The Altneuschul in Prague was built around 1270 and has been in continuous use ever since, apart from the years of the German occupation. That makes it the oldest active synagogue in Europe, and the qualifier is doing necessary work: the Erfurt synagogue's fabric is older, dendrochronologically dated to the 1090s, but it spent some five centuries as a storehouse, a ballroom and a bowling alley; the Worms synagogue was founded earlier still but was destroyed in 1938 and rebuilt in 1961.
Judah Loew, and the story attached to him
Judah Loew ben Bezalel (c. 1520-1609), the Maharal of Prague, was a serious legal authority, a philosopher and an educational reformer whose actual writings are substantial and are now read mainly by specialists.
He is famous instead for making a man out of clay.
The story is that the Maharal formed a golem from the mud of the Vltava to defend the Jews of Prague against blood-libel accusations, animated it with a divine name, and that its remains lie in the synagogue's attic, which is therefore not to be entered.
It is not a medieval tradition, and it has nothing to do with the historical Loew.
- The golem appears nowhere in Prague sources of the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.
- It appears nowhere in Loew's own extensive writings.
- It is not attached to Loew in any source during or near his lifetime.
- Its earliest appearances in print connecting a golem to Prague are in German literature of the 1830s and 1840s.
- The familiar full version was fixed by Yudl Rosenberg in a Hebrew work of 1909, which presented itself as a manuscript three hundred years old preserved in Metz. It was not; Rosenberg wrote it, and lifted material from other popular fiction of his day while doing so.
Gershom Scholem's verdict was that these are not ancient legends but modern fiction. The golem motif itself is genuinely old in Jewish mystical literature, the making of an artificial man appears in the Talmud and in medieval commentaries on Sefer Yetzirah, but its attachment to Loew and to Prague is a nineteenth-century literary event.
The museum, and a claim that should be retired
The Prague synagogues and their contents survived the war because the German authorities permitted a Jewish museum in the city, into which the property of liquidated Czech Jewish communities was gathered and catalogued.
This is very widely explained by saying the Nazis intended a "museum of an extinct race."
The claim is not supported by evidence, and the Jewish Museum in Prague itself says so. The documented sequence is that the proposal came in 1942 from within the Prague Jewish community, as an attempt to preserve the property of communities being destroyed, and that the occupying authorities approved it because a cataloguing operation staffed by Jewish specialists was administratively convenient for them. Most of the staff who assembled the collection were subsequently murdered.
Where the phrase originated has not been established. It persists because it is memorable and because it supplies a satisfying motive; it should not be repeated as fact.