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THE GOLEM.   Term Paper ID:24936 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Examines Jewish mythical creature, origins, secular & religious significance, various incarnations, Christian views, anti-Semitism.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Examines Jewish mythical creature, origins, secular & religious significance, various incarnations, Christian views, anti-Semitism. Paper Introduction: The purpose of this research is to examine the origins, evolving interpretation, and crystallization into the psyche of Jewish thought of the Golem, conceptualized as humanoid in physical feature and having functional mental capabilities, including, apparently, the capacity (though not necessarily and always the inclination) to follow the directions of its creator. The plan of the research will be to set forth a working definition of the Golem in the context of its late-medieval origins and more modern conceptions, and then to discuss the interpretive historiography of the Golem, as well as secularist, rabbinical, and mystical strands of thought that have developed around the concept. In order to define Golem, which is identified specifically with Jewish mystical tradition, Goldsmith traces the term back to the H Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. Systematic Theology: Volume Three: Life and the Spirit, History and the Kingdom Of God. Idel's work on the Golem is partly an elaboration but also partly acritique of Scholem's work. Goldsmithcites the single biblical reference to the creation of the golem "'in thelowest parts of the earth,' from which came his 'unperfect substance'(Goldsmith 16). Hasidic metaphysical andcontemplative texts during the Crusades, however, reflected "the mostextraordinary combinations of Hellenistic occultism, early Jewish magic,and ancient German belief in demons and witches" (Scholem 86). New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982.Summers, Montague. The content of this narrative is straightforward, althoughcertain of its details vary with given texts: In his concern about Rudolf'spersecution of Jews in Prague, Rabbi Loevy constructed and then conjuredinto life a clay Golem, which went about Prague protecting Jews from harmbut which Loevy destroyed when it ran amok (Goldsmith 16). Idel also takes note of the factthat the talisman described in the Kabbalist's account of its creation isnot designated "golem." That means term was not identified with the figurein Poland in the 167 s, even though the legend itself had been gainingattention for some time. We have seen that Idel's overall analysis of how the cosmology wasinterpreted in the multiple Jewish communities of the Diaspora, from thetime of antiquity, is focused on encounters of Jewish text with localcultures and mystical attributes of those cultures, and a consequentialdevelopment of ritual and spiritual predisposition. 2.Idel, Moshe. . Many of these accounts appear tobe aimed at younger readers. . The legacy of hegemonic Christianity, which began in no small part asa response to its spiritual precursor, Judaism, was that Jews becameincreasingly stereotyped targets of institutional discrimination.Wistrich's view is that as dominant cultures ebbed and flowed in Europe inthe Common Era, antisemitism was adapted so as to have the effect ofcontinued and particular dissociation of Jews from whatever constitutedmainstream culture. Scholemcontinues: It would appear as though in the original conception of the Golem came to live only while the ecstasy of his creator lasted. Indeed, advocates of "natural religion" andsecularist revolutionaries against Christian culture could point to Judaismas the origin of what was wrong with Christianity while denying it as thesource of the spiritual value of Christianity (Wistrich 44-5). The "recipe" for creation ofthe Golem, says Scholem, entails a combination of ceremony and "lettermagic . Thepoint is that the Golem may be effective but is far from perfect. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997.Singer, Isaac Bashevis. In other words, the Golemof Prague has the status of legend in Jewish folklore. What is relevant is that the case demonstrates the engagementof the Elizabethan and Jacobean political imagination with the supernaturaland what could be called the establishment's demonization of opponents.Larner ("Witch" 33-35; "Enemies" passim) notes that witch-hunting in bothScotland and England between 1542 and 1735 was commonplace. Goldsmith cites three distinctive features of the Golem: its hugeness;its "special power, a tellurian [from the earth] force, which enables himto have a vision of the future of mankind" (16); and the Golem as symbol ofman's attempt to compete with God by creating life artificially. Interestingly,Scholem's treatment of Jewish mysticism's elaboration of the creativeprinciple as such contains no specific reference to the Golem by name.Scholem does say that the connection between Jewish mysticism and magic(the latter of which, as we have seen, he elsewhere associates with theliteralized Golem) is the character of the encounter or more exactly theinterpenetration of folk religion and more systematic and aristocraticmystical praxis (Scholem, Possibility 124-5). (b) "The Golem in Jewish Magic and Mysticism." Golem! In Singer's tale, which has an aspect of social criticismembedded in it, the saintly rabbi miraculously brings to life a giant madeof clay earth in order to protect a member of Prague's Jewish elite (abanker) from being persecuted by gentiles during Rudolf II's reign.Rogasky, meanwhile, reshapes the narrative around the Golem as an aspect ofdivine providence to enable the Jews of sixteenth-century Prague to goabout their daily affairs in peace. The purpose of this research is to examine the origins, evolvinginterpretation, and crystallization into the psyche of Jewish thought ofthe Golem, conceptualized as humanoid in physical feature and havingfunctional mental capabilities, including, apparently, the capacity (thoughnot necessarily and always the inclination) to follow the directions of itscreator. What were called conversoswere apostate Jews, often privately observant, who pretended to convert toChristianity as a survival strategy in response to pogroms starting in thelate fourteenth century. The plan of the research will be to set forth a working definitionof the Golem in the context of its late-medieval origins and more modernconceptions, and then to discuss the interpretive historiography of theGolem, as well as secularist, rabbinical, and mystical strands of thoughtthat have developed around the concept. Danger, Deliverance and Art. The Malleus Maleficarum. New York: Judaica P, 198 .Wisniewski, David. Citing in particular a trial of conversos accused of occult childmurder, Baer acknowledges that Jews, like Gentile contemporaries, mighthave dabbled in magic rituals. Elsewhere, notably among the Spanish Kabbalists,who were exposed to Greek thought and Neoplatonic and Arab interpretationsof the Greeks, the effect was to conceptualize the Golem in "utterlyspiritual" terms (Idel 277-8). What is presently relevant to whatcan be called the culture of the Golem is that (to follow Idel's discussionin broad outline) a quasi-metaphorical/quasi-literalist idea of the Golemdominated Jewish thought until the seventeenth century. Trans. Goldsmith follows Scholem on this point (39), addingthat the narrative strategy of Rosenberg's work can be explained by itsemergence in the context of blood libel activity in Eastern Europe in thefirst years of the twentieth century. Winkler says that blood libels caused "so much bloodshed in themedieval and Renaissance periods that at least five popes felt called uponto denounce them" (1). New York: Holiday House, 1996."Rudolf II." Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia. Vol. Now suchliteralism has a metaphorical aspect to it, as Idel indicates when he saysthat "the correspondence between letters, limbs and cosmological things istreated here in the frame of a creative process" (72). Works CitedBaer, Yitzhak. What that suggests is that Rosenbergimputed to 158 Prague what was actually true of 19 9 Warsaw. He does, however, appear to insist that Rosenberg's Hawthorne-likeaccount of the manuscript was not a literary conceit and that it has beenmischaracterized as a hoax, not least because of its consistency withJewish folklore. Wisniewski's picture book focuses on the way blood libelforced Prague Jews into the ghetto, to be followed by Rudolf II's formaldeclaration of religious liberty for them. The Protestant Christian theologian Paul Tillich (oddly enough)usefully articulates the problematics of intellectual choice along theselines, even though in context he is by no means referring specifically tothe Golem. However, the foundation of the golem myth is saidto reside in Jewish mysticism, specifically its preoccupation with the"mystery of Creation, contained in the so-called Book of Creation, or SeferYezirah, and encoded in the "22 letters of the [Hebrew] alphabet and in thevarious names of God which can be combined from them. Jewish culture,though threatened chiefly in Spain in the medieval period, persisted prettymuch intact physically and intellectually in Italy and elsewhere in Europethroughout the Renaissance (Idel 165). Perhaps the most impressive is that of IsaacB. New York: Schocken, 1995.