Before Frankenstein: The Strange Jewish History of the Golem (Part 1)
I loved Halloween as a child, back when Halloween still felt mostly like a permission slip to run half-wild through the dark. My little brother and I would tear around town, sometimes with the neighbor kids and sometimes with my mom and aunt dressed up right along with us, going door to door through our tiny town, if you could really call it a town, and cutting across yards so dark we couldn’t even see our feet. It was the stuff of full moons, wholesome spookiness, plastic masks, heavy sacks full of candy, and homemade popcorn balls.
Those early Halloweens probably helped form my lifelong affection for monsters that are just frightening enough to be interesting without becoming horrible. Frankenstein's monster especially fascinated me as I got older, because beneath all the lightning, graveyards, and stitched-together body parts lay a much stranger question than whether the creature was scary. Victor Frankenstein had made something that moved, thought, suffered, wanted companionship, and eventually demanded to know what sort of responsibility its creator owed it. The monster story was really a creation story, and the deeper mystery was not how Victor assembled the body, but what exactly had happened when that body came to life.
Long before Mary Shelley gave us Frankenstein, Jewish tradition had already been asking a surprisingly similar question. There is a creature in Jewish tradition that begins with something almost embarrassingly ordinary: dirt. No demon is summoned into it, at least not in the older stories, no wandering ghost possesses it, and there is no lightning bolt, laboratory table, or mad scientist shouting triumphantly into a thunderstorm. A human being shapes earth into something resembling another human being, manipulates sacred letters or Divine names according to secret knowledge, and the thing rises.
It walks and obeys instructions, while in some stories it performs household chores and in others grows enormously strong or becomes dangerous, which suggests that even medieval storytellers understood one timeless truth about inventing labor-saving technology: eventually somebody is going to have trouble turning it off. These are not the teraphim we discussed last time, but rather creatures that came to be called golems. If you’ve never heard of a golem, neither had I, and if your knowledge of golems comes mostly from fantasy novels, video games, or the famous story of the Golem of Prague, the actual history is considerably stranger. The idea reaches back far beyond Prague, into the Hebrew Bible, rabbinic discussions about the creation of Adam, an enigmatic ancient book about the architecture of creation, and medieval Jewish mystics who wondered whether human beings who understood the hidden structure of the universe might imitate, in some limited fashion, the creative work of the Creator.
That is the part that caught my attention because, beneath the folklore, lies a question far larger than whether a medieval rabbi once managed to get a clay servant walking around his house. What actually separates living matter from nonliving matter, and is life contained entirely within the physical machinery of a body, or does something else have to enter the equation? If human beings eventually learn to construct something that looks alive, thinks, communicates, adapts, and perhaps even insists that it is conscious, will we actually have created life? Or will we simply have become very good at rearranging the clay?
Before the Monster, There Was an Unfinished Human
The word golem is much older than the creature we now imagine. In fact, it appears only once in the Hebrew Bible, in Psalm 139, where the psalmist describes the Creator seeing him before his body was fully formed: “Your eyes saw my unformed substance,” as many modern translations render the Hebrew golmi. The basic idea is something incomplete, unfinished, or not yet given its final form. Later Jewish tradition connected that word directly with Adam.
Genesis itself never calls Adam a golem, but the association is easy to understand. Genesis 2 describes the Creator forming the human being from the dust of the ground and then breathing into him the “breath of life,” after which the human becomes a living being. Ancient Jewish interpreters expanded upon that brief description, imagining stages in Adam's formation. In one rabbinic tradition, Adam exists first as gathered dust, then as an undefined or unfinished form, and only later receives a soul and stands upright as a living human being.
A golem was not originally a Jewish version of Frankenstein's monster. At its deepest level, the word pointed toward matter awaiting completion, and Adam himself could be imagined as a golem before he became fully alive. That means the later legends are playing with the creation story at its most mysterious point: the interval between the formation of a body and the emergence of a person. Genesis places the decisive moment with the Creator, with the dust shaped first, and the human becoming a living being only after receiving the breath of life.
