"Golem" comes from the Hebrew word "gelem," which means
"raw material." In Jewish folklore, a golem (sometimes pronounced goilem)
is an animated being crafted from inanimate material.
"The word golem is used in
the Bible and in Talmudic literature to refer to an embryonic or incomplete
substance. It appears only once in the Old Testament:
"Your eyes have seen my unformed
substance; And in Your book were all written the
days that were yet ordained for me, when as yet there
was not one of them." - Ps.
139:16 NASB.
Golems are used today primarily in metaphor either as brainless lunks or
as entities serving man under controlled conditions but enemies in others.
Similarly, it is a Yiddish slang insult for someone who is clumsy or
slow."
The
Golem of Prague
The story is set in 16th
century (1580) Prague (then part of the Austrian Empire ruled by Rudolph II -
now the Czech Republic), but it was not told until the 18th century. A
Jewish community (a ghetto called Josefov) was threatened by blood-libels (claims that they were
murdering Christian children and using their blood to make matzo). At this
time, a Christian who murdered a child and planted it in a Jew's house could
report the Jew. The Jew would be executed and his property would be split
between the Christian who reported him and the government.
Rabbi Judah
Loew (1513-1609), the famous Maharal of
Prague and the legendary
creator of the "golem," used information from the Kabalah -the central book of
Jewish mysticism -to learn the formula by which God first made man out of clay.
With the help of two other pious men (supposedly his son-in-law and a
Levite pupil), the rabbi built a man out of mud from the Vltava River.
Yossel, as the golem was called, came to life when the Rabbi placed a shem
in its mouth. (A shem is a tablet with a Hebrew inscription on it - possibly
God's secret name.)
The Golem was between seven-and-a-half and nine feet tall
and had tremendous strength, but was lacking in personality, intelligence, and
speech (the things that would make it human). At night, the Golem
guarded the ghetto. He single-handedly ended the possibility of
successfully blood-libeling the Jewish community. Loew then got the
Emperor to end the practice of letting blood-libelers profit from their actions.
When the Golem was no longer needed, Loew removed the parchment, returning
the Golem to just a statue and placed it in the attic of the Old New Synagogue.
A popular variation on the
story is that the golem rebelled and became an uncontrollable monster. (It
has been speculated that Mary Shelley patterned Frankenstein on this
story.) The legend states that Rabbi Loew had to interrupt his Sabbath service
in the Synagogue to deal with it. His congregation kept repeating the
verse in the psalm that they had been reciting until the Rabbi returned.
To this day, at the Old-New Synagogue, a line in the Sabbath service is
repeated in memory of this event. The Rabbi removed the shem from the golem's
mouth and carried its remains to the attic of the Old-New Synagogue where they
supposedly reside to this day. After visiting the grave of the Rabbi,
tourists can buy a golem statue from one of the souvenir stands along the street
where they exit the cemetery.
Another variation on the
legend is that Rabbi Loew's son-in-law brought the golem back to life and he is
still protecting the Jews of Prague to this day.
There is a children's
version of the legend by the Fifth Dimension.
The second picture on the
left is another children's version from the Jewish Publication Society.
Click
here for another
version.
The Jewish Virtual Library version incorrectly
attributes the golem legend to Tolkien's creature, Gollum, in The Lord of the
Rings; however, Gollum, was not created or brought to life by anyone in the
story. Instead, he was once a hobbit, a natural creature of Middle Earth.