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TheTrailofthePolishGolem
Mikoaj Gliski
2015/04/09

The most famous golem and its creator Rabbi Lw. Illustration by Mikol Ale, 1899. Ink on paper. National Gallery in Prague.
source: Wikipedia/ CC

The legend of the Golem seems inextricably connected with the history
of Prague, however substantial evidence links this legend to an older
tradition, one which has ourished in early modern Poland.
The legend of the golem - the unformed mass of clay which, thanks to a magical spell,
becomes a living creature inspired Jewish cabbalists as early as the 12th century. The
possibility of creating a humanoid creature raised interest from both theorists and
practitioners of Cabbalah - Jewish or not - from Spain to Germany.
But the story of the Golem as we know it, whose main narrative is located in Prague, and
which connects the creation of the golem with the gure of the rabbi Jehuda Loew ben

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which connects the creation of the golem with the gure of the rabbi Jehuda Loew ben
Betsalal (Maharal), was formed much later - in a period scholars tentatively identify as a
time between the 17th and early 19th century.
It turns out some of the key elements of the legend, including the gure of Betsalal
himself, may have come to Prague via Poland. And could it be that the legend of the
Polish golem also inspired Mary Shelley to create Frankenstein?

Was the Golem from Prague?

Paul Wegener and Lyda Salmonova in the lm "Der Golem", 1915, photo: Forum

According to the Praguian legend, rabbi Betsalal created a golem to defend the Prague
ghetto from anti-semitic attacks and pogroms. Depending on the version, the Jews in
Prague were to be either expelled or killed under the rule of the Holy Roman Emperor,
Rudolph II.
The problem is that this period, often referred to as the Golden Age of Czech Jewry, was
a time of remarkable tolerance toward Jews and Protestants alike, when Jewish cultural
life ourished, and the Jewish population grew signicantly. This makes it a rather
unlikely background for the history of a golem whose main function was to be a
bodyguard of the Jewish community.
Another problem is posed by Betsalal himself, the creator of the Prague Golem. Hillel J.
Kieval, an expert in the golemology, points to the fact that while Betsalal does appear to

Language & Literature

TheTrailofthePolishGolem

have had an interest in the speculative side of Jewish mysticism, he had never written
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about golem, nor was he known for having been a devotee of "practical" Kabbalah
- the

art necessary to create a Golem. This art, however, ourished in another nearby state,
TABLE OF
CONTENTS:
Was the Golem from
Prague?

namely Poland. And Betsalal himself was really born in Pozna, where he became also
the rabbi of Poland, that was before he moved to Prague.

Poland land of Golems

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Poland land of Golems

Golem from Chem
Golem vs Frankenstein
Can Golem be counted in a
minyan?
The Last Polish Golem
From Clay to Clay

SEE ALSO:

Polish Animation Brings the

Ancient Yiddish Legend of the
Golem Back to Life

A monument of Golem in Pozna was designed by Czech artist David ern in 2010. Rabbi Betsalal was born in Pozna around
500 years earlier; source: Wikipedia / CC

- After saying certain prayers and holding certain feast days, they make the gure of a
man from clay, and when they have said the shem hamephorash [the explicit and
Micha Jacaszeks American
Tour

unmentionable name of God] over it, the image comes to life. And although the
image itself cannot speak, it understands what is said to it and commanded of it;
among the Polish Jews it does all kinds of housework, but is not allowed to leave the
house.

Pre-war Jewish Life: The Secret

Life of Menachem Kipnis

This may be the earliest testimony referencing the Golem-building powers of Polish
Jews. It comes from a letter written by a non-Jewish folklorist Christoph Arnold in 1674.
Hillel J. Kieval observes that among early modern Jews, tales of the creation of life by
pious individuals seem to have been most common in Poland. More importantly, he
notes that beginning in the seventeenth century, an important new motif was added:
from that point onwards a golem was understood to have been not merely a servant who

Sholem Asch

performed all sorts of physical labor for his master, but also a source of danger.
This is attested also in Arnold's relation:
- On the forehead of the image they write: emeth, that is, truth. But the gure of this
kind grows each day; though very small at rst, it ends by becoming larger than those
in the house. In order to take away his strength, which ultimately becomes a threat to

Language & Literature

all those in the house, they quickly erase the rst letter aleph from the word emeth on

TheTrailofthePolishGolem

its forehead, so that there remains only the word meth, that is, dead. When this is
done the golem collapses and dissolves into the clay or mud that he was.
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Golem from Chem

Was the Golem from

Prague?