---. claimed toshare . The Golemfigure itself is a giant figure that is created out of earthen clay that isinfused with motion and sensibility according as the alphabet letters andnames for God are incorporated into its design. It is in this period,he says, that the imperfection of earth-formed statuary can be connected tothe biblical condemnation of idolatry ((b) 19-2 ). Such denunciations hardly prevented or truncatedthe cultural preoccupation with occultism, conflated with antisemitism andmisogyny. New York: Dover, 1971.Tillich, Paul. McDermott's version of the story hasthe good rabbi creating the Golem to protect the Prague Jews from anantisemitic mob. The religious basis for antisemitism is Christian-messianic ideology,the Christian accepting Jesus as the messiah, and the Jew denying themessianic character of Jesus. His emphasis is less on what he calls Scholem's"idea" of the Golem than on "different syntheses between ancient Jewishmagical traditions and alien types of thought" (xxii). foreword . In the systematic academic discourse of the Golem as an artifact ofJewish intellectual tradition, whether one follows Scholem's mysticalinterpretation or Idel's creation-related interpretation, there can bediscerned certain tensions between literalistic "recipes" for creating aclay man and the metaphors of moral and spiritual meaning dominatesrabbinical discourse of the Golem in the medieval period: "The corporealcreation is a story that only fools will understand literally; theilluminati are able to fathom beyond the version of the text to its innermeaning" (Idel (b) 27). From the SeferYezirah cosmology as the source of Golem discourse, which makes the pointthat the various combinations of letters contained therein constitute thedivine codes of creation (112), Idel implies that the Golem can beinterpreted as the artifact representing the result of the human attempt todecode the mind of God, i.e., to imitate the divine creative principle. Idel sees evidence of an impulsetoward magical replication/creation as far back as Jewish antiquity andcontinuing as a strand of Jewish mystical thought into later periods andinfluenced by the encounter of Jewish thought with the thought of theGreeks and their Hellenistic and medieval interpreters, as well as withastrology and magic (Idel (b) 16). Scholem locates the origin of the Golem with Hasidic mystical-ascetic-ecstatic tradition in medieval Germany that predated even the antisemiticconsequences in Germany of the Crusades (82-4). Suchencoding, or recipes, are associated with the Ashkenazi tradition and RabbiEleazar of Worms (Idel (b) 21). Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1963.Winkler, Gershon. Now Winkler does not insist on the literal reality of Loevy'sGolem. Golem. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966. The creation of the Golem was, as it were, a particularly sublime experience felt by the mystic who became absorbed in the mysteries (Scholem 99). Indeed, what is remarkableabout the blood libel as far as the Jews of the medieval Diaspora areconcerned is the power it had to acquire institutional sanction during theInquisition and to maintain what could be called its imagistic and culturalintegrity in the centuries following. The conceptual differences, says Idel, explain differences in ritualand theological interpretation among the Jews of the Diaspora. Rudolf was also styledKing of Bohemia ("Rudolf" 424). Running parallel with and even precedingthe conflation of occultism and antisemitism in the period of the medievalDiaspora was a tradition of Jewish mysticism of which Golem lore was apart. Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred. New York: Jewish Museum, 1988. Popular legend, says Scholem, overtook and literalized the correlationof spiritual idea and mystical experience to construct for the Golem "anexistence outside the ecstatic consciousness" (99). In the background of one dominant strand of thought about the originsof the Golem--and indeed an important feature of context for Golemdiscourse from antiquity to the twentieth century--is the cultural historyof Jews in the Diaspora as manifest in Western antisemitism. Introduction. Danger, Deliverance and Art. It comprises, chiefly, an adumbrated translationand elaboration of Rosenberg's story, together with essays on theattributes of the Golem (including its similarity to such literarycreations as Frankenstein's monster), stories from Jewish tradition aboutrabbis who have constructed Golemim from time to time in history, andtensions between science and miracles, the kabbalah and black magic, andmore generally the legitimate and