Judah Loew ben Bezalel

Judah Loew, known as the Maharal, served as chief rabbi of Moravia at Mikulov and later of Prague, and he wrote a large and unusually systematic body of work. Its central problem is what to do with aggadah, the non legal portion of rabbinic literature, the stories, the impossible measurements, the conversations between God and angels. In his own time these were being attacked from outside as absurd and defended from inside by reading them literally, and he refused both. His position is that such passages describe an order of reality that is not the physical one, that their concreteness is deliberate, and that a reader who takes them as reports about the world of the senses has made the same error as a reader who dismisses them.

The consequence is a method rather than a set of allegorical keys, and he applies it across a considerable corpus: a work on the Exodus, a long ethical treatise on the paths of the world, a book on Torah and the human intellect, and a defence of aggadah answering a specific published attack. He also wrote at length on how children should be taught, arguing for an order of study that begins with scripture rather than with legal dialectic, which was a live and contested question in the Jewish schools of central Europe.

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.