Golem

Origin

The Hebrew golem (גולם) literally means an unformed mass, a body without yet a shape, and the oldest written use is Psalm 139:16, 'thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect'. The earliest technical description of creating a body by the manipulation of language is in the Kabbalistic Sefer Yetzirah (the Book of Creation, c. 200-500 CE, possibly Babylonian or Palestinian), which sets out the cosmogonic role of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 65b (c. 500 CE), recounts that the fourth-century rabbi Rava built a speechless man out of earth. The medieval pious mystics of the Rhineland, the Hasidei Ashkenaz, codified the ritual in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: Eleazar of Worms (c. 1176-1238), in his Hilkhot Yetzirah ('Statutes of Creation', preserved in Oxford Bodleian Library MS Opp. 540), describes how the practitioner forms a body of earth, recites the alphabet, and walks around the figure in a cosmic dance to bring it to life. The earliest named historical creator is Rabbi Eliyahu Ba'al Shem of Chelm in Poland (active c. 1550); his golem is said to have grown beyond his control, and he had to remove the letter from its forehead. The most famous legend, the Golem of Prague, attributes the act to Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague (1525-1609), known by the acronym MaHaRaL, who is said to have built a clay servant during the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II to defend his Jewish community against blood-libel persecution; this story circulated orally until 1909, when the Polish-born rabbi Yudl Rosenberg published Niflaos Maharal (Warsaw) as if it were the memoir of the Maharal's sixteenth-century son-in-law. Gershom Scholem, in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, 1941, chapter 5), traced the layers of this pseudepigraphic invention.

Features

• Material — traditionally river clay; later traditions include stone, iron, and flesh (the four canonical types of the Dungeons & Dragons golem)
• Activation — inscribing emet ('truth' in Hebrew, the letters aleph-mem-tav) on the forehead, or placing a parchment shem (a slip bearing the divine name) in the mouth, while the practitioner recites the twenty-two Hebrew letters
• Deactivation — erasing the first letter aleph from emet so that it becomes met ('death', mem-tav), upon which the golem collapses back into clay
• No free will and no power of speech (Talmud, Sanhedrin 65b); the golem obeys commands literally, which makes it useful but also dangerous
• In fifth-edition Dungeons & Dragons the four types stand at Challenge Rating 9 (clay), 10 (stone), 5 (flesh), and 16 (iron), with Magic Immunity as their defining trait

Stories

Golems are the canonical figure of will-less servants — used for household labour, study companions, synagogue caretakers, and night-watchmen for embattled Jewish communities. The Talmudic Rava made his speechless figure as a labourer; the Chelm golem of the sixteenth century did housework; the Prague golem of Rabbi Loew patrolled the ghetto by night. Their absence of will is ambivalent: they are perfectly obedient but interpret orders by the letter, with all the dangers that follow. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Lackington, 1818) is the secular Romantic descendant; Karel Capek's R.U.R. (Aventinum, Prague, 1921), which gave the word 'robot' to the world, explicitly acknowledged the golem ancestry (Capek's 1933 Lidove noviny interview). Gary Gygax's Dungeons & Dragons standardised the four-type golem (Clay, Stone, Flesh, Iron) in the Greyhawk supplement (TSR, 1975) and the AD&D Monster Manual (TSR, 1977). The figure remains a fixture in Magic: The Gathering, Final Fantasy, Pokemon (Golem, 1996), Terry Pratchett's Discworld Feet of Clay (Victor Gollancz, 1996), and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Random House, 2000), which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Weakness

The decisive vulnerability of the golem is the reversibility of its activation. Erasing the aleph from emet leaves met, and the figure collapses back into clay (Eleazar of Worms in the twelfth century; Rosenberg's 1909 retelling). Removing the parchment shem from the mouth has the same effect. The absence of free will makes the golem read commands literally, and this is the standing risk of every story — both the Chelm and the Prague golem grew dangerous and had to be deactivated by their makers. Religiously the act of creation is dangerous in itself: the Kabbalistic mainstream (Eleazar of Worms, Hilkhot Yetzirah) treats creation of a body by formula as a near-trespass upon the divine prerogative, and strict orthodoxy regards golem-making as blasphemous. In fifth-edition D&D every golem variant has Magic Immunity, but each is also vulnerable to non-magical weapons of a stated kind and to a Berserk state in which it can turn on its allies.

Cultural Significance

The golem legend is rooted in the centuries of Jewish persecution that gave rise to it: Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Random House, 2000) opens with the smuggling of the Prague Golem in a coffin out of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, putting that political weight at the heart of the novel. Gustav Meyrink's Expressionist novel Der Golem (Kurt Wolff Verlag, Leipzig, 1915) reset the Prague ghetto as Modernist horror, and Paul Wegener's silent film Der Golem (Bioscop, 1915) and its prequel Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920) gave the figure its modern visual canon. Jorge Luis Borges's poem El Golem (1958, in Sur 263) is one of the most refined Latin-American literary engagements with Jewish mysticism. When Karel Capek introduced the word robot in R.U.R. (1921), he wrote in a 1933 interview in Lidove noviny that he had taken the golem and industrialised it, so that the modern semantic field of robot descends directly from the golem tradition. The figure remains a fixture of contemporary games and media — Minecraft's iron golem (2011), Pokemon's Golem (1996), and Terry Pratchett's Feet of Clay (Gollancz, 1996) — and is regularly invoked in present-day Jewish-American writing.

In Popular Culture

Psalm 139:16 (compiled c. 5th c. BCE) — earliest documented use of Hebrew golemSefer Yetzirah (the Book of Creation, c. 200-500 CE, Babylonian or Palestinian) — Kabbalistic basis for the creation ritualBabylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 65b (c. 500 CE) — Rava's earthen manEleazar of Worms, Hilkhot Yetzirah (c. 1180-1238; Oxford Bodleian Library MS Opp. 540) — canonical golem ritualRabbi Eliyahu Ba'al Shem of Chelm (active c. 1550, Poland) — first named historical creatorYudl Rosenberg, Niflaos Maharal (Warsaw, 1909) — pseudepigraphic source of the Prague Golem canonGustav Meyrink, Der Golem (Kurt Wolff Verlag, Leipzig, 1915) — Modernist horror reworkingPaul Wegener (dir.), Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (Bioscop, 1920) — definitive visual canonKarel Capek, R.U.R. (Aventinum, Prague, 1921) — origin of 'robot', explicitly from the golem traditionGary Gygax, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual (TSR, 1977) — four-type golem standard

Trivia

• The Hebrew words emet ('truth', aleph-mem-tav) and met ('death', mem-tav) differ by exactly one letter, the initial aleph; the single character holds the difference between life and clay. Gershom Scholem in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken, 1941, ch. 5) reads this as a direct expression of the Kabbalistic doctrine that the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet build the world.
• Rosenberg's 1909 Niflaos Maharal presents itself as the memoir of Rabbi Yitzhak Katz, the Maharal's sixteenth-century son-in-law, but scholars since the 1960s have established that it is the rabbi Yudl Rosenberg's own pseudepigraphic invention (Arieh Morgenstern in Israel Studies, 1981).
• When Karel Capek introduced the word robot in R.U.R. in 1921 — from the Czech robota, 'forced labour' — he made the golem connection explicit in a 1933 interview in Lidove noviny: 'I took the golem and industrialised it.' The whole modern semantic field of robot descends from this branching.
• Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Random House, 2000) opens with the Prague Golem smuggled in a coffin from Nazi-occupied Prague in 1939; in a 2000 New Yorker interview Chabon connected the scene to his own grandfather, a Polish Jew who fled the same period.