The Black Madonna of Częstochowa
“If a machine is capable of doing what man can do, and even doing it better than man, then what is man?”
The emperor Joseph II finds this remark escaping his lips during a routine engagement with the mechanical Turk. He has gone mad for the machine, in awe of its receptivity in matches of chess. No one has beaten it, but there are tales of those in the French court that have. It waits patiently for its opponents to move, even shaking its head in the advent of a mistake, all with no apparent motive force but its own gears and cogs, all visible to the curious eye that may wish to inspect these compartments, conveniently made transparent by the clever de Kempelen. The engagement, in the course of the emperor’s interest in the daughter of a strange holy man of foreign birth and passages, prompts a further reflection of life’s origins in natural and chemical processes, yet initiated by a higher power.
The mechanical Turk, however, is a hoax, its compartments and machinic anatomy augmented by a series of glass panes and mirrors that may shift according to the designs of the operator concealed within, a chess grandmaster. Constructed in 1770 by de Kempelen as a gift to Joseph II’s mother, the Empress Maria Theresa, perhaps the orientalist image of the Turk itself served to mask the false nature of the machine. The confrontation of that daunting imperial power of the Ottomans, contenders for dominance in the Balkan peninsula and Eastern trade, turned the loss of the match into a fatalist reconciliation with the antinomy of Nature and Man.
Even the false conceals within it that insight from which springs a greater truth. Walter Benjamin famously finds in the mechanical Turk an allegory for the philosophy of history. The mannequin guaranteeing its perpetual victory is the “historical materialism” of the Second and Third Internationals, where the ideologues of social democracy assigned to the workers’ movements an intrinsically progressive character, a march towards the final crisis of capitalism and the inevitability of socialism’s triumph. Out of sight from this mechanical materialism is the hidden operations of the hunchback called theology, the messianic spirit that, for Benjamin, historical materialism must enlist if it is to win the game, that is, the defeat of the oppressors’ view of history and thus the oppressor itself. Yet, between historical materialism and theology, between the machine and its operator, who is in service to whom?1
It would be difficult to not see in this brief scene from Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob an explicit fidelity to Benjamin’s messianic conception of historical time, not only for its tale of the messianic Frankist sect of 18th century Eastern Central Europe, but also for the author’s own conception of the novel. The alternative numbering of the pages, the countdown to the last from which the first image of omniscient Yente begins for us, is for Tokarczuk not only a nod to the direction of books written in Hebrew, but “a reminder that every order, every system, is simply a matter of what you’ve gotten used to.”2 The upheaval of the Messiah’s arrival is this moment in which the last becomes the first, and the first last; inauguration of the transformation that is necessarily wrought by salvation and liberation. But what then of Jacob Frank and his followers? The novel takes us through the many lives of believers, enemies, and accomplices, the most ardent followers and the most reluctant of observers caught up in the Messiah’s wake, all forming a tapestry that Fredric Jameson celebrates as Tokarczuk’s impossible achievement, “to write the novel of the collective.”3
To follow Jameson’s own maxim of the novel, that notorious exhortation of The Political Unconscious, “Always historicize!”, we can in turn take Tokarczuk’s novel of the collective as that collective that finds its articulation in the two paths of the historicizing operation: “the path of the object and the path of the subject”, where in The Books of Jacob their mutual identity in non-identity is brought forth in the manner by which the monadic introduction of individuals builds out the majestic path of their historical totality. But this is no mere historical novel, set upon the resurrection of the past as an end in itself. No historical fiction ever is, despite itself. The Poland of the Commonwealth’s twilight in the 18th century recalls the Poland of now, torn between the European Union’s own crisis of liberal tolerance and the resurgence of nationalist reaction, itself as committed to property’s sanctity as the most liberating of marketplaces, that is always nurtured by this very commitment to tolerance. Indeed, the original publication of The Books of Jacob in 2015 brought with it immediate hostility from Polish nationalists, as the Nowa Ruda Patriots association called for the revocation of Tokarczuk’s honorary citizenship to the township, supported by Senator Waldemar Bonkowski of the Law and Justice Party.4 Tokarczuk’s own response that she is, in fact, the “true patriot” in turn becomes revealing of this impossibility of liberalism’s ideal.
