The Golem
Ancient Rite, Modern Legend
- First attested
- 6th centuryThe earliest surviving evidence is the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 65b, redacted by about the sixth century: the Aramaic reads only "Rava bara gavra", Rava created a man, and "golem" in the standard English is the edition's interpolation. The only complete manuscript of the Talmud, Munich Cod. hebr. 95, was copied in 1342. The word itself is older and means something else — unformed matter in Psalm 139:16, an uncultivated man in Mishnah Avot 5:7. Instructions for making one appear in Eleazar of Worms's commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, about 1200. The golem reaches halakhah in 1712, when Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi's responsa, printed at Amsterdam, asked whether one could be counted towards a minyan; he and his son Jacob Emden were writing about their own ancestor Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chelm, and Prague does not appear. Jacob Grimm's notice of 1808 is still Polish. Edan Dekel and David Gantt Gurley (2013) give the earliest known printed attachment of the golem to Judah Loew and Prague as a footnote in Joseph Seligmann Kohn's novel Das jüdische Gil Blas (Leipzig, 1834), followed by Ludwig August Frankl's folkloric item of 16 November 1836, Berthold Auerbach's Spinoza (1837), Franz Klutschak's report of 1841, and Leopold Weisel's version in Wolf Pascheles's Gallerie der Sipurim (Prague, 1847), which became standard. Yudl Rosenberg's Sefer Nifla'ot Maharal im ha-Golem (Piotrków, 1909) presented itself as an edition of a manuscript by the Maharal's son-in-law Isaac ben Shimshon Katz, held in a Royal Library of Metz that does not exist. Each layer animates differently: in Grimm the Shem ha-Meforash is spoken over the clay and the forehead's Aemaeth is only the life-token, its first letter rubbed out to kill it; in the Prague texts the shem is a written slip laid in the mouth; in Wegener's film of 1920 it is a word sealed in an amulet set into the chest.
The Golem of Prague first reaches print in 1834, in a footnote to a German novel, 225 years after Judah Loew died, and the blood-libel plot everybody knows was written by Yudl Rosenberg in 1909 and sold as a rediscovered manuscript.
A man of clay brought alive by letters: mute, obedient, and dangerous the moment its maker forgets.
In the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 65b, Rava creates a man and sends him to Rabbi Zeira, who speaks to him, gets no answer, and tells him to return to dust. The passage never uses the word golem, and the link to Sefer Yetzirah is Rashi's, not the text's. Eleazar of Worms, about 1200, supplies a procedure: virgin soil never dug, kneaded with living water, the alphabets of the 221 gates recited over each limb. By the mid-seventeenth century the maker was Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chelm, and Jacob Grimm's notice of 1808 has the story still Polish, emet on the forehead and the aleph rubbed out to leave met. Prague arrives late. Judah Loew is first named as maker in print in 1834, Leopold Weisel fixed the standard version in 1847, and the plot most readers know is Yudl Rosenberg's, 1909.
Light
Gershom Scholem read the medieval rite as proof of mastery, not a way to get a servant: what mattered was that Sefer Yetzirah's letters had been understood, and the undoing was in the recipe. Moshe Idel, against him, makes it operative magic, not inner experience.
Shadow
Rosenberg's protector appeared in 1909, ten years after the Polná ritual-murder charge in Bohemia; the blood-libel plot is generally read as his answer to it, a rescue written for people nobody rescued. Wegener's 1920 film made the ghetto a horror set, its creature everyone's monster.
