What Happens When a Made Thing Will Not Stop? A Story About Instructions

The word appears once in the Hebrew Bible meaning an unformed or incomplete thing, and rabbinic writings from the early centuries of the common era use it for an unfinished body. Medieval mystical texts developed the idea into a practice, describing how a figure of earth could be animated by combining letters according to elaborate rules and by inscribing a divine name, which was understood as an imitation of creation and therefore as something both remarkable and dangerous. The figure so made was described as lacking speech and lacking a soul, capable of following instructions and incapable of judgement, which is the feature every later story turns on.

Accounts differ enormously and share a set of features:

• •A body formed from clay or earth by a learned and pious person
• •Animation by a written name placed in the mouth or inscribed on the forehead
• •Strength and tirelessness, combined with an inability to speak or reason
• •Growth in size, in several versions, becoming steadily harder to control
• •Deactivation by erasing a letter or removing the written name
• •A conclusion in which the maker must destroy what they made

The best known version attributes the making of such a figure to Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague in the late sixteenth century, to protect the Jewish community against violence, with the figure eventually stored in the attic of the Old New Synagogue. That association is almost certainly nineteenth century rather than contemporary, appearing in print from the early 1800s and elaborated substantially in a widely read collection published in 1909 that presented invented material as traditional. Loew himself was a real and important scholar who wrote a great deal and never mentions it. The story became attached to a real person and a real building, which is how a nineteenth century literary invention came to be received as ancient tradition.

Stories about artificial servants that turn on their makers recur across traditions and comparing them clarifies what is distinctive here. Greek tradition has a bronze figure guarding Crete, animated by a single vein of fluid and destroyed when it is opened. Automata described in Chinese and Islamic texts perform tasks and occasionally alarm their audiences. European alchemical writing describes creating a small artificial person. The broom that will not stop fetching water in a tale retold by Goethe in 1797 is the same structure with no figure at all. What distinguishes the Jewish tradition is that the animation is textual, achieved by letters and a name, so the creature is literally made of language, which is why the stories turn on writing and erasing.

The narrative supplies a structure that later periods found useful and it has been borrowed continuously. A made servant that obeys instructions exactly and lacks any judgement about them is a direct anticipation of arguments about automation, and the story is cited constantly in discussions of robotics and of artificial intelligence, which is the reading most people now encounter. The figure also served as a symbol of protection and of vulnerability in Jewish writing and art, particularly in the twentieth century. Literary treatments run from Romantic fiction through Yiddish theatre to modern novels, and an influential German film of 1920 shaped the visual idea of an animated made figure that later cinema drew on repeatedly.

The word means an unformed thing, and medieval mystical texts describe animating a figure of earth by combining letters and inscribing a name, producing something strong, obedient and incapable of judgement. The famous Prague attribution is a nineteenth century literary development attached to a real scholar who never mentions it. The story persists because a servant that follows instructions exactly and understands nothing anticipates arguments about automation.