Jacob Frank (c. 1726-1791) inherited the Sabbatean underground of Podolia, the legacy of Sabbatai Zevi's 1666 apostasy, and proclaimed a doctrine of liberation through the violation of every boundary, drawing on radical readings of the Zohar. In 1759-60 thousands of Frankists were baptized into Polish Catholicism; Frank settled at Offenbach, where his daughter Eva succeeded him. Gershom Scholem's studies, 'Redemption Through Sin' (1937) and The Messianic Idea in Judaism (1971), are the scholarly spine.
Frankism attracts maximal claims, links to the Donmeh, to Freemasonry, to every subsequent revolutionary movement, most of which outrun the archive. The documented core is strange enough: a messianic antinomian sect that dissolved into the Polish aristocracy within two generations.
Frank radicalized the Sabbatean logic Scholem named: if the exile is total, holiness can be reached only by descending into the realm of the broken shells, the kelippot, and retrieving the sparks from within transgression itself. It is the darkest coherent reading of the Lurianic repair, tikkun, and the reason Frank remains the magnetic south of Jewish mysticism.
If a messiah preaches that every law must be broken to be fulfilled, what remains of the law?