Golem

For other uses, see Golem (disambiguation).

An illustration of a Golem.

In Jewish folklore, a golem (Template:He; /ˈɡoʊləm/ GOH-ləm) is an animated anthropomorphic being, created entirely from inanimate matter. The word was used to mean an amorphous, unformed material in Psalms and medieval writing. The most famous golem narrative involves Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late 16th century chief rabbi of Prague.

History

Etymology

The word golem is used in the Bible to refer to an embryonic or incomplete substance. Psalm 139:16 uses the word גלמי, meaning my unshaped form, which then passed into Yiddish as goylem. In modern Hebrew the word golem means "dumb" or "helpless". The Mishnah uses the term for an uncultivated person: "Seven characteristics are in an uncultivated person, and seven in a learned one", Pirkei Avos 5:9 in the Hebrew text (English translations vary). Similarly, golems are often used today as a metaphor for brainless lunks or entities who serve man under controlled conditions, but are hostile to him in others. Similarly, it is a Yiddish slang insult for someone who is clumsy or slow.

Earliest stories

The earliest stories of golems date to early Judaism. In the Talmud (Tractate Sanhedrin 38b), Adam was initially created as a golem when his dust was "kneaded into a shapeless husk". Like Adam, all golems are created from mud. They were a creation of those who were very holy and close to God. A very holy person was one who strove to approach God, and in that pursuit would gain some of God's wisdom and power. One of these powers was the creation of life. However, no matter how holy a person became, a being created by that person would be but a shadow of one created by God.

Early on, it was noted that the main disability of the golem was its inability to speak. Sanhedrin 65b describes Rava creating a man (gavra). He sent the man to Rav Zeira. Rav Zeira spoke to him, but he did not answer. Rav Zeira said, "You were created by the magicians; return to your dust."

Activating golems

During the Middle Ages, passages from the Book of Creation, Sefer Yetzirah, were studied as a means to attain the mystical ability to create and animate a golem, although there is little in the writings of Jewish mysticism that supports this belief. It was believed that golems could be activated by an ecstatic experience induced by the ritualistic use of various letters of the Hebrew Alphabet.

In some tales, a golem is inscribed with Hebrew words that keep it animated. The word emet (אמת, "truth" in the Hebrew language) written on a golem's forehead is one such example. The golem could then be deactivated by removing the aleph (א) in emet, thus changing the inscription from 'truth' to 'death' (met מת, "dead"). Legend and folklore suggest that golems could be activated by writing a specific series of letters on parchment and placing the paper in a golem's mouth.

The classic narrative

Rabbi Loew and golem by Mikoláš Aleš, 1899.

Synagogue of Prague with the rungs of the ladder to the attic on the wall.

The most famous golem narrative involves Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late 16th century chief rabbi of Prague, also known as the Maharal, who reportedly created a golem to defend the Prague ghetto from anti-Semitic attacks and pogroms. Depending on the version of the legend, the Jews in Prague were to be either expelled or killed under the rule of Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor. To protect the Jewish community, the rabbi constructed the Golem out of clay from the banks of the Vltava river, and brought it to life through rituals and Hebrew incantations. As this golem grew, it became increasingly violent, killing gentiles and spreading fear. A different story tells of a golem that fell in love, and when rejected, became the violent monster seen in most accounts. Some versions have the golem eventually turning on its creator or attacking other Jews.

The Emperor begged Rabbi Loew to destroy the Golem, promising to stop the persecution of the Jews. To deactivate the Golem, the rabbi rubbed out the first letter of the word "emet" (truth or reality) from the creature's forehead leaving the Hebrew word "met", meaning dead. The Golem's body was stored in the attic genizah of the Old New Synagogue, where it would be restored to life again if needed. According to legend, the body of Rabbi Loew's Golem still lies in the synagogue's attic. Some versions of the tale state that the Golem was stolen from the genizah and entombed in a graveyard in Prague's Žižkov district, where the great Žižkovská tower now stands. A recent legend tells of a Nazi agent ascending to the synagogue attic during World War II and trying to stab the Golem, but he died instead. The attic is not open to the general public.