We should be careful with our terminology here because breath, spirit, soul, consciousness, and biological life are NOT interchangeable concepts in either biblical Hebrew or later theology. Genesis is not offering a scientific account of metabolism, and it certainly does not explain neurons. Later Jewish and Christian thinkers would find in this passage a much larger theological idea: matter alone does not exhaust the mystery of the human person. During the long development of Jewish mystical thought, that understanding would eventually lead to an obvious and slightly alarming question: if the Creator formed Adam from earth, and we are made in the image of that Creator, could a human being ever do something similar?
The Rabbis Who Made a Man
One of the oldest Jewish stories that would later become associated with golems appears in the Babylonian Talmud. The passage occurs amid a discussion involving the powers available to human beings and the distinction between forbidden sorcery and extraordinary acts associated with holiness. In the text, Rava, an important fourth-century rabbi in Babylonia, invokes Isaiah 59:2, where the prophet says that human sins have created a separation between people and the Creator. The passage connects that separation with Rava's astonishing claim that, “If the righteous wished, they could create a world” (as one modern translation renders it).
Then the Talmud gives us an example with almost no explanation, stating that “Rava created a man.” We are not told that he sculpted him from clay, wrote Hebrew letters across his forehead, placed a Divine name in his mouth, or performed any of the rituals that would become familiar in later golem legends. The original Aramaic simply says that Rava “created a man,” and then sent this strange creation to visit another sage, Rabbi Zeira. Zeira apparently tried to speak with the newly created man, but the man did not answer. At that point, Zeira seems to understand what he is dealing with and tells the silent figure that he was created by one of their colleagues and then commands him to “return to your dust.” Which, apparently, the creature did.
That is the entire story. The Talmud never tells us whether the creature looked perfectly human, how long he existed, why Rava created him, or exactly what happened when Zeira ordered him back into dust. It does not even call him a golem, since that identification belongs to the later tradition surrounding the passage. What the ancient text actually gives us is both simpler and more peculiar: a respected rabbi creates a figure sufficiently human-looking for another rabbi to speak to him, but the figure cannot speak back.
Shortly after this peculiar little episode, the Talmud gives another example of human creative power. Two other sages, Rav Hanina and Rav Oshaya, are said to have spent every Sabbath eve studying teachings associated with the Sefer Yetzirah, the puzzling Book of Formation, after which they would create a calf and eat it for their Sabbath meal. The precise description of the calf in the Aramaic has been translated in several different ways, but fortunately, its age or size makes very little difference to the story. The Talmud presents the entire event with remarkably little drama, as though producing livestock by contemplating the mysteries of creation were just another way of preparing dinner.
So, what is this mystifying book that later became central to the golem tradition, the Sefer Yetzirah or Book of Formation? Its exact origins remain uncertain, but it describes the Creator forming the universe through thirty-two mysterious paths of wisdom: ten sefirot, mysterious numerical principles or dimensions of creation, and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Creation is therefore intimately connected to language itself, an idea that echoes the opening of Genesis, where the Creator speaks and reality responds: “Let there be light,” and there is light. The Sefer Yetzirah goes much further into the combinations of letters through which the created world was formed, suggesting that language is somehow woven into the architecture of reality itself.
It is difficult not to hear a faint echo here of a much more modern idea, the idea that the worlds we inhabit are shaped, at least in part, by what we think, speak, and repeatedly name. There is no historical line connecting the Sefer Yetzirah with modern manifestation theory, and the two emerge from very different understandings of reality. The Sefer Yetzirah does not teach that human thought simply manifests whatever we desire, nor does it place human beings on the same creative level as the Divine. Still, the parallel is intriguing because, over a very long span of human history, we keep returning to the possibility that words may be considerably more powerful than they appear.
Back to the rabbis, because the placement of these stories together matters. The Talmud appears to be exploring an idea that would become enormously important to the later golem tradition. The idea is that a sufficiently righteous and knowledgeable human being might participate in the Creator's ordering of matter to an extraordinary degree. This was not understood as ordinary magic, and elsewhere the calf-making episode is specifically contrasted with prohibited sorcery, suggesting that the rabbis understood this sort of creation as different from summoning forbidden supernatural powers.
