On August 10, 1792, Junius Frey and his brother Immanuel took part in the storming of the Tuileries Palace, for which they were decorated with orders; to commemorate the proclamation of the Republic a month later, Junius Frey adopted an orphan boy, took a blind widow on jointure, and began paying a pension to a man who was elderly and infirm.
In the summer of 1793, a text was published by Junius Frey by the title of Philosophie sociale, dediée au peuple fran?ais par un Citoyen de la Section de la République fran?aise, or Social Philosophy Dedicated to the French People by a Citizen of the Section of the French Republic, in which Frey, that is, Thomas von Sch?nfeld, that is, Moshe Dobrushka, maintained that every political system, similarly to every religion, has its own theology, and that the theological foundations of democracy needed to be investigated, too. He dedicated an entire chapter to a devastating critique of Mosaic law, Moses having deceived his people insofar as the laws invented by him—serving solely to oppress man and strip him of his freedom—were presented by him as divine. The number of misfortunes and plagues, acts of violence and wars suffered by the Jewish people, along with other peoples of the world, due to this deception was, to Frey’s mind, staggering. Jesus was better and more noble, in that he predicated his system upon reason. Unfortunately, his ideas got distorted, similarly to Muhammad’s. And yet the truth so effectively hidden by Moses could be reached by following the connections between seemingly disconnected domains—the hard sciences, the arts, alchemy, and Kabbalah—that in fact complement and comment upon each other. The book concluded in an elegy for Kant, who, for fear of an oppressive regime, had to cloak his true thoughts within an obscure metaphysics that served him as “talisman against hemlock and cross.”
In Paris, Junius Frey lived an intense and profligate life. He and Fran?ois Chabot, who married Leopoldyna, were infamous for their debauchery and had many enemies. Thomas, i.e., Junius, had a vast quantity of money and was suspected of spying on behalf of Austria. Thanks to Chabot, he became a member of the commission that liquidated the assets and liabilities of the French East India Company—an unimaginable fortune. Soon denounced for falsifying documents, Chabot took Thomas down with him.
After a brief trial, on the 16th of Germinal, in the year II, that is, April 5, 1794, Junius Frey, and his younger brother, Immanuel, along with Danton, Chabot, Desmoulins, and others, were sentenced to death.
The pinnacle of the execution was the beheading of Danton; it was his head the mob had been eagerly awaiting. The whistling and applause lessened steadily as each of the other convicts had their turns. When it came time for Junius Frey, that is, Thomas von Sch?nfeld, that is, Moshe Dobrushka, who was last in line, the mob had already begun to disperse.
Junius saw all the heads before his be severed, saw them fall into the basket set under the guillotine, and as he tried to rein in the wild, animal fear that had come over him, he realized with a thrill that he would finally have the opportunity to learn how long a severed head continues living, a question that had inspired intense debate ever since the guillotine began its breakneck career. He decided with the same excitement that he would try to convey this information across the empty fields of death before he was reborn.
To the French he wrote: “I am a foreigner among you, my native skies are far from here, but my heart was warmed by the word Freedom, the most beautiful word of our century. It is this word that lights my every deed, for I have pressed my lips to Freedom’s nipples, and it is the milk of Freedom that sustains me. My fatherland: the world. My profession: performing acts of goodness. My mission: kindling souls of feeling.”
For a long time on the streets of Paris, a song was sung whose origins were obscure. Yet we know with certainty that it was just a simplified translation into French of a poem by Junius Frey, which was of course his French translation of the German version of Nahman’s prayer. It went like this:
Nowadays my soul is over
All that loses your composure.
Throne and coat of arms, crown, scepter,
My soul’s scot-free from every captor.
Nowadays my soul goes dancing,
From its stage it’s always glancing.
Good and evil, niceties and beauty—
My soul’s the soldier, they’re the booty.
It sees no borders and no walls,
Haunts the soapbox with a smile,
Blows through the grain and all the chaff,
Casts pearls in the pigsties with a laugh.
O tell me, O Holy Paternity,
Great citizen of all eternity,
Since my soul’s dance is nearly through—
Are there others just like you?
For if you are the only one,
In order to protect my sons,
Give me the right words and the language,
That they and their sons can all manage.
The children
Yente is the one soul capable of seeing from above, and of following the tracks of all these restless beings.
And so she sees that old Yeruhim J?drzej Dembowski was right when he talked about how his sons would be dressed when they visited him. It also makes sense to Yente why they ended up never visiting him at all. Jan Dembowski became Ignacy Potocki’s secretary, while Joachim was aidede-camp to Prince Joseph Poniatowski, nephew of the king. Jan later fought as a captain in the Ko?ciuszko Uprising and was reportedly the most energetic of all the conspirators. He was subsequently seen leading the mob as they went to hang the traitors. When the uprising was quelled, he—like many—joined the Legions and went on fighting in Italy. During the battle in 1813, he fought the Austrians and became, for some time, the governor of Ferrara. He married one Miss Visconti and lived out the remainder of his days in Italy.
His brother Joachim fought at his prince’s side until the very end and shared his tragic fate.
Antoni, the grandson of Moshe of Podhajce, and the only son of Joseph Bonaventura ?ab?cki from his marriage to Barbara Piotrowska, daughter of Moshko Kotlarz, after graduating from his Piarist boarding school took a position at the age of fifteen in the chancellery of the Four-Year Sejm, and even at such a young age published several smaller works in defense of planned reforms. In the time of Congress Poland, he worked as a lawyer and often defended minorities. His defense style was widely known: he would lean far over the railing and lower his voice almost to a whisper, then suddenly, in the places he considered especially important, roar and bang his fist on the railing, so that the judges, who had been lulled by the monotony of his tone, nervously twitched in their seats. Whenever he saw that his arguments were not gaining traction and that he was losing, he would raise both hands and clench his fists, his whole body would visibly struggle, and sounds of desperation would issue from his chest, compelling the judges to come to his aid.
Married to Eva Wo?owska, he had four children, among whom his eldest son, Hieronim, particularly distinguished himself as organizer and historian of Congress Poland’s mining industry.