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Poland land of Golems

Golem from Chem
Golem vs Frankenstein
Can Golem be counted in a
minyan?
The Last Polish Golem
From Clay to Clay
Chem, the birthplace of the Golem legend, drawn in 1780 by T. Rakowiecki; photo: Wikipedia / CC

SEE ALSO:

In this same letter Arnold goes on to report on the most prominent tale of the Polish
golem:
- They say that a baal shem in Poland by the name of Rabbi Elias made a Golem who
became so large that the rabbi could no longer reach his forehead to erase the letter e.
He thought up a trick, namely that the Golem, being his servant, should remove his

Polish Animation Brings the

Ancient Yiddish Legend of the
Golem Back to Life

shoes, supposing that when the Golem bent over, he would erase the letters. And so it
happened , but when the Golem became mud again, his whole weight fell on the rabbi,
who was sitting on the bench, and crushed him.

Rabbi Elias was a real person, known also as Elijah Ba'al Shem(b. 1550, d. 1583), he
served as a chief rabbi of Chem, a town in Eastern Poland, which in later times became
Micha Jacaszeks American
Tour

famous for its literary tradition of tales about the fools of Chem. But rabbi Elias was an
important Talmudic scholar and kabbalist, and the rst baal shem, that is, one said to
possess secret knowledge of the holy names of God [literally, master of the Name (of
God)].
The story of rabbi Elias was recounted also by his grandson, the prominent Jewish

Pre-war Jewish Life: The Secret

Life of Menachem Kipnis

theologist and halachist, Jacob Emden. Emden wrote down the golem legend as told to
him by his father Tzvi Ashkenazi, around the year 1700. As Kieval notes, in this version,
the wordplay emeth/meth was omitted, and the collapse of the golem did not crush and
kill his creator but only rendered him cut and bruised. Apart from this, the story is
basically the same.
Gershom Sholem, the most prominent scholar of Jewish mysticism of the 20th century,

Sholem Asch

believed it very unlikely that the Prague legend could have been formed independently
from the Chem legend. That's why some scholars today believe that the legend of the
rabbi of Chem must have made it to Prague by the mid-18th century very likely taken
there by the Hassidim. Here, the story of Chelmer rabbi Elias was transferred onto a
more famous Jewish rabbi from around the same time, Yehudah Leib ben Betsalel
(Maharal).

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TheTrailofthePolishGolem

The True Origins of the Polish Golem video explainer

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TABLE OF
CONTENTS:
Was the Golem from
Prague?
Poland land of Golems
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Poland land of Golems

TheTrailofthePolishGolem|Article|Culture.pl

Golem from Chem

Golem vs Frankenstein
Can Golem be counted in a
minyan?
The Last Polish Golem
From Clay to Clay

The story of the Chelmer Golem features in Maciej Paka's comic strip Lublin. Location
2.0, part of the project run by Laboratorium Teatr NN from Lublin - You can nd the

comic in English here

SEE ALSO:

Golem vs Frankenstein
But the story of Polish golem also traveled in
other directions. In 1808, some 140 years after
the rst account of the Chem golem, this very
story was published by Jacob Grimm in the

Polish Animation Brings the

Ancient Yiddish Legend of the
Golem Back to Life

journal Zeitung fr Einsiedler. At this time

Grimm was apparently still unaware of any
association of the golem theme with the city of
Prague, the rst accounts of which were
published only some 30 years later.
It has been argued that Grimm's version of the

Micha Jacaszeks American

Tour

story of Polish Golem might have inspired Mary

Shelley in her literary creation of another worldfamous monster. In her preface to the 1st edition
Was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein inspired by the Golem

of Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, she

legend?Boris Karlo as Frankenstein's monster. Photo:

reminisced about the circumstances of her stay

Universal Pictures / Wikipedia / CC.

at the Lake Geneva in 1816:

Pre-war Jewish Life: The Secret

Life of Menachem Kipnis

The season was cold and rainy, and in the evenings

we crowded around a blazing wood re, and occasionally amused ourselves with some
German stories of ghosts, which happened to fall into our hands.

Could it be that on of those German stories was Polish Golem? Anotherhumanoid being
Sholem Asch

created by man to serve him.

But Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, being the tale of a monster revolted against its creator
who wreaks havoc to everything and everyone around, bears also many resemblances
to the Praguian golem legend. Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus was rst
published in 1818, and by 1830s gained huge popularity in Europe.

