The golem initially seems to have been conjured up as part of a meditative rite, reflecting the high level of mystical experience adepts could reach. Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Kabbalah, observed: “It would appear as though… the golem came to life only while the ecstasy of his creator lasted.”
A recipe for making a golem was preserved in the writings of one medieval luminary, Rabbi Elazar of Worms (1176-1238), for whom it was to be kneaded out of fresh mountain soil and running water. An idea that became common in golem lore is found in another medieval source: that in order to bring the golem to life, the word emet, “truth”, had to be inscribed on its forehead: if the first letter, aleph, is removed, it leaves the Hebrew word met, “dead”, and the golem ceases to exist.
A man examines a clay statue planning to bring it to life in a still from the 1915 German silent film, The Golem 1915. (Photo: Getty Images)Getty Images
The golem came to be associated, most of all, with the illustrious Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel in 16th-century Prague, known as the Maharal – although there was nothing in his lifetime that linked him to it. In Yudl Rosenberg’s The Golem or the Miraculous Deeds of Rabbi Lipa, published in Yiddish in 1909, the Maharal creates the being out of clay on the riverbank in order to help him protect the Jewish community from the Blood Libel. Although the story was set centuries before, Rosenberg was writing at a time when the libel was still current in parts of East Europe.
In his account, the golem is a relatively benign figure, who is actually given a name – Joseph. In public, he is presented as an assistant beadle, who is secretly sent by the Maharal on special errands to help foil the libel-mongers, sometimes with the aid of an amulet of invisibility. In particular the rabbi must strive to outwit a dastardly priest who tries to have the bodies of dead Christians planted in Jewish households.
Miscreants reluctant to face the rabbi when summoned are carried to him over the golem’s shoulders. Joseph, who is mute, is human enough to be bloodied and bruised when he survives a revenge attack. Finally, when the King issues a decree to abolish the Blood Libel, the Maharal decides his golem is needed no longer: Joseph is decommissioned and secretly laid to rest in the synagogue attic.
What is noticeable in Rosenberg’s version is that the Maharal is fully in control of the golem, who remains his obedient servant. But elsewhere the golem turns into more of a monster that eventually wreaks havoc – as it does in an earlier account in the 1840s, by the ethnographer Leopold Weisel, a collector of Jewish folk tales.
The Maharal is meant to deactivate it for Shabbat but one week he forgets and the golem goes berserk, throwing rocks, uprooting trees and tearing down houses. Fearful of his creature’s violence, the Maharal puts it to sleep for good.
It is Weisel’s incarnation that has caught the imagination of the golem’s subsequent resurrecters. The golem’s story becomes a parable of over-reach. In our quest for knowledge, we strive to find the key to generating life itself, but there are limitations to our mastery and hidden dangers.
Many a dystopian sci-fi tale has imagined robots and machines that evolve to such an extent that they threaten to break free of the constraints of their creators. With the progression of AI, some suggest that the threat may no longer be fantasy. As a cautionary character, the golem was ahead of its time.
Top image: Joshua Abarbanel's sculpture of the Golem in a 2016 exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin (photo: Getty Images)
For sources, see The Golem: Past, Present and Future, Zachary Bahar, sefaria.org
