The Golem That Arrived Two Hundred Years Late

The story is famous: a rabbi of Prague shapes a man from the clay of the Vltava, animates him with a divine name, and sets him to protect the Jewish quarter, until the creature becomes dangerous and has to be stopped. It attaches to the Maharal, and it is not from his lifetime. It appears in print in the early nineteenth century, more than two hundred years after his death, was elaborated considerably in a book published in 1909 that presented itself as an old manuscript, and reached the widest audience of all through twentieth century novels and films. Nothing in his own writing mentions making a golem, and the contemporary accounts of his life do not either.

The wider golem tradition is genuinely old and quite different in character. It runs from speculative material around the Book of Formation, through medieval Ashkenazi practices in which letters are combined over dust to produce a figure that is then unmade, and it is understood in those settings as a demonstration of the creative power of language rather than as a way of obtaining a servant or a guard. The atlas holds the two apart. An old mystical practice and a modern legend about a specific rabbi are separate objects, and the fame of the second has almost entirely obscured the first.