The famous story of the Golem of Prague is usually considered to be a Jewish folk story from the 18th century, at the latest. Israeli literary historian Eli Eshed considers it to be a later literary invention. According to Eshed, the story was created by Jewish German writer Berthold Auerbach for his 1837 novel Spinoza. Eshed argues that the story served as a "trigger" for an almost immediate explosion in publication for various poems, stories, plays, and novels, creating a false impression that it is an "ancient folk story" when in reality it was a completely modern invention by a well-known writer. This story of the Golem later appeared in print in 1847 in Galerie der Sippurim, a collection of Jewish tales published by Wolf Pascheles of Prague as if it was a well known "old" folk story.

Ultra-Orthodox writers claim that there is earlier evidence of the golem narrative. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (the last Rebbe of Lubavitch) wrote that his father-in-law told him that he saw the remains of the Golem in the attic of Alt-Neu Shul. Rabbi Chaim Noach Levin also wrote in his notes on Megillas Yuchsin that he heard directly from Rabbi Yosef Shaul Halevi, the head of the Rabbinical court of Lemberg, that when he wanted to go see the remains of the golem, the sexton of the Alt-Neu Shul said that Rabbi Yechezkel Landau had advised against going up to the attic after he himself had gone up.

Many modern versions of the golem legend are based on the Katz Manuscript. This manuscript is supposedly the long-lost diary of Rabbi Loew's son-in-law, who had helped create the golem. It was published in Warsaw in 1909 by Yudl Rosenberg. He claimed he found the manuscript in the main library in Metz, translated it into Yiddish as "Niflaos Maharal: Ha Golem Al Prague" (Wonders of the Maharal: The Golem of Prague). Most scholars think the Katz manuscript was fabricated by Rosenberg, and that his stories are embellishments of the older legends.

Hubris theme

The existence of a golem is sometimes a mixed blessing. Golems are not intelligent, and if commanded to perform a task, they will perform the instructions literally. In many depictions golems are inherently perfectly obedient. In its earliest known modern form, one story has Rabbi Eliyahu of Chełm creating a golem that became enormous and uncooperative. In one version of this story, the rabbi had to resort to trickery to deactivate it, whereupon it crumbled upon its creator and crushed him. There is a similar hubris theme in Frankenstein, The Sorcerer's Apprentice and some golem-derived stories in popular culture. The theme also manifests itself in R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), Karel Čapek's 1921 play which coined the term robot; the play was written in Prague and while Capek denied that he modeled the robot after the golem, there are many similarities in the plot.

Similar-sounding words

Words that sound similar to golem, but are completely unrelated, exist in several languages. These include Bulgarian голям, Macedonian голем, and Serbian dialectal/Macedonian literary golem meaning "big", which are related to Scandinavian gamle/gamla "old".

In modern culture

Statue of Prague Golem created for the film Císaruv pekar — Pekaruv císar

20th and 21st centuries

In the early 20th century, the golem was adopted by mainstream European society. Most notably, Gustav Meyrink's 1914 novel Der Golem is loosely inspired by the tales of the golem created by Judah Loew ben Bezalel. These same tales inspired a classic set of expressionistic silent movies, Paul Wegener's Golem series, of which The Golem: How He Came into the World (also released as The Golem, 1920, USA 1921: the only surviving film of the trilogy) is especially famous. Another famous treatment from the same era is H. Leivick's 1921 Yiddish-language "dramatic poem in eight sections" The Golem. There was a 1966 film entitled It!, starring Roddy McDowall, about a golem. Also notable is Julien Duvivier's Le Golem (1936), a sequel to the Wegener film. Nobel prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer also wrote a version of the legend. Elie Wiesel wrote a children's book on the legend.

In 1974, Marvel Comics introduced "The Golem" as a recurring character in its Strange Tales comic book series.

Pete Hamill's 1998 novel Snow In August includes a retelling of the story of Rabbi Loew and the Prague golem. The 2004 novel The Golem's Eye by Jonathan Stroud revolves around a golem. Ted Chiang makes use of the myth of the Golem in his novella "Seventy Two Letters".

Michael Chabon's 2001 novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay features one of the protagonists, Josef Kavalier, an amateur Jewish magician smuggling himself out of Nazi Europe along with the Prague golem. The theme of vengeance against anti-Semites and subsequent regret of such deeds pervades the novel, culminating in Kavalier's own drawing of a modern graphic novel centered around a golem.