Could itTheTrailofthePolishGolem
be that also this story inuenced the legend of the Prague golem? As Polish
Language & Literature
author Adam Wgowski claims in his book Bardzo polska historia wszystkiego, this is
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not altogether out of the question, considering that the rst literary attribution of the
golem legend to Maharal which appeared in Berthold Auerbach's novel Spinoza TABLE OF
CONTENTS:

comes only in 1837.

Was the Golem from

Prague?

Was Van Helsing Originally from Poland?

Poland land of Golems

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Golem from Chem

In Bram Stokers famous Dracula, we encounter the memorable

gure of the vampire hunter Abraham... READ MORE

Golem vs Frankenstein
Can Golem be counted in a
minyan?

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The Last Polish Golem

From Clay to Clay

Can Golem be counted in a minyan?

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Meanwhile, golems were still the subject of both the practical and theoretical interests
of Polish Jews.
Inspired by his grandfather's golem experience, Jacob Emden discussed the legal status
of the golem, asking such sophisticated questions as 'Could the golem be counted in a
minyan? [minyan = the quorum of ten men required for prayer in Jewish tradition]?

Polish Animation Brings the

Ancient Yiddish Legend of the
Golem Back to Life

But meditating about the mysteries of the golem was not reserved to the Hassidim only.
One of their great enemies and the foremost leader of Lithuanian mitnagdic Jewry in the
second half of the 18th century, rabbi Eliah ben Salomon Zalman, also known as the
Vilna Gaon, recounted to his pupil how he had also once contemplated the idea of
animating a golem. Inspired by his study of Sepher Yetzira, he started creating the
golem, but stopped after experiencing what he described as a gure moving above his

Micha Jacaszeks American

Tour

head. He interpreted it as a sign from heaven discouraging him from continuing the
experiment.

The Last Polish Golem

It is probable that the last golem on Polish soil was created by rabbi Dovid Yafa (Yae,
Yao) in 1800 in Drahichyn in Polesie (in today Belarus; not the more famous Drohiczyn
Pre-war Jewish Life: The Secret
Life of Menachem Kipnis

in the Podlasie region of Poland). Reb Dovid was a descendant of the famous rabbi
Mordechai Yafa. However, as Jacek Moskwa explains, reb Dovid far surpassed his
ancestor in cabalistic skills.
According to one of the versions of the story which as Jacek Moskwa underlines,
doesn't appear in other variants of the golem legend the Drahichyn golem was a kind
of shabes-goy, which means that he performed all the chores forbidden to Jews during

Sholem Asch

the shabes. In winter he would light up re in ovens and stoves, which was very
important. The golem would always receive his orders one day earlier, so that the
religious law wasn't infringed upon.
One day, as a result of a mistake made in the order, the golem started a re which burned
down the whole shtetl. Following this catastrophe rabbi Dovid commanded his children
that they never follow in his footsteps and become rabbis. According to the family

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TheTrailofthePolishGolem

tradition this fatherly precept was observed.

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From Clay to Clay

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Was the Golem from
Prague?
Poland land of Golems
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Golem from Chem

Golem vs Frankenstein
Can Golem be counted in a
minyan?
The Last Polish Golem
From Clay to Clay

SEE ALSO:

Old Synagogue in Chem on a pre-war photograph. According to the legend the remains of the golem were hidden in the building's

Polish Animation Brings the

Ancient Yiddish Legend of the
Golem Back to Life

attic. Photo: Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (NAC)

Lost among the marshes of Polesie, the cabbalistic centre of Drahichyn may have
survived the re caused by the golem in 1800 but, just like so many other shtetls of this
region, ceased to exist during WW2.
A similar fate was dealt to the Jews and golem of Chem. We will never know whether, as
Micha Jacaszeks American
Tour

the story goes, the remains of the golem really laid once hidden in the locked attic of the
Old Synagogue in Chem. Unlike the Old-New Synagogue in Prague about which a
similar story is told, the Old Synagogue in Chem was destroyed by Germans in 19401941, leaving no traces behind.
Author: Mikoaj Gliski, April 8, 2015

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One of the most mysterious, as well as the most famous,

TheTrailofthePolishGolem
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LANGUAGE & LITERATURE

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TAGS:

GOLEM

JEWISH LEGENDS

JEWISH HERITAGE IN POLAND

CHEM

KABBALAH

Was the Golem from

Prague?
Poland land of Golems

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