Golem

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Names & Creature Profile

The golem’s body is made, rather than born. In stories collected by the historical Jewish Encyclopedia, a maker can shape clay or wood into a figure that follows commands. Some accounts bring this labouring body into a household; others ask whether something made by human art can belong within a praying community. Its resemblance to a person does not settle its place among people. [7]

The name has an older setting in Psalm 139:16. Its Hebrew golmi is rendered as the speaker’s unformed substance in Mechon-Mamre’s parallel English text. The surrounding verses speak of formation in the mother’s womb and of a life already known to God. Here the unfinished body belongs to the person speaking the psalm, long before the word evokes a servant walking through Prague. [1]

Tales & Encounters

Leopold Weisel opens his Prague collection by recalling stories heard from older residents. His account of the Golem, read here in a later Brandeis printing of Sippurim, gives Rabbi Löw a servant made from clay. A Schem, which Weisel glosses as a magical formula, is placed in its mouth. The servant takes over the heavy work of the house: wood to be chopped, water to be carried, lanes to be swept. Before each Sabbath, the rabbi removes the formula so that it rests. [12]

On the forgotten Friday, the useful worker becomes a force loose in the streets. It pulls houses down, hurls rocks and uproots trees. People hurry to tell the rabbi. Their alarm brings a second difficulty: the Sabbath seems already to have begun, and work is forbidden, whether it makes something or destroys it. The very act that could stop the destruction appears to have come too late. [12]

The escape from this predicament is local and precise. The Old-New Synagogue has not yet inaugurated the Sabbath. Weisel’s story says that the other synagogues follow this oldest one, so a little time remains. Löw rushes to the servant and pulls the formula from its mouth. The clay figure falls and breaks into fragments. Frightened by what has happened, the rabbi has no wish to make another such servant. The narrator ends by reporting that pieces are said to remain in the synagogue attic. [12]

Weisel compares the crisis to Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice and his enchanted broom. Yet the deadline gives this telling a consequence beyond the loss of a useful tool. The worker’s scheduled rest, the maker’s lapse and the synagogue’s commencement of the holy day all bear on whether the street can be made safe. No adversary has ordered the rampage. The household arrangement itself has failed. [12]

A much earlier created man meets a quieter end in the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 65b. Rava sends him to Rabbi Zeira. Zeira speaks, receives no answer and recognises a creation of the sages; he tells the figure to return to dust. The encounter follows Rava’s assertion that the righteous could create a world. The next passage describes Rav Hanina and Rav Oshaya studying Sefer Yetzira, the Book of Creation, before the Sabbath and producing a calf that they eat. These compact episodes place extraordinary creation beside learning and righteousness.

Homeland & Tradition

The Jewish Encyclopedia locates Elijah’s golem in Chelm and Rabbi Davidl Jaffe’s in Dorhiczyn, in the government of Grodno. Prague is one centre within this wider geography. Named makers and towns give separate accounts local roots, even when their creatures share the task of service. [7]

Peter Schäfer’s discussion of the Book of Creation connects its alphabetic combinations, numbers and divine name to the possibility of creation. [4]

Historical Record

Historian Hillel J. Kieval places the first literary Prague attribution in Berthold Auerbach’s novel Spinoza (1837), followed by Franz Klutschak’s account (1841) and Weisel’s contribution to Sipurim (1847). Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal, died in 1609. The gap matters especially for Yudl Rosenberg’s 1909 collection: Kieval identifies its purported old manuscript as Rosenberg’s fabrication. A later book’s claim to ancient testimony is part of its reception, not a date for its incidents. [3]

Appearance & Signs

Weisel first describes figures made from clay or carved wood, then identifies Löw’s particular servant as clay. He supplies no height or elaborate facial portrait. Its body becomes memorable through the work it performs and the destruction it can cause. Nor does its apparent endurance require a meal: his general account says such servants need neither food nor drink, work tirelessly and demand no wages. Scolding brings no answer. The catalogue of conveniences makes the eventual failure especially unsettling. [12]

Robert Wilson and Moidele Bickel’s 1987 Golem has a very different surface. The Jewish Museum in New York records a life-size form made from Chinese and Japanese newspapers, glue and a metal support. Onstage, an actor wore its rigid hat and coat. Another character cut the back laces and removed the shell, revealing the performer in corresponding real clothes. The figure was sculpture, costume and scenery at once. [9]

Nature & Powers

Art historian Emily D. Bilski distinguishes mystical creation from making a useful servant. In the traditions she discusses, the act seeks spiritual fulfilment and closeness to God; the created being may be made lifeless again immediately. Hebrew letter combinations belong to that undertaking. Its culmination need not be a worker sent into the house. [5]

The Jewish Encyclopedia tells how Solomon ibn Gabirol’s attributed maidservant brings him under royal suspicion. When the king wants to punish him, the maker returns each part to its original form, demonstrating what he has constructed. In its Chelm account, the problem is growth: Elijah fears that his increasingly monstrous creation could destroy the world. He removes the written divine name and it becomes dust. The same power to undo a body answers quite different emergencies. [7]

Landscape & Associations

Weisel’s Prague is a city of connected households and streets. Water and wood must be brought in; swept lanes lie outside. When the servant changes its behaviour, domestic work spreads into public disaster. The Old-New Synagogue then governs the remaining time, and its attic receives the story’s final trace. The creature’s route passes through places that have ordinary uses, making the extraordinary interruption part of a familiar city. [12]

