FRANEKER, a town in the province of Friesland, Holland, 5 m. E. of Harlingen on the railway and canal to Leeuwarden. Pop. (1900) 7187. It was at one time a favourite residence of the Frisian nobility, many of whom had their castles here, and it possessed a celebrated university, founded by the Frisian estates in 1585. This was suppressed by Napoleon I. in 1811, and the endowments were diverted four years later to the support of an athenaeum, and afterwards of a gymnasium, with which a physiological cabinet and a botanical garden are connected. Franeker also possesses a town hall (1591), which contains a _planetarium_, made by one Eise Eisinga in 1774-1881. The fine observatory was founded about 1780. The church of St Martin (1420) contains several fine tombs of the 15th-17th centuries. The industries of the town include silk-weaving, woollen-spinning, shipbuilding and pottery-making. It is also a considerable market for agricultural produce. FRANK, JAKOB (1726-1791), a Jewish theologian, who founded in Poland, in the middle of the 18th century, a sect which emanated from Judaism but ended by merging with Christianity. The sect was the outcome of the Messianic mysticism of Sabbetai Zebi. It was an antinomian movement in which the authority of the Jewish law was held to be superseded by personal freedom. The Jewish authorities, alarmed at the moral laxity which resulted from the emotional rites of the Frankists, did their utmost to suppress the sect. But the latter, posing as an anti-Talmudic protest in behalf of a spiritual religion, won a certain amount of public sympathy. There was, however, no deep sincerity in the tenets of the Frankists, for though in 1759 they were baptized _en masse_, amid much pomp, the Church soon became convinced that Frank was not a genuine convert. He was imprisoned on a charge of heresy, but on his release in 1763 the empress Maria Theresa patronized him, regarding him as a propagandist of Christianity among the Jews. He thenceforth lived in state as baron of Offenbach, and on his death (1791) his daughter Eva succeeded him as head of the sect. The Frankists gradually merged in the general Christian body, the movement leaving no permanent trace in the synagogue. (I. A.)