Who Is the Golem of Prague? A Servant Made of Clay

The word appears once in the Hebrew Bible, in a psalm, meaning something unformed or incomplete, and it was used by early commentators for Adam in the state before God breathed life into him, a body of earth without a soul. From that, rabbinic and later mystical literature developed the idea that a sufficiently learned person, working with the creative power of language, might animate matter in imitation of creation. The Talmud contains a brief account of a rabbi creating a man and sending him to a colleague, who spoke to him, received no answer, and told him to return to dust. Medieval mystical texts, particularly commentaries on the Sefer Yetzirah, describe procedures involving the combination of Hebrew letters, and a strand of the tradition treats such creation as an exercise in contemplation rather than as a practical technique, a way of understanding creation rather than performing it.

The famous version attaches to Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague, a real and eminent rabbi who died in 1609 and who is buried in the old Jewish cemetery there. In the story he creates a golem to protect the community from blood libel accusations, the recurring and murderous falsehood that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes, which had produced pogroms across Europe. The mechanism varies: in most versions the word for truth is inscribed on the creature's forehead, and erasing the first letter leaves the word for death, which returns it to clay; in others a slip of paper bearing a divine name is placed in its mouth and removed on the Sabbath. The ending is consistent in tone, with the golem growing, becoming destructive, and being deactivated, after which its remains are stored in the attic of the Old New Synagogue, which by tradition must not be entered. The synagogue is real, its attic is closed, and tourists are told the story daily.

The attribution to Rabbi Loew is not contemporary. No source from his lifetime or for two centuries afterwards connects him to a golem, and his own extensive writings do not mention one. The earliest known link appears in print in 1837, and the story reached a wide audience through a collection published in 1909 by Yudl Rosenberg, presented as a translation of a manuscript by Loew's son-in-law, which historians have established Rosenberg wrote himself. Similar legends had attached to other rabbis earlier, including one in sixteenth-century Poland. What the nineteenth century supplied was the combination: a specific famous rabbi, a specific city with a famous synagogue, a defensive purpose against real persecution, and a dramatic ending. The legend then travelled back into Jewish communities as folklore, which is a common route for stories that begin as literature.

Several readings coexist and none excludes the others:

• •Protection, since the legend arose and spread among communities that were genuinely attacked and had no legal recourse, and it imagines a defender where none existed
• •The limits of human creation, with the recurring lesson that a made being cannot be fully controlled and that the maker is responsible for what it does
• •The power of language, since the creature is animated by a written word and deactivated by removing a letter, which is a statement about text that fits a tradition organised around the study of it
• •The danger of literalism, because a golem follows instructions exactly and the disasters come from commands that did not anticipate how they would be carried out
• •A meditation on what is missing, since the being has no speech, no soul and no moral agency, which is what separates it from a person

The story has probably the widest literary influence of any Jewish folk narrative. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein of 1818 shares its central structure of a made being that turns on its maker, whether or not she knew the legend. Gustav Meyrink's novel of 1915 and Paul Wegener's silent films from 1915 to 1920 established the visual image of a lumbering clay figure, which fed directly into the film monsters of the 1930s. The word entered technology through the same route, and Karel Capek's play of 1921, written in Prague, introduced the word robot to describe manufactured workers who rebel. From there the lineage runs through most twentieth-century fiction about artificial servants, including Asimov's laws of robotics, which are an explicit attempt to solve the problem of literal obedience that the golem stories pose. It reappears in comics, where several characters are golems, in Michael Chabon's novel about comic book creators, and in contemporary discussion of artificial intelligence, where the image of a powerful obedient creation that does exactly what it was told and not what was meant has turned out to be uncomfortably useful.

A golem is a figure of clay animated by divine language, an idea running from a biblical word for something unformed through medieval mystical texts describing letter combinations. The Prague version, in which Rabbi Loew makes one to protect the Jewish quarter and deactivates it by erasing a letter from the word truth, is not contemporary with the sixteenth-century rabbi it names and appears in print only from 1837, reaching its familiar form in a 1909 book presented as a found manuscript. The story shaped Frankenstein, the word robot and modern writing about artificial minds.