illegitimate uses of the supernatural. God Himself wassupposed to have used them in creating the world" (Singer 6). the excitement of discovering a rare manuscript with the truestory it contained." Now the time frame of this narrative of the Golem isimportant because it is positioned in Prague in the context of religiouspersecution. He cites (211ff) what he considers the central event in this regard,a fanciful eleventh-century monograph by English cleric Thomas of Monmouththat describes the death of a child as Jewish ritual murder, which in turnwas the provenance of the "crucifixion accusation" (236), also called bloodlibel, that spread throughout Europe in succeeding ages. The most familiar historical institutional/cultural oppression of Jewsbefore the 2 th-century Holocaust was the medieval Inquisition,concentrated in but not confined to Spain from the 13 s until 1492, theyear of the so-called Expulsion, and afterward. On this view, making meaning constitutes whatevermagic the Golem may possess. Winkler acknowledges this as well, but hisinterpretation is that documentation of the Golem, as a feature of oralJewish tradition, would have been a separate project from the writtenfamily history of the Marahal (14). A History of Jews in Christian Spain, from the Fourteenth Century to the Expulsion. London: Methuen, 1991. It couldbe said that the Golem is a soulless being, sentient without beingsensible, conscious without consciousness or conscience, a creature ofhuman immanence and an artifact of human construction that, however, doesnot perforce remain under its creator's control. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1987.Langmuir, Gavin I. In hisdiscussion of how antisemitism originated in Western culture, with a viewtoward showing how it "came to develop into what we are witnessing today"(xxvi), Wistrich argues that from the time of the ancient Diaspora to themodern period, the Jews' deliberate dissociation from dominant culture,Jewish social cohesion, and Judaism's "religiously sanctionedexclusiveness" coupled with the mainstream's suspicion of the other,fostered a peculiar species of social and cultural hostility that wasaggravated by theological and ideological competition from the Christianperiod onward. In order to define Golem, which is identified specifically with Jewishmystical tradition, Goldsmith traces the term back to the Hebrew wordgolem, meaning "shapeless matter, ignorant person, dummy," and in Yiddishoften used as an insult. Yehuda Loevy. There is no doubtwhatever that it is captured in multiple twentieth-century retellings, allof which have a literalist turn of mind. Singer. The Golem: A Version. Thisfocus on the creative principle, rather than the ecstatic principle, as themain artifact of Golem-concept is the source of distinction between Idel'sand Scholem's views on the Golem. New York: Clarion Books, 1996.Wistrich, Robert S. The thirdfeature has been implicated in such artifacts as Frankenstein's monster.Winkler speculates (19) that Mary Shelley was aware of her Germancontemporary Jakob Grimm's 18 8 writings about the Golem when she publishedFrankenstein in 1816. Idel sees in the encounter between pagans and Jews of the Talmudic eraevidence that Jews were aware of statuary idolatry. Langmuir (1 ff), meanwhile, locates the origins ofmodern antisemitism in the Middle Ages, an outgrowth of Christianity'sinstitutional competition with Judaism as a universalistic religion. 1981): 32-36.---. Idel suggests that the thirteenth centuryrabbinical commentators were the first to suggest that the creation of theliteral clay Golem figure would come about as a consequence ofmanipulation, ritual, incantation, and articulation of the recipes, byrighteous individuals, of the letters and names for God. . Scholemdescribes the medieval German Hasidim as acknowledged spiritual masters of"magical forces" of the universe and in that character as the source of"the legend of the Golem, or magical homunculus--this quintessentialproduct of the spirit of German Jewry" (99). obviously aimed at producing ecstatic states of consciousness"derived from alphabet recombinations found in the "Book of Creation" [SeferYezirah], a text of ancient Jewish cosmology (Scholem 99). Whatboth views come down to is that Christian, anti-Christian, secularist,spiritual, intellectual, and political sources were able to use the uniqueattributes of Jews as a proxy for their hostility toward and intolerance oroppression of Jewish culture from a variety of non-Jewish sources. The Golem of Prague. . It was in the 167 s that a Rabbi in Poland appears to have actuallymade his interpretation of the Golem by using the recipes of antiquity