Some of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels have used golems as a central theme. The novel Feet of Clay revolves around the attempts of golems to free themselves, and Making Money describes the effect of free golems on the city of Ankh-Morpork's economy. Piers Anthony featured a golem character, Grundy, in the novel Golem in the Gears in his Xanth series.

David Brin's science-fiction novel, Kiln People, describes a future where humans make lower quality copies of themselves (dittos or golems) out of clay. After reaching their expiration date, the golem's memories can be reintegrated to the original person or not. There are references to the Jewish legend such as the name of the character Yosil Maharal.

Marge Piercy's novel He, She and It tells the story of a cyborg, Yod, who is deliberately contrasted with the Golem of Prague.

Two episodes of the science fiction TV series The X-Files, season 4's "Kaddish" and season 6's "Arcadia," feature Golem monsters. Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror XVII" features Bart discovering the Golem of Prague in Krusty's storeroom. In "The Great Game," the third episode of the BBC's 2010 Sherlock a hired assassin from eastern Europe is called "Golem" and Sherlock briefly mentions the legend. On The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, an episode is named "The Golem".

In the film Inglourious Basterds, the German army refers to the Basterd Donny "the Bear Jew" Donowitz as a golem.

Games

Golems often appear in the various editions of Dungeons and Dragons, where they may be constructed of nearly any material from wood to spider silk. The large influence of Dungeons and Dragons on video games and other tabletop role-playing games has led to the inclusion of golems in many other tabletop and video games. "The Golem" is the logo of Paizo Publishing Co., which publishes the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (published 2009) that was born of fan reaction to the most recent (4th) edition of Dungeons and Dragons (1976, 4th Ed. published 2008), and is commonly considered to be a continuation of and/or an improvement to the 3.5 edition of Dungeons and Dragons, which was released in 2003.

and the yugioh card game since 1996-2001- 2011

Culture of the Czech Republic

The golem is a popular figure in the Czech Republic. There are several restaurants and other businesses whose names reference the creature. Strongman René Richter goes by the nickname "Golem", and a Czech monster truck outfit calls itself the "Golem Team".

A golem had a main role in the 1951 Czech movie Císařův pekař a pekařův císař (released in the US as The Emperor and the Golem).

Abraham Akkerman preceded his article on human automatism in the contemporary city with a short satirical poem on a pair of golems turning human.

Composer Karel Svoboda finished his last musical based on the legend of the Golem.

See also

• Homunculus
• R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)

Further reading

• Bilski, Emily B. (1988). Golem! Danger, Deliverance and Art. New York: The Jewish Museum. ISBN 8-7334-0493-0. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: checksum (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Bloch, Chayim (1972). The Golem: Mystical Tales of the Ghetto of Prague (English translation from German. First published in 'Oestereschischen Wochenschrift' 1917). New York: Steinerbooks. ISBN 0-8334-1726. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: length (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Chihaia, Matei (2011). Der Golem-Effekt. Orientierung und phantastische Immersion im Zeitalter des Kinos. Bielefeld: transcript. ISBN 978-3-8376-1714-6. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Faucheux, Michel (2008). Norbert Wiener, le Golem et la cybernétique. Paris: Editions du Sandre. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Dennis, Geoffrey (2007). The Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism. Woodbury (MN): Llewellyn Worldwide. ISBN 0-7387-0905-0. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Winkler, Gershon (1980). The Golem of Prague: A New Adaptation of the Documented Stories of the Golem of Prague. New York: Judaica Press. ISBN 0-9108-1825-8. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Goldsmith, Arnold L. (1981). The Golem Remembered 1909-1980: Variations of a Jewish Legend. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. ISBN 0-8143-16832-8. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: length (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Idel, Mosche (1990). Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid. Albany (NY): State University of New York Press. ISBN 0-7914-0160-X. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)
• Rosenberg, Yudl (2008). The Golem and the Wondrous deeds of the Maharal of Prague (first English translation of original in Hebrew, Pietrkow, Poland, 1909). Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-12204-6. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Tomek, V.V. (1932). Pražské židovské pověsti a legendy. Prague: Končel. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help) Translated (2008) as Jewish Stories of Prague, Jewish Prague in History and Legend. ISBN 1-4382-3005-2.

External links

• http://www.rabbiyehudahyudelrosenberg.com/
• http://www.yutorah.org/lectures/lecture.cfm/736269/Dr._Shnayer_Leiman/Golem_of_Prague,_Fact_or_Fiction