Sabbatian Charlatans: the first Jewish cosmopolitans   1. This paper is based on a chapter of my book, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement 1755-1816, University of Pennsylvania Press (forthcoming). View all notes

摘要

This paper utilises the concept of the charlatan in order to analyse the fortunes of two Jewish ‘false messiahs’, Wolf Eibeschütz and Jacob Frank. As the Encycopédie put it, charlatanry is ‘the vice of him who strives to recommend himself, or things belonging to him, as being endowed with imaginary qualities’. While charlatans obviously existed in every age and ‘every class had its charlatans,’ in some periods charlatanry was particularly prominent and widespread. Thus, charlatanry was especially likely to appear in the periods of social, cultural, and scientific change, in which empirical research out ran theory, and the rapid development of technology eluded the abilities of its conceptualisation, let alone the possibilities of explaining it to the general public. In other words, charlatanry was likely to hold sway whenever the ‘fringe of the inexplicable’ became especially large, and the gap between those in the know and the rest of the population particularly wide. The mid-eighteenth century was the golden age of European charlatanry. Members of the pan-European guild of the itinerant charlatans drifted from court to court, rotated from salon to salon, exchanging experiences, swapping mistresses, and underwriting each other's false bills of exchange. The most important representatives of this type were contemporaries and often knew each other. The last part of the paper discusses contacts between Jacob Frank and Giacomo Casanova.View full textDownload full textKeywordsJewish, Cosmopolitanism, Sabbatai, Eibeschütz, alchemy, Casanova, charlatanRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2010.481930