Was Frankism the link between Kabbalah and Enlightenment?, or, What Scholem Got Unintentionally Right Gershom Scholem posited Frankism as the crucial link between Sabbateanism and modernity. Sabbateanism’s anti-authoritarian stance inspired the anti-authoritarian Haskalah, Scholem said, much more than did the non-Jewish Enlightenment. And Frankism,
by way of Prague, is the missing link.
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Was Scholem wrong, then, about Frankism? Ironically, he was unintentionally right. As a species of Western Esotericism, Frankism is indeed a halfway-house between religion and secularism. Late Frankism was part of a Western Esoteric tradition that, in its materialist metaphysics and in its presenting of an alternative body of knowledge to religion, helped lay the groundwork for the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution.
Scholem was puzzled that Frankist superstition could persist at the time of the French revolution, but this “superstition” was in fact a set of Western Esoteric myths that helped lay the groundwork for the French Revolution itself. In sum, Frankism was, in fact, part of the movement that birthed modernity – the Western Esoteric movement – and Scholem got it unintentionally right.