The Golem of Prague

In the legend as it is usually told, the Jewish quarter of Prague is under threat from a blood accusation, and Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, known as the Maharal, goes down to the river with two assistants at night, shapes a man out of clay, and brings it to life by ritual means involving the divine name, in most versions written on a slip of parchment placed in its mouth or inscribed on its forehead. The creature is enormously strong, understands instructions, and cannot speak. It patrols the quarter, uncovers the plot, and protects the community. Then it becomes a problem: accounts differ over whether it grows violent, whether it is forgotten and left active on the Sabbath, or simply whether its strength outgrows any use for it. The rabbi undoes the animation by reversing the procedure, and the remains are carried to the attic of the Old-New Synagogue in Prague, where the story holds that they lie under the roof and that the stairs are not to be climbed.

The narrative is unusually specific about place, which is part of its power. The synagogue exists, the attic exists, and the tradition of not entering it is real and long-standing. What the story does not have is early documentation.

Behind the Prague story lies a much older and quite different Jewish tradition. Commentaries on Sefer Yetzirah, the short and obscure work of letter-cosmology that circulated from late antiquity, discuss the making of an artificial anthropoid through combinations of the letters of the alphabet, and the medieval German pietists developed this into a described practice: a solitary or paired exercise, performed on virgin soil, involving the recitation of letter-combinations over a shaped figure. In those accounts the point is contemplative rather than practical. The creature is made in order to demonstrate that the practitioner has understood the creative process, and is usually undone immediately, sometimes by walking the recitation backwards. Nothing in that tradition involves protecting anybody from anything.

The attachment of a golem to the Maharal specifically cannot be traced before the nineteenth century. He died in 1609 and left a substantial body of writing that does not mention it, and his contemporaries do not associate him with one. The story appears in print in the early nineteenth century in German-language collections, and the full narrative most people now know was published in 1909 by Yudl Rosenberg, who presented it as an old manuscript by the rabbi's son-in-law; scholarship treats it as Rosenberg's own composition. From there it passed into a Czech and German literary culture already fascinated by Prague, into an influential silent film cycle, and thence into the wider modern idea of a made servant that outgrows its maker.