The stage Golem occupied another constructed environment. Wilson’s Death, Destruction, and Detroit II, performed in Berlin, drew on Kafka’s writings across nine stages and four hours. People with sticks initially directed the creature’s movement. The museum reads that visible manipulation through questions about robots, choice and free will. [9]

Variants & Kindred Beings

The Jewish Museum in Prague now tells a protector’s story. Loew shapes clay beside the Vltava and animates it with a written divine name or an inscription on its forehead. It guards the Jewish quarter, then becomes violent one Sabbath evening. In the inscription version, erasing the initial letter of emet, “truth,” leaves met, which the museum renders “death.” The body collapses and is hidden in the synagogue attic. This ending uses a changed word, whereas Weisel’s uses the removal of the formula from the mouth. [8][12]

A winter servant in the Jewish Encyclopedia has a different relationship to the Sabbath. Attributed to Rabbi Davidl Jaffe in Dorhiczyn around 1800, it receives instructions on Friday and carries them out the next day, replacing the non-Jewish worker who would heat Jewish homes. A small mistake in an order causes a fire that destroys the town. Its disaster comes through mechanical obedience rather than rebellion. The account never supplies the mistaken wording, leaving the scale of the damage beside the smallness of the stated error. [7]

Meaning & Belief

The historical encyclopedia also records a question attributed to the Hakham Zevi, a descendant of Elijah of Chelm: could a golem count toward a minyan, the quorum for communal prayer? That question gives the created figure a place at the threshold of a gathering. Being capable of work does not decide whether it can be counted among worshippers. The source reports the question; it does not justify turning it into a universal ruling about artificial life. [7]

Bilski describes Golem II (1987), by Rimma Gerlovina, Mark Berghash and Valeriy Gerlovin, as photographed body parts arranged with Hebrew letters. Read across and down, the grid joins truth, death and human being in different combinations. A body assembled from images becomes a surface that must be read. [6]

The worker who sets a town on fire has not misunderstood the demand to obey. That is the troubling point of the encyclopedia’s brief ending: a human error becomes catastrophic through faithful execution. Weisel’s catastrophe begins with a different human lapse, forgetting to stop the worker. Both accounts make the creature’s usefulness depend on attention its maker fails to sustain. [7][12]

Later Retellings & Reception

Anna-Carolin Augustin’s Berlin museum feature follows the golem into Gustav Meyrink’s spectral Prague and Paul Wegener’s films of 1915, 1917 and 1920. Wegener played the creature himself, helping establish its cinematic face. Augustin also identifies antisemitic stereotypes in Meyrink’s descriptions and Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrations. The haunting imagery has a history of prejudice as well as invention. In the 1920 film, Hans Poelzig and Marlene Moeschke built an expressive city for the creature; its architecture was designed to produce an atmosphere. [10]

Schäfer describes Mark Podwal’s The Dream of Rabbi Loew (1982) through Prague’s two town-hall clocks: Roman numerals above, Hebrew letters below, with the lower hands travelling in the opposite direction. In the drawing’s imagined transformation, letters leave the clock to create the golem. [4]

The Jewish Museum Berlin’s 2016 exhibition brought these transformations into a wider company of artworks and technological metaphors. Its announcement connects the motif with genetic technology, computers, robots and artificial intelligence, while describing artists who make the process of creation visible. One example is Michael David’s deliberate exposure of works to fire and natural forces. Material continues to change after the artist has intervened, giving the exhibition’s question about control a physical form. [11]

Evidence & Open Questions

After the Golem, Weisel tells other wonders attributed to Löw, then records an explanation fashionable in his own “enlightened” age: the rabbi was a skilful mechanic and his servant an automaton. The narrator also mentions a camera obscura, an optical device, to explain a separate wonder: Emperor Rudolf II’s requested appearance of the biblical ancestors. He presents these as attempts to make the wonders natural, not discoveries of a machine hidden inside the clay. [12]

That coda changes the reader’s angle without emptying the story. The servant that was desirable because it never ate, tired or answered back has already proved impossible to keep. Whether imagined as enchanted clay or explained as a mechanism, it leaves the same practical absence: the maker must go on without the worker he thought would serve him. [12]

Sources & Manuscript Notes

Weisel supplies the complete Prague household story in a later historical printing. The Jewish Encyclopedia preserves several other attributed accounts. Psalm 139 and Sanhedrin retain their separate textual settings. Kieval establishes the publication chronology; the museum essays and object records follow modern interpretations. [12][7][1][2][3][4][5][6][8][9][10][11]

Psalm 139 ↗
Mechon-Mamre
139:13–18, especially 16
Checked 2026-10-09
Sanhedrin 65b ↗
Sefaria, William Davidson Talmud · William Davidson / Koren-Steinsaltz English presentation
65b:16–18, especially 17

Artwork

Illuminated folios

Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.

An ochre clay human figure holding a wooden bucket in a quiet moonlit Prague courtyard, within a complete dark vine frame. — An original clay-helper interpretation of the Prague Golem's later legend, informed by public Jewish museum interpretation and Hillel J. Kieval's account of its literary history. No sacred writing, ritual method or historic likeness is reproduced.

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