“All religions change and go beyond the borders laid down by their ancestors”

Abstract Chapter 8 explores how late Frankism foreshadows the Haskalah, Hasidism, and “New Age” Jewish spirituality, even if it did not influence them directly. First, while Sabbateanism did not, as Scholem argued, bring about the Haskalah by destabilizing rabbinic authority, Frank’s quasi-rationalistic critique of traditional theodicy did foreshadow those of the Haskalah, and was known to the Prague Frankists who became Maskilim. Second, Frankism is referred to directly by the Baal Shem Tov and Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, and both movements displace the messianic from the historical to the personal-experiential. Third, Frank anticipated Jewish New Age spiritualities, which extract personal-transformational elements from religious frameworks and insert them into a syncretic, feminist, “spiritual,” and universalist one. Like Frank, the New Age combines skeptical antinomianism with esoteric myth. Though he did not influence them directly, Frank anticipated trends that would become widespread in Jewish religious life.