The Commonwealth in which we encounter the Messiah Jacob Frank and his disciples is one reeling from the crises of the 17th century. The prosperity brought to the szlachta landed nobility by the price revolutions in the grain trades of the 16th century led to an ascension of the aristocracy that greatly reduced the influence and powers of the monarchy, and the establishment of an aristocratic commonwealth that, despite maintaining a royal figurehead, would resist the centralization of the State that Absolutism promoted in the Western lands of the continent. The inability for the ruling szlachta class, however, to adequately concentrate their capacities in the State led to key geopolitical weaknesses in a century’s time, as their inability to mobilize public investment would make their development as a maritime power impossible, thus forfeiting any chance at securing the Baltic littoral. Polish expansions southwards to the Black Sea would be thwarted by the combative Cossack settlements in the Ukraine, and the reliance on the military initiative of a monadically individualist noble class would prove insufficient to the encirclements of Swedish maritime power, Petrine Russia’s cavalry, and the unsubordinated frontiers of the South. Sarmatism, the proto-national ethnic mythology of the szlachta, proved a weak substitute for concentrated power.5
The first Messiah of our novel’s people, Sabbatai Tzvi, arose from this turbulence, in the wake of the Cossack uprising in the Ukraine of 1648 that launched the Jewish Black Year and the social violence of that hostility which would see further pogroms initiated, the Jews suspected as collaborators of the Swedish invaders.6 “Yente’s father, Mayer of Kalisz, was one of those righteous few to be granted a glimpse of the Messiah.”7 The pain and misery of these times, Khmelnytsky’s massacres and the expulsions of Jews, the jacqueries against the landed nobility and retrenchments of serfdom, led her father from Regensburg to Poland, where her family would find relative prosperity in the grain trade, routing the crop to Gdańsk and onto the greater world. The persecution of the region’s Jews persisted, however, and the loss of this time would lead to a despair that called upon itself the eventual arrival of the Messiah and the Apocalypse, the Janus face on one head of death and birth, the alarms of a new era. “Then, in the autumn of 1665, along with their goods from Smyrna came the news that soon shook all the Jews of Poland: The Messiah has arrived. Everyone who heard this instantly fell silent and tried to make sense of this short sentence: The Messiah has arrived. For it is not a common phrase. And it is a final answer. Anyone who pronounces it will watch scales fall from his eyes, will see the world completely differently from that day forward.”8 Mayer is skeptical. After all, what should prevent the Messiah from arriving every generation, after every misfortune? But we are assured that this time is different.
Sabbatai Tzvi and his prophet Nathan of Gaza were to gather followers for the pilgrimage to Stamboul, where the Messiah was to tear away the Sultan’s crown and proclaim himself king. The Sultan, however, would intercept these plans, the cause of such disquiet, and imprison Sabbatai Tzvi, supposedly coercing his conversion to Islam upon penalty of death should he not comply. This imprisonment and conversion would not stop the faithful from adorning him in what would become more a relative isolation than incarceration. Upon his visit, Mayer Kalisz’s glimpse of the Messiah, his strange and unanticipated beauty, elicited a lasting impression. “Mayer the Skeptic felt something then like a sting in his chest, a tug of emotion, and that must have deeply wounded his soul, because he passed that wound along to his children and, later, his grandchildren.”9 From the recognition of this wound and its experience comes the knowledge of that repair of the world to which redemption aims.