And, the human-produced man looked enough like a person for Rabbi Zeira to address him, yet he could not answer. This facet is something later Jewish thinkers would pay considerable attention to, the silent aspect of the creature. Genesis describes the Creator forming Adam from the dust of the ground and then giving him the breath of life, while Jewish tradition also placed enormous significance on human speech, language, and the Hebrew letters through which creation itself was understood to have been ordered.
And this, I think, is where the golem becomes really interesting. If a manufactured being looks sufficiently like a person that another person attempts to speak with it, what exactly is it missing? Is the answer intelligence, language, consciousness, free will, a soul, or something the ancient rabbis themselves did not attempt to define here? The Talmud leaves the creature standing silently before Rabbi Zeira and then sends him back to the dust.
From Creation Theory to Golem Making
By the medieval period, some Jewish mystics had begun to ask whether the Sefer Yetzirah merely described creation or whether its mysteries could be put into practice. The book itself was not a handbook entitled How to Build Your Own Clay Man in Seven Easy Steps, nor does it record various rabbis creating golems. It is brief, difficult, and cryptic, meditating on numbers, language, cosmic structure, elemental relationships, directions, seasons, the human body, and the impenetrable way in which the Creator brings an ordered universe into existence. Later Jewish traditions, however, increasingly associated its mysteries with extraordinary acts of creation.
During that time, among the Jewish pietists known as the Hasidei Ashkenaz in Germany, some mystical writers discussed procedures by which a sufficiently learned and righteous person might create an artificial human being. Rabbi Eleazar of Worms, who lived around the turn of the thirteenth century, left one of the clearest medieval discussions. The process involved forming a human shape from earth and working through elaborate permutations of Hebrew letters associated with the mysteries of creation, while other medieval mystical texts contain related procedures and stories.
The medieval golem was not generally imagined as the product of sorcery in the modern horror-movie sense. The theoretical power came from sacred knowledge: understanding the letters, names, and patterns through which the Creator had structured reality. That does not mean medieval Jews agreed that people could actually manufacture human beings, because Jewish mystical traditions were never monolithic, and texts describing golem-making can be interpreted in different ways. Some have been understood as descriptions of literal practices, others as visionary or initiatory exercises, demonstrations of mystical knowledge, or legends illustrating the spiritual stature of extraordinary sages.
In fact, some of these early mystical exercises seem to have had very little to do with creating a useful servant and much more to do with demonstrating one's mastery of the mysteries of creation, so that the creation itself becomes an act of contemplation. A human being studies how the Creator formed the cosmos and then attempts, in miniature and through Divine permission, to reproduce something resembling that act. That is a very different story from a rampaging clay monster, although it still raises the uncomfortable theological possibility that humans might imitate the Creator's work just well enough to begin confusing imitation with equality.
Truth Written on the Forehead
Some of the best-known features of golem folklore developed in medieval and early modern stories. In certain versions, the creature is animated through a shem, a Divine name written on a piece of parchment and placed in its mouth or attached to its body, while in others, Hebrew letters are manipulated through ritual procedures associated with the Sefer Yetzirah. One particularly memorable tradition places the Hebrew word emet, meaning “truth,” on the golem; remove the first letter, aleph, and emet becomes met, meaning “dead,” causing the creature to collapse back into the material from which it came. It is almost too perfect as a piece of symbolism, which is usually a good reason to check whether a story is as ancient as people claim.
Yet, the motif is genuinely old in the golem tradition, but different activation methods belong to different texts and periods, and there was never a single universal recipe for producing a golem. Our modern mental picture combines elements that developed over centuries, much as our modern picture of angels combines biblical material, later theology, Renaissance art, and a surprising number of chubby babies that have nothing whatsoever to do with Scripture. One early-modern golem story became especially important because it attached the creation of a golem to an identifiable rabbi, Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chełm, a sixteenth-century Jewish scholar and wonder-worker in Poland who was later said to have made one. Versions of the story circulated within a few generations of his lifetime, and later members of his family discussed the tradition.
