a messianic figure emerges in a small Jewish community. It says something about this book that this character is not introduced until a good hundred pages in, because the story is less about him than about the communities he was part of, ones he rejected and ones he created, and ones on the periphery of his world.
The discursive subtitle, too lengthy to include here, signals the antiquarian spirit of the book, filled with fragments, images, letters, personal accounts, and ranging across narrators, tenses, and empires. The central figure Jacob Frank, and the great majority of the rabbis, priests, mystics, tradesmen, noblewomen, soldiers, Turks, and Kabbalists who appear, are historical persons. The author has dug deeply into libraries and archives to assemble these threads and weave them together with a wide-ranging imagination.
Jacob’s call is to reject Jewish law and its traditional elaborations, especially the Talmud, and embrace Christianity, not exactly as the end goal, but as a parallel path to a true faith. The narrative pursues his followers and hangers-on across networks of families and dynasties of teachers, through trials, curses, an anti-Talmudic disputation, a blood libel accusation made by one group of Jews against another, sexual shake-ups, and Jacob’s imprisonment in a monastery. After the group converts to Catholicism, they take on Christian names, further disrupting readers’ attempts to keep characters straight. Yente, an old woman who swallows charmed words of protection and cannot die, sees all but does not intervene.
Fascinating and frustrating, the book is both a dry treatise and a fever dream. Readers who enjoy sinking into a time and place will be intrigued, while readers who like to engage with storylines and get attached to characters may find it hard to get a foothold.