Tikkun olam becomes an ethical imperative of the Messianic task. The versatility of its interpretation calling forth improvement, establishment, repair of that which is broken, those wounds of the oppressed of which a just order demands mending. These acts of tikkun are enumerated to the Kabbalists of this story, though they continue to appear to the Frankist Sabbatarians in guises increasingly heretical to all orders. Persecuted by the Talmudic Jews granted safety by the Commonwealth themselves, they will retreat to the Ottoman hinterlands to prepare for their own appeal for sanctuary and safe passage through lands westward. The diverse lives of Eastern Europe’s Jewish culture is brought forth, as peasants and merchants, traversing this emergent world system of the 1700s, the foreclosure of the paths East leading to the destiny of capital to the West. Sabbatai Tzvi’s apostasy teaches a liberation with cunning. The movement towards the establishment of the non-Utopia Ivanie, is marked by Jacob’s prophet Nahman of Busk as such:
“There are external and internal things. External things are appearance, and we live amongst external things like people in a dream, and the laws of appearances must be taken for real laws when in fact they are not. When you live in a place and a time in which certain laws are in effect, then you must observe those laws, but never forgetting that they are only partial systems, never absolute. For the truth is something else, and if a person is not prepared to come to know it, then it may seem frightening and terrible, and that person may curse the day he learned of it. But I do believe that everyone can tell what kind of person he truly is. It is just that deep down, he doesn’t want to find out.”10
We will do well to remember this for Nahman, soon to be Piotr Jakubowski, following the mass conversion to Christianity that the followers of Jacob will undergo to safeguard their passage and fulfill their Messiah’s mission, as he takes upon himself the fulfillment of the Messiah’s lowest descent. Jakubowski the informant betrays the truth of this mission to the inquest of the Bishops, revealing their heresy not only to the Talmud and Mosaic law, but to the Christian Messiah as well. “And what does Jacob want? Right away I answered: Jacob does not need to want anything. Jacob is an instrument of greater forces, that I know. His task is to destroy this evil order.”11 These words, spoken some years before the Sabbatarians are granted their public disputation against the Talmudists, before their conversion, their eventual questioning by the Church’s interlocutors, before Nahman, become Jakubowski, seals Jacob’s fate to imprisonment in Częstochowa at the Pauline monastery of Jasna Góra, already betray what he will never be able to conceal, what the arrival of the Messiah portends to any order, even one that has secured to itself for all time the watchful sacrifice of one many centuries past.
Benjamin’s disturbance of homogeneous, empty time arises from this recognition, that the “tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.” This is what it means for us to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”12 The Messianic tradition wrestles with its appropriation by its oppressors and the obligation it aims to fulfill to the oppressed of its past. The arrival of the Messiah is an admission of the openness of the present, that the foundations of this order are only ordained in so far as they can be enforced. The Sabbatarians, with all their mercantile wealth and aspirations for land, seek not solely integration into the szlachta. This they will achieve just fine through the mute compulsions of trade. They exist in the historical continuum between proletarianization and bourgeoisification, the edges of the ancien régimes coming asunder from which a new world will be born, its fate as yet undecided, its contours already presenting the difficulty of overdetermination. The life in common emerges as a coterminous desire with the rendering of life into value’s autonomous petrification of life’s activity and subordination to its movement as capital.
The embrace of heresy and apostasy, the chosen submergence within one order to emerge as that which is altogether new, unknown to that present and its past: this is the gambit of Jacob as Messiah. He is not a Messiah of toil and uplift, borne of his own suffering. He is a joyous yet miserable Messiah, whose destiny resides in the lowest place, the redemption that is not absolution from sin, but redemption through sin, the destruction of the evil order through the conquest of its evils, or, rather, the reconciliation of its antinomies. Nahman, in the joyous period of the sect’s life in Ivanie, before their descent with the Messiah’s fall from which he will rise once more, tells Moliwda, their sponsor to the szlachta:
“You may not even understand us. You say: black and white, good and evil, woman and man. But it isn’t that simple. We no longer believe in the things of which the elder Kabbalists spoke, such that if all the sparks could be collected from the darkness, they would unite into a messianic tikkun and transform the world for the better. We’ve already crossed over. Because divinity and sinfulness are everlastingly interconnected. Sabbatai said that after the Torah of Bria, the Torah of the Created World will come the Torah of Atzilut. But Jacob and all of us know that the two Torahs are interwoven, and the only thing that can be done is to move beyond the both of them. The struggle is about leaving behind that point where we divide everything into evil and good, light and darkness, getting rid of all those foolish divisions and from there starting a new order all over again. We don’t know what’s past that point. It’s like putting all your eggs in one basket and just taking that step into the darkness. We are headed into the darkness.”13
Upon its own terms, the Age of Enlightenment will bring about not only the light of reason, but the darkening of that which obstructs its illumination. The light seen by the Messiah and the one that he emits to the believers, their consciousness of its implicit darkness, predates the Rohatyn doctor Asher Rubin’s, now Rudolf Ascherbach in distant Vienna following the wars that will bring about the partitions, realization of the Enlightenment’s discourse. With Gitla Gertruda, a stray younger woman that he has built a life with, their remade lives are lived through this new intellectual current. “For one entire evening they play around with the metaphor of the light of reason that illuminates everything equally and dispassionately. Gertruda remarks immediately and intelligently that wherever something’s brightly lit, there is also a shadow, a darkening. The more powerful the light, the deeper, the more intense the shadow. That’s true, that’s a little bit disturbing; they stop talking for awhile.”14 Can a world so advanced in thought reconcile that which this greater knowledge makes conscious of itself? To what does the doctor owe his discomfort? Recollecting Gitla, he understands. “Enlightenment begins when people lose their faith in the goodness and the order of the world. The Enlightenment is an expression of mistrust.”15
We know of this age its political turbulences, its devastation of old ways of life, and what came next. Can we say the same of our own? The broken link of modernity is that we have yet to assail these same impasses. It is rather the case that our time, its perpetual seeking out of redemption and the interminable reconstitution of the Apocalypse owes its stagnation not to an insufficient idea of the future, of our place in history’s eventual and infinite progress, but to an insufficient fidelity to its past liberators. History can never be forever evacuated of its content. For Benjamin, this alliance with modernity’s pretensions left social democracy hobbled, comfortable with its assigning the role of the working class to the vanguard of future development. “This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”16 Perhaps Jacob Frank, consorting with Empresses and the nobility of the West after imprisonment, watching stocks and engaging in financial alchemy, also made this fateful betrayal. But even the false Messiah contains a moment of the true.
