The Golem of Prague: Rabbi Loew and the legend of the clay man

Among the legends of Prague none has enjoyed a fortune comparable to that of the Golem, the clay creature that a sage is said to have shaped and brought to life to defend the Jewish community of the ghetto. Tradition links it to Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the great rabbi known as the Maharal, who died in Prague in 1609. To understand this story, however, we must distinguish between the historical figure, the long Jewish reflection on creation and the narrative form the legend took in relatively recent times.

The Maharal, a master between mysticism and philosophy

Judah Loew was born around 1520, probably in Poznań, and served as rabbi in Moravia and Poland before settling in Prague. He wrote numerous works of exegesis, ethics and philosophy, widely studied in the following centuries. The sources also record an audience with Emperor Rudolf II in 1592, a meeting whose content, however, is unknown. His writings contain no reference whatsoever to the creation of a golem.

His tomb, in the Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague, still attracts visitors who leave pebbles and notes with prayers on it. The cemetery, where the gravestones crowd one another for lack of space, received burials until 1787. The nearby Old-New Synagogue, built in the thirteenth century and still in use, is the place the legend associates most closely with the creature.

The roots of the golem idea

The word golem appears only once in the Hebrew Bible, in Psalm 139, where it denotes something shapeless, not yet completed. The Talmud tells of sages able to create an artificial being, and the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, was read in the Middle Ages as a text on the creative power of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. From these speculations arose the idea that a righteous man might imitate, to a limited degree, the work of the Creator.

Before being attributed to Prague, the story of a golem was associated with another sixteenth-century rabbi, Elijah of Chełm, in Poland. The tale connected with the Maharal appears in writing mainly in the nineteenth century, in particular in the collection of Prague Jewish stories published by Wolf Pascheles from 1847 onwards.

Emet and met: the secret of life and death

According to one of the best-known versions, the Golem came to life through the word emet, “truth”, inscribed on its forehead. Erasing the first letter produced met, “dead”, and the creature returned to clay. Other versions speak instead of a slip bearing the divine Name placed in its mouth. The story goes that the rabbi removed the slip every Friday evening so that the Golem would not work on the Sabbath; once he forgot, and the creature ran amok.

Tradition adds that the Golem's remains were stored in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue, where no one was allowed to go. In the 1920s the journalist Egon Erwin Kisch claimed to have entered it and found nothing. Meanwhile the myth had already conquered literature, with Gustav Meyrink's novel The Golem of 1915, and cinema, with Paul Wegener's film of 1920.

Today the Golem has become a symbol of Prague and, more generally, a figure for reflecting on the limits of human creation. The creature born to protect and turned dangerous reminds us that every power, if it escapes the control of those who wield it, can turn against its own makers.