The notion that a righteous person with esoteric wisdom could form an artificial human from inorganic matter has roots in the and in early kabbalistic ideas. Rabbi Elazar of Worms even set down instructions. The question is when that old idea became a story about one rabbi and one city.
The Prague version is young. The tradition attached to Yehudah Leib ben Betsalel, the , only between the late seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and there is no evidence he ever engaged in such activities. The first literary attribution to him was Berthold Auerbach’s 1837 novel, and the first written record of a tale told by Prague Jews came from the journalist Franz Klutschak in 1841.
The idea is old. In Jewish culture a particularly righteous person, possessed of esoteric wisdom, could create an artificial human being out of inorganic matter and thus imitate the Divine. That notion has literary roots in the Talmud and in early kabbalistic ideas.
Early modern tales of such creation were most common in Poland, where from the seventeenth century a new motif appeared: the golem as a source of danger rather than merely a servant. Those tales attached to Eliyahu of Chełm, and in one version the dying creature crushed its maker.
Prague came later. The tradition became attached to the city and to Maharal sometime between the late seventeenth and the nineteenth century, though his own career shows no sign of such activity. The may have formed in the 1720s and 1730s, during a small cult of Maharal veneration.
The written record is nineteenth century. Jakob Grimm published a version of the Polish legend in 1808 without connecting it to Prague, and Auerbach made the first literary attribution to Maharal in 1837. Klutschak published a tale told by Prague Jews in 1841, and Leopold Weisel’s better-known version followed in 1847. added the false accusation of ritual murder in 1909, a theme absent from the Prague version before 1900.
wat. The rabbi it is named after left no sign of ever making one.
wat wat
A legend everyone treats as medieval turns out to be datable, and its most familiar elements are the newest.
How do we know?
Hillel J. Kieval traces the textual record for the YIVO Encyclopedia, from the medieval mystical sources through the Polish tales to the nineteenth-century fiction, ethnography and folklore that fixed the Prague version.
What is still unknown
Oral tradition leaves little trace, so the earliest Prague tellings can only be bracketed rather than dated.
Learn something?