In one early version, Elijah finally destroyed the ever-growing creature by erasing the first letter of emet, changing ‘truth’ into ‘dead.’ As the golem collapsed back into dust, it injured its creator in the fall. The story eventually produced a question I would never have imagined finding in serious religious discussion: could a golem count toward a minyan, the quorum traditionally required for certain Jewish prayers? Rabbi Tzvi Ashkenazi, a major seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authority and descendant of Elijah of Chełm, actually considered the issue, including the significance of Rabbi Zeira having destroyed Rava's artificial man. Ashkenazi ultimately concluded that such a created being could not count toward the minyan, turning what sounds like the premise of a science-fiction story into a genuine question of Jewish religious law.
Apparently, theologians have always eventually arrived at the same problem science-fiction writers do, because the deeper question was not simply whether the golem looked human. The problem was whether a being manufactured by a righteous person could possess the status of a human being within the religious community. Put into more modern language, the question becomes even more uncomfortable: at what point does the thing we made become somebody?
What About the Famous Golem of Prague?
The most famous golem story takes us to sixteenth-century Prague and Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, one of the most important Jewish scholars of his era. According to the familiar legend, Prague's Jewish community was threatened by persecution and blood-libel accusations, so Rabbi Loew formed a giant human figure from clay, brought it to life through sacred names and mystical rituals, and used it to defend the Jews. In many versions, the creature is called Josef or Yossele, and it patrols the Jewish quarter, frightens attackers, performs tasks for the rabbi, and eventually becomes difficult to control. The rabbi finally deactivates it, and its body is supposedly hidden in the attic of Prague's Old New Synagogue.
It is a fantastic story, but it is almost certainly not sixteenth-century history. No contemporary source from Rabbi Loew's lifetime records him creating a golem, and nothing in his substantial surviving writings connects him to such an event. Written associations between Rabbi Loew and a Prague golem emerge much later, becoming increasingly visible in nineteenth-century literature and folklore, more than two centuries after his death. Whether an earlier oral story existed is impossible to rule out.
The famous protector-of-the-Jews version became increasingly elaborate as the story was retold, and by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the golem had moved decisively into literature, theater, and eventually film. Gustav Meyrink's 1915 novel The Golem helped carry the creature into European popular culture, although Meyrink's story differs considerably from the traditional Prague legend. The enormously influential German film The Golem: How He Came into the World followed in 1920. From there, the golem effectively escaped the synagogue attic.
Modern fantasy turned it into a species of monster; science fiction discovered an artificial being created by humans and asked whether it could develop independence; comic books found the protector; and horror writers found the creature that turns against its maker. Computer programmers eventually adopted the term golem as a metaphor for constructed systems that perform precisely what they are told to do, occasionally with results their creators did not intend. The story had found a new world because the problem at its center had never belonged only to the medieval world; it belonged to us, too.
Could the Golem Be Even More Pertinent Now Than in Times Past?
And that seems like a good place to leave our golem for the moment, somewhere between the dusty attic of a Prague synagogue and the modern world that turned him into a monster, protector, robot, and metaphor. Because underneath all those stories lies a much more difficult question that we have only begun to touch: if a human being really could shape matter into something that walked, worked, followed instructions, and perhaps even seemed to think, would that creature actually be alive in the same sense that we are? Would it possess consciousness, free will, or even a soul, and who would get to decide when a thing had crossed the boundary into becoming someone?
Next week, we will follow the golem out of medieval folklore and into Catholic and Orthodox ideas about the soul, laboratory-created living forms, artificial intelligence (AI), and even a very strange 1970s experiment in which a group of people tried to create a paranormal personality entirely from their own imaginations. As it turns out, the old story about humans shaping something from the dust may be considerably more relevant now than it was when the legends first began.
Grace and light to you all.