“With this deed we go to the naked thing”

Abstract Frankism is perhaps most notorious for its alleged sexual libertinism, though the rumors of it far exceed the evidence. Chapter 5 presents the evidence that does exist and discusses the challenges in interpreting and theorizing Frankist sexual antinomianism. This included not only a libertine attitude toward sex and apparently rare, choreographed sexual ritual, but women taking leadership roles in the community and a conception, inherited from Sabbateanism, that the liberation of women and sexuality is part of the messianic age. Frank tropes this liberation as devotion to the Maiden—a syncretic, messianic figure who is a perennial, feminine incarnation of sensuality. Drawing on feminist and queer readings of religious texts, chapter 5 explores four meanings of sexual praxis in Frankism: sexuality as worldly ecstasy, the remasculinization of the Jewish hero, messianic enactment, and the liberation of the “feminine.” Religion’s subordination of material to spiritual, female to male, is ascribed by Frank to the demonic, while Frankist sexual practice offers a privatized and displaced messianic experience in opposition to it. Sexual liberation is a foretaste of the messianic age.