Jacob Frank would die on December 10, 1791, his passing a parallel with a distant, but no less interwoven and interdependent moment of liberation the likes of which modernity had yet to see. It was in these same months that the first expeditions of French troops would be sent to the island colony of San Domingo to suppress the insurrection of the slaves, themselves having heard and embraced the doctrine of liberté, égalité, fraternité shaking the foundations of the empire whose wing covered the vulgar brutalities and exploitation of this distant land of sugar plantations. In many ways, the forming underdevelopment of Poland and the self-emancipation of San Domingo were twin destinies. The grain trade of Eastern Europe’s “second feudalism” was the basis for the expansion of feudal incomes whose demand sustained colonial-plantation production. The crises of the political wars and the bourgeoisie’s ascension in the Enlightenment and its revolutions would lead to the successively increasing import of enslaved Africans and their more intensive exploitation on the island. As Abbé Raynal noted of the situation, “Already are there established two colonies of fugitive negroes, whom treaties and power protect from assault. Those lightnings announce the thunder. A courageous chief only is wanted. Where is he, that great man whom Nature owes to her vexed, oppressed and tormented children? Where is he? He will appear, doubt it not; he will come forth and raise the sacred standard of liberty.”17
Always one to deny his elevation to divine provenance or Messianic claims, Toussaint L’Ouverture, himself having read Raynal’s text, would indeed appear and claim his place as this wanted chief, leading the enslaved of San Domingo to their liberation. As C.L.R. James would make clear, despite Toussaint’s greatness, and that is undeniable of his qualities, his power would only be that of the masses that bore him upon their shoulders. And it would be that movement of the masses that he would tragically betray. Toussaint L’Ouverture would serve as the most humane and gracious of conquerors of the colonists, though his steadfast commitments to slavery’s abolition, to the self-directedness and expansion of the freedoms of the island’s black labor, would still find him committed to San Domingo’s place in the French Republic that had granted them freedom, though it was a freedom they earned of their own sacrifice. The French empire upon Bonaparte’s ascent, however, would come to have no such tolerance for this accommodation. In a fateful moment, Toussaint chose the preservation of order against the mobilization of the masses. The disarray that followed left him just weak enough to be eventually captured by French troops led by Leclerc, following Bonaparte’s directives, as they sought to reinstate slavery or eliminate the colony’s black population in their attempts to do so. It would be the task of Dessalines to finally resolve the matter, void of Toussaint’s grace and mercy. There was no other option. Echoing the dialectic of Enlightenment and Darkness noted by Tokarczuk’s Ascherbach, James would put the matter thus:
“Yet Toussaint's error sprang from the very qualities that made him what he was. It is easy to see today, as his generals saw after he was dead, where he had erred. It does not mean that they or any of us would have done better in his place. If Dessalines could see so clearly and simply, it was because the ties that bound this uneducated soldier to French civilization were of the slenderest. He saw what was under his nose so well because he saw no further. Toussaint's failure was the failure of enlightenment, not of darkness.”18
Unable to resolve liberation in the principles of Enlightenment, Toussaint, like so many others, could not see the mutual identity of the illuminated life of the free, and the shadows cast behind them, deepening in intensity with that of the light cast upon them. There is a standard for the pursuit of correct action. This standard, according to Lukács, in its self-awareness “makes it clear that at times it is impossible to act without burdening oneself with guilt. But at the same time it teaches us that, even faced with the choice of two ways of incurring guilt, we should still find that there is a standard attaching to correct and incorrect action. This standard we call sacrifice. And just as the individual who chooses between two forms of guilt finally makes the correct choice when he sacrifices his inferior self on the altar of the higher idea, so it also takes strength to assess this sacrifice in terms of the collective action. In the latter case, however, the idea represents an imperative of the world-historical situation, a historico-philosophical mission.”19 While Haiti would stand, the world that would continue to punish it for the insolence of its freedom would as well. The past darkness is the precondition for the illumination of the present.
