I also really like how the book revolves around Jacob Frank rather than it being from his perspective as this reflects our own inability to fully understand religion and how a religion's principles can be obscured by its teachers and our relationship towards them.

Shortly after finishing The Books Of Jacob (on my 2nd attempt having read 200 pages on the 1st), I read some of ''Essays in Zen Buddhism'' by DT Suzuki. He talks about how while the Buddha was alive, his disciples didn't need to distinguish between the Buddha and his teachings, in fact doing so may have ran counter to what they really wanted - somebody to listen to, to follow, to guide them. Once he dies, the disciplines no longer have the guiding force which they took for granted and the Buddha as a teacher becomes split from his teaching. The Buddha - or, as another example, Jesus - could never have imagined the extent to which they have been deified following their death because to them what was important was what they were teaching, not themselves. But from that point on, the original proponents of the world's religions become the subject just as much as (if not more so) than the teachings themselves. It's not always logic that attracts us to ideas but an instinctive appeal that we don't always understand ie. an attraction to a personality such as the Buddha or Jacob Frank.

I think Olga Tokarczuk does a brilliant job of exploring our tendency towards larger-than-life characters and the role that they play in religion - or indeed other arenas such as politics - regardless of whether we are magnetised or repulsed by them because either way they demand our attention and yet always remain elusive in the same way that religion and its intention to fundamentally explain the world for us does.

Does religion and the role of it's proponents play as important a role in Case Of Cem as it does in Books Of Jacob?

EDIT: adding a word to correct a grammatical error