Facts flatly contradicted his assertion, put forward through his mouthpiece, Charles Anton, that "there were no longer any Sabbatians." They raised their serpent heads and shot forth their tongues full of poisonous rage at this very moment. The seed which Chayim Malach had scattered in Poland was by no means checked in growth by the anathemas of the rabbis. They had only forced the Sabbatians to disguise themselves better, and to counterfeit death; but they flourished secretly, and their following increased. Some towns in Podolia and Pakotia were full of Talmudists who, in Sabbatian fashion, scoffed at the Talmud, rejected the law of Judaism, and, under the mask of ascetic discipline, lived impure lives. The disorders to which the dispute regarding Eibeschütz had given rise in Poland encouraged the Polish Sabbatians to venture from their hiding-places and raise their masks a little. The time seemed favorable for an attempt to cast aside odious religious rites, and openly to come forward as anti-Talmudists. They needed a spirited leader to gather the scattered band, give it cohesion, and mark out a line of action. This leader now presented himself, and with his appearance began a new movement which threw the whole Jewish world of Poland into intense agitation and despair. This leader was the notorious Jacob Frank. Jankiev Lejbovicz (that is, Jacob son of Leb) of Galicia, was one of the worst, most subtle, and most deceitful rascals of the eighteenth century. He could cheat the most sagacious, and veil his frauds so cleverly that after his death many still believed him an admirable man, who bore through life, and carried to the grave, most weighty secrets. He understood the art of deception even in his youth, and boasted how he had duped his own father. As a young man he traveled in Turkey in the service of a Jewish gentleman, and in Salonica entered into relations with the Sabbatians or Jewish Moslems there. If he did not learn from them how to work deceptive and mystifying miracles, he at all events learnt indifference towards all forms of religion. He became a Mahometan, as afterwards a Catholic, for so long as it served his purpose, and changed his religion as one changes one's clothes. From his long sojourn in Turkey he acquired the name of Frank, or Frenk. Ignorant of Talmudical literature, as he himself confessed, he was acquainted with the Zoharist Kabbala, explained it to suit his purpose, and took peculiar pleasure in the doctrine of metempsychosis, by virtue of which the successive Messiahs were not visionaries or impostors, but the embodiment of one and the same Messianic soul. King David, Elijah, Jesus, Mahomet, Sabbataï Zevi, and his imitators, down to Berachya, were one and the same personality, which had assumed different bodily forms. Why should not he himself be another incarnation of the Messiah? Although Jacob Frank, or Lejbovicz, loved money dearly, he accounted it