toconstruct a little clay talisman that he hung around his neck and finallydestroyed. . Cultural outgroups, particularly though not exclusively the Jews,suffered as a consequence of this preoccupation. In the most famous version of the narrative of theGolem of Prague, supposedly created by the rabbi of that city in 158 or159 , the Golem is destroyed by the rabbi after it has accomplished itsmission (to protect the Jews of Prague from a pogrom) (Goldsmith 49). "Witch Beliefs and Witch-Hunting in England and Scotland." History Today 31 (Feb. It was such text that was seized upon bythirteenth-century commentators who basically constructed specifictechniques or recipes for manipulating the letters to form creatures (oranyway concepts for creatures). It is difficultto see why Baer is so intent on arguing the facts of a trial, given thetemper of the times and the decisiveness with which the blood libel appearsto have entered popular imagination. In some places, notablyamong the relatively insular Franco-Ashkenazi Jews of Northern Europe, theeffect of the encounter was to conceptualize the Golem in literal,material, artifact terms. What that implies is that spiritual/magicalrather than material/ literal interpretation of the Golem is the more to bepreferred. Idel notes that the Golem legend isabsent from East-European Hasidism, which he characterizes as even morespiritual and mystical than the Kabbalist tradition (279). The Golem. Loevy was the chiefrabbi of Prague while Rudolf II, known by history to have been mentallyunstable and to have sanctioned religious persecution of Protestants andJews, reigned (1576-1612) as Holy Roman Emperor. On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our time. When the creatorof the figure sinned, the Golem would turn to dust (Idel 6 ). Indeed, the popular imaginationthroughout Europe was exercised by fears of occult heresy and/or revolutionas late as the seventeenth century, and directed not only against Jews.Summers (xiv) describes the 159 trial in England of a coven of some twohundred accused witches, who "had assembled for their rites at the oldhaunted church of North Berwick, where they consulted with their Master,'the Devil,' how they might most efficaciously kill King James." Thecontent or proof of that case, directed possibly against witchcraft butcertainly against anti-Jacobean partisans of Francis Bothwell, isirrelevant. The Golem Remembered, 19 9-198 : Variations of a Jewish Legend. . Idel says that the SeferYezirah is unique among ancient Jewish texts in encoding the creativeprinciple in the 22 letters of the alphabet and the names for God. And as he sayselsewhere, Scholem's idea that Golem creation is connected to mysticalexperience "is not sustained by the sources, with the exception of thetexts pertaining to the ecstatic Kabbalah" (Idel (b) 32). . 1975 ed.Scholem, Gershom Gerhard. His subject is rather more general and nonsectarian, what hecalls the ambiguities of religion, which, he says, "always moves betweenthe danger points of profanization and demonization" (Tillich 98), andalways perilously close, it seems, to ritualistic or intellectualreification of its felt magic along literalist, idolatrous lines. But, he says, it "is utterly out of thequestion that they should have made use of Christian ritual objects, orthat they should have allowed the participation of conversos, who were notregarded as Jews and were not even circumcised" (Baer 4 3). Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1976.Rogasky, Barbara. Los Angeles: U of California P, 199 .Larner, Christina. Citing oral tradition in regard to the Golem over the centuries aswell as 2 th-century skepticism of the authenticity of the manuscriptRosenberg said he had discovered, Winkler settles on the view thatRosenberg's account "seems most realistic and is probably the authenticone" (13). It is at this point that more formally analytical strands of thoughtwith regard to the Golem emerge. Aristocratic, educated Jews of the agetended to escape by insisting on their Christian faith, or anyway bydemonstrating lack of commitment to Judaism (Baer 344), only to reassertJewish identity once locating elsewhere in Europe. The imperfection of the creation is the relevant point, for the Golemis not a creature of God but a creature of man. Scholem, the acknowledged leading modern authority on Jewish mysticism(Idel xxi), declares Rosenberg's work to be "not ancient legend[] butmodern fiction" (373). Thus the Golem isidentified as something imperfect partly because it is the materialrepresentation of human beings' attempt to use the Book of Creation toreplicate the divine creative process. More will be said about the tension between spiritual and literalinterpretations of, theories about, and influences on conceptions of theGolem from the medieval period onward. R.Yehudah Loew of Prague" (Idel (b) 31). Conversos who did not publicly "return to Judaismwere known as bad Christians, Averroists, and unbelievers" (Baer 273) andwere special Inquisition targets. Indeed, in this line of thought, there is a specific and programmaticdisconnect (or at least theory of independent development) betweenantisemitism and the Inquisition on one side, and the creation of Golem onthe other. . Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland. . New York: Jewish Museum, 1988.---. . The most often cited text concerning the Golem of Prague is whatGoldsmith describes (38) as a Yiddish pamphlet published in Poland in 19 9by Yudl Rosenberg titled The Golem or the Miraculous Deeds of Rabbi Liva.Goldsmith (38) says that "like Nathaniel Hawthorne fifty-nine years earlier[with The Scarlet Letter], Rosenberg['s] . Toward a Definition of Antisemitism. Thus the Golem appears to lack the capacity to form self-conscious mental states or exercise anything like moral judgment. But the evidence of Golem discourse is that this place seemsby and large in popular and axiological imagination, not in scholarly orsystematic theological praxis. The Golem: A Jewish Legend. Winkler (2) saysthat the first formal antisemitic blood libel/ritual murder trial in Europetook place in Norwich, England, in 1147. By Henrich Kramer and James Sprenger. 3 vols. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Foreword. 15-35.Goldsmith, Arnold L. The Reformation and its progeny did notresolve but rather aggravate antisemitism, which manifest as hostility toJudaism's persistent spirituality from one point of view, or as hostilityto a rationalist/revolutionary Jewish critique of prevailing Christiansociety from another. But whatthese various interpretations and/or constructions the Golem share, onIdel's view, is that they purport to give an adequate account of thecreative principle of the divine as well as of the nexus of that principlewith the creative potential and practice of human beings, hence anunderstanding of the interpenetration of divine and human ontology. To besure, there is a place in modern culture for the entertainment value ofliteralist evocations of spiritual ideas, whether they are shaped as theGolem of Prague, as Frankenstein's monster, or as painting, sculpture, andother plastic art meant to facilitate a response embedded with sentienceand meaning. Baer (354-8) cites court recordsdetailing judicial murder, including mass executions, of thousands ofconversos, many of them peasants, once the practice of royal protection ofJews as a class was withdrawn. Baltimore: John Hopkins P, 1981.McDermott, Beverly Brodsky. Thus, although replete with footnotes and references,Winkler's Golem of Prague appears aimed more accurately at the popular thanthe scholarly readership. Montague Summers. Langmuirdiscounts the religious explanation of antisemitism as insufficient to thetask of accounting for the social foundations of special hatred directed atJews. Golem! The tension implicit in the pogrom narrative appears to be decisive inthe fact that, as Winkler says, the so-called Golem of Prague "seems tohave left the most profound and memorable imprint on both Jews andChristians, for close to four hundred years" (5). Golem: Story and Pictures. Further tothis point, Goldsmith notes that there is no mention of the Golem incontemporaneous biographical accounts of the great rabbi of Prague or inthe rabbi's own writings. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY P, 199 ---. The connection between blood libel pogroms, Jewish occultism, and theGolem can be found in the strand of thought holding surrounding anappearance of the Golem in 158 -159 in Prague, with a rabbi quitefrequently characterized as saintly and even more frequently identified byvariant spellings, including Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Yehudah Loevy, JudaLoew, and Moreynu HaRav (Maharal) R. This event, Idel says, "is the blueprint of the later legend[though set a century earlier] of the creation of the golem by . What Scholem's analysissuggests is that, particularly in such elaborations as Rosenberg's text(not to say on-the-money pop-culture interpretations of it such asWinkler's), the Golem as a concept relevant to theological discourse and animpulse toward considerations of the problem of God became subsumed by thedifficulties associated with sorting out the complex implications ofintellectual metaphor vis-à-vis idiosyncratic spiritual experience. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.