Perhaps the Messianists of Jacob Frank, despite their failure, understood this. The omniscient Yente, suspended between life and death, comes to understand the Messianic machine, its operations. Like a mill along the river, the “dark water turns the great wheels evenly, without regard for the weather, slowly and systematically. The person by the wheels seems to have no significance; his movements are random and chaotic. The person flails; the machine works. The motion of the wheels transfers power to some gears that grind the grain. Everything that falls into them will be crushed into dust.”20 But to escape this captivity, this entrapment in the machine, requires tragic sacrifices. It cannot be otherwise. For Benjamin, the historian that recognizes that such a moment became historical posthumously “stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.”21 The angel of History is then no revolutionary figure, for how could it be? To passively contemplate that catastrophe which it holds as a separate object, this is the bourgeois historian, not the self-consciousness of Spirit. He grasps nothing, and is blind to that future to which he is propelled, reconciliation is denied.22 Yente sees this, as she sees all. The Messiah becomes something more in this identity of the non-identical, transformation occurs in the living movement of this faith:
“The Messiah is something more than a figure and a person – it is something that flows in your blood, resides in your breath, it is the dearest and most precious human thought: that salvation exists. And that’s why you have to cultivate it like the most delicate plant, blow on it, water it with tears, put it in the sun during the day, move it into a warm room in the night-time.”23
Benjamin, Walter, Harry Zohn, Hannah Arendt, and Leon Wieseltier. 2013. Illuminations: [Essays and Reflections]. New York: Schocken Books; Löwy, Michael and Chris Turner. 2016. Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “on the Concept of History.” London; New York: Verso.
Tokarczuk, Olga, and Jennifer Croft. 2022. The Books of Jacob: Or: A Fantastic Journey across Seven Borders, Five Languages, and Three Major Religions, Not Counting the Minor Sects. Told by the Dead, Supplemented by the Author, Drawing from a Range of Books, and Aided by Imagination, the Which Being the Greatest Natural Gift of Any Person. That the Wise Might Have It for a Record, That My Compatriots Reflect, Laypersons Gain Some Understanding, and Melancholy Souls Obtain Some Slight Enjoyment. New York: Riverhead Books. P. 5.
Jameson, Fredric. 2022. “The Fog of History.” London Review of Books. March 24, 2022. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n06/fredric-jameson/the-fog-of-history
Piekarska, Magda (15 December 2015). "Nowa polityka historyczna wg PiS. Żądają odebrania Tokarczuk obywatelstwa Nowej Rudy" https://wyborcza.pl/7,75410,19347868,nowa-polityka-historyczna-wg-pis-zadaja-odebrania-tokarczuk.html
Anderson, Perry. 2013. Lineages of the Absolutist State. London; New York: Verso. Pp. 279-298
Wandycz, Piotr S. 1992. The Price of Freedom: A History of East Central Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present. London; New York: Routledge. P. 90
Tokarczuk (2022) p. 808
Ibid, pp. 806-05
Ibid, p. 801
Ibid, p. 569
Ibid, p. 581
Benjamin (2013) pp. 255 & 257
Tokarczuk (2022) p. 503
Ibid, p. 133
Ibid, p. 130
Benjamin (2013) p. 260
Quoted in James, C.L.R. 1989. The Black Jacobins. New York, N.Y.: Vintage. p. 25
Ibid, p. 288
Lukács, György. 1972. Tactics and Ethics: Political Essays 1919-1929. New York. Harper Torchbooks. Pp. 10-11
Tokarczuk (2022) p. 323
Benjamin (2013) p. 263
For this reading of Benjamin, see Gregory Marks’ essay “Between Absolute Spirit and the Angel of History: On Walter Benjamin and Hegelian Marxism” https://thewastedworld.wordpress.com/2022/05/01/spirit-and-angel/
Tokarczuk (2022) p. 322