The Golem

The golem is a creature from Jewish folklore—a human-shaped figure built entirely from lifeless materials, most often clay or mud. The best-known story centers on Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late-16th-century rabbi of Prague. As *Moment* magazine notes, the golem is "a highly mutable metaphor with seemingly limitless symbolism. It can be a victim or villain, man or woman—or sometimes both. Over the centuries, it has been used to connote war, community, isolation, hope, and despair."

In Jewish tradition, the golem is often compared to the Frankenstein monster, a popular 19th-century trope. In fact, the golem predates and may have inspired the Frankenstein story in several ways. Mary Shelley wrote *Frankenstein* in the 1810s, but golem legends reach back to the 12th century in Jewish Kabbalistic tradition—and possibly earlier, to the Talmud.

In modern usage, the term refers to "any magically created human figure," and such beings appear frequently in tabletop role-playing games and video games.

**Etymology**

The word *golem* appears once in the Bible, in Psalm 139, where the Hebrew *golmi* ("my golem," "my light form," "raw material") describes an unfinished human being before God. In Pirkei Avot 5:9, the term refers to an unsophisticated person: "[There are] seven things [characteristic] in a clod, and seven in a wise man."

In Modern Hebrew, *golem* means "dumb," "helpless," or "pupa." It is also used as a metaphor for a stupid person or an entity that serves under controlled conditions but turns hostile otherwise. In Yiddish, *goylem* describes someone lethargic or in a stupor.

**History**

**Earliest stories**

The oldest golem stories come from early Judaism. In the Talmud (Tractate Sanhedrin 38b), Adam is first created as a golem when his dust is "kneaded into a shapeless husk." Like Adam, all golems are made from mud by those close to divinity, but no human-made golem is fully human. Early on, the main flaw was its inability to speak. Sanhedrin 65b describes Rava creating a man (*gavra*) and sending him to Rav Zeira. Zeira speaks to the man, but he does not answer, so Zeira says, "You were created by the sages; return to your dust."

During the Middle Ages, passages from the *Sefer Yetzirah* were studied as a way to create and animate a golem, though little in Jewish mystical writings supports this belief. The earliest known written account of how to make a golem appears in the *Sode Raza*, a commentary on Merkabah mysticism by Eleazar of Worms, who lived in the late 12th and early 13th centuries.

It was believed that golems could be activated through an ecstatic experience brought on by ritual use of Hebrew letters forming one of God's names. This name was written on paper and placed in the golem's mouth or on its forehead.

In some tales—including certain stories of the Chełm and Prague golems—a word like *emet* ("truth") is inscribed on the golem, often on its forehead. The golem could be deactivated by removing the first letter *aleph*, changing the inscription from "truth" to *met* ("dead").

One source credits Solomon ibn Gabirol, an 11th-century figure, with creating a golem—possibly female—for household chores. Another legend claims Samuel of Speyer made a golem in the 12th century. In 1625, Joseph Solomon Delmedigo wrote that "many legends of this sort are current, particularly in Germany."

**Golem of Chełm**

The oldest description of a golem created by a historical figure appears in a tradition connected to the Baal Shem (folk healer) Elijah of Chełm (1550–1583). In a 1674 letter, Christian author Christoph Arnold reported that Polish Jews said Rabbi Eliyahu Baal Shem made a golem from lime to serve as a servant and do housework. It was animated by writing *emes* (truth) on its forehead. The golem kept growing and growing. To stop it, the *alef* had to be erased from *emes*, leaving *meis* (dead). When the rabbi saw the golem had grown too large to reach its forehead, he tricked it into taking off its boots. As the golem bent over, the rabbi erased the letter. The golem turned back to clay, but its full weight fell on the rabbi and crushed him.

A similar account from an unnamed Polish Kabbalist, written around 1730–1750, says: "And I have heard, in a certain and explicit way, from several respectable persons that one man [living] close to our time, whose name is R. Eliyahu, the master of the name, who made a creature out of matter [Heb. Golem] and form [Heb. tzurah] and it performed hard work for him, for a long period, and the name of emet was hanging upon his neck until he finally removed it for a certain reason, the name from his neck and it turned to dust."

Rabbi Jacob Emden, in his 1748 autobiography *Megillas Sefer*, elaborated: "As an aside, I'll mention here what I heard from my father's holy mouth regarding the Golem created by his ancestor, the Gaon R. Eliyahu Ba'al Shem of blessed memory. When the Gaon saw that the Golem was growing larger and larger, he feared that the Golem would destroy the universe. He then removed the Holy Name that was embedded on his forehead, thus causing him to disintegrate and return to dust. Nonetheless, while he was engaged in extracting the Holy Name from him, the Gol..."