The Golem

The word golem appears only once in the Hebrew Bible. In Psalm 139 the psalmist praises God, who knew him even before birth: “Your eyes saw my unformed body”, or in the older English of the King James Version, “my substance, yet being unperfect”. The Hebrew word is golmi, “my golem”, the shapeless mass from which a person is formed. In the Mishnah the word describes an uncultivated, unlearned person, and in modern Hebrew it can still mean a fool or a clumsy lump.

The Talmud uses the idea for the first man himself. In one account of the day of creation, Adam spent his second hour as a golem, a body of earth not yet given a soul. The same body of rabbinic literature contains the first story of a created human. “Rava created a man”, the Talmud says, and sent him to Rabbi Zeira. When Rabbi Zeira spoke to him and he did not answer, the rabbi said, “You are from the magicians; return to your dust.” On the same page two rabbis are said to have studied the Book of Creation every Sabbath eve and created a calf, which they then ate.

The Book of Creation, the Sefer Yetzirah, is a short and mysterious work of uncertain date, perhaps composed sometime between the second and sixth centuries CE. It teaches that God created the world through the ten primordial numbers and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. If the letters were the building blocks of creation, later readers reasoned, a sage who understood them perfectly might, with God’s permission, imitate that act.

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the mystics known as the Hasidei Ashkenaz, the pious of Germany, took up this idea. Commentaries on the Book of Creation from this circle, including one attributed to Eleazar of Worms, describe golem-making as a solemn rite of letter combinations performed in purity. For these writers the aim was spiritual: the act was a form of contemplation that demonstrated the creative power of the divine name, and the figure was usually returned to dust at once. Historians debate whether anyone actually tried to perform the rite.

A famous motif appears in medieval sources: the word emet, “truth”, one of the names of God, gives the golem life. In one tale the prophet Jeremiah and Ben Sira, called his son in legend, create a man who bears the words “God is truth” on his forehead. The created man erases the first letter, changing the phrase into “God is dead”, and warns them that no human should rival the Creator. The play on emet and met, “dead”, became the best-known feature of the legend.

The golem of these sources is strong but incomplete. It cannot speak, and many writers held that it lacked a true soul, since only God can give the breath of life. This silence marked the difference between human and divine creation: the most learned sage could shape a body, but not a person.

From around the seventeenth century, stories circulated about Rabbi Elijah of Chełm in Poland, who died in 1583 and was said to have made a golem as a servant. In the eighteenth-century account of his descendant, the rabbi Jacob Emden, the golem grew so large that Elijah feared it would destroy the world, and he removed the divine name from it, injuring himself as the clay collapsed. In 1808 Jacob Grimm published a version in a German literary journal, describing Polish Jews who made golems that grew larger every day until their makers erased the first letter of emet.

Only in the nineteenth century was the legend firmly attached to Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague, known as the Maharal, who died in 1609. Loew was a real and important thinker, a scholar of law, philosophy and mysticism, but nothing in his writings or in any source from his lifetime mentions a golem. German-language collections of Prague Jewish tales from the 1840s told how he made a golem to serve him, and how it ran wild when he forgot to deactivate it on a Sabbath eve.

The version most people know today owes much to Yudl Rosenberg, a Polish rabbi who in 1909 published The Wonders of the Maharal, claiming it came from an old manuscript. In his tales the golem protects the Jews of Prague against the blood libel, the false accusation that Jews murdered Christians for ritual purposes. Scholars regard the book as Rosenberg’s own creation, written at a time when such accusations were again being raised in Europe. Prague tradition adds that the golem’s remains lie in the attic of the Old New Synagogue.

In the twentieth century the golem left the world of Jewish lore and entered modern culture. Gustav Meyrink’s novel Der Golem (1915) wove the legend into a dreamlike portrait of Prague’s old Jewish quarter, and Paul Wegener’s silent film The Golem, How He Came into the World (1920) gave the creature its heavy, clay-booted image. H. Leivick’s Yiddish drama The Golem (1921) and later writers such as Isaac Bashevis Singer and Michael Chabon returned to the story.

The golem also became a way to think about technology. The mathematician Norbert Wiener used it in the title of his 1964 book God and Golem, Inc., about cybernetics and moral responsibility, a book that compared the making of learning machines with the old legend, and in 1965 Gershom Scholem gave the name Golem Aleph to an early computer built at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot. In debates about robots and artificial intelligence, the golem is still invoked as a warning and a hope: a creation of great power that depends on the wisdom of its maker. Fantasy fiction and games have made the golem a stock creature of stone, clay or iron, and Terry Pratchett’s comic novel Feet of Clay (1996) imagined golems who longed for freedom. In Prague, meanwhile, the golem is a beloved emblem of the city’s Jewish history, sold in clay figurines in the shops of the old Jewish quarter.