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Golem Legend

subject · http://data.judaicalink.org/data/ep/1960495

The literary, folkloristic tale of the creation of a golem; the most famous formation of which was said to have been effected by Yehudah Leib ben Betsal’el (Maharal; d. 1609) of Prague. The notion in Jewish culture that a particularly righteous person, possessed of esoteric wisdom, could create an artificial human being out of inorganic matter—and thus imitate the Divine—has literary roots in the Talmud and early kabbalistic ideas. Some medieval readers of Sefer yetsirah (The Book of Creation), one of Judaism’s earliest mystical texts, understood the work to have practical as well as theoretical implications. In a commentary to that text, Rabbi El‘azar of Worms (ca. 1165–ca. 1230), an exemplar of German Jewish pietism, enumerated instructions for the actual creation of a golem. The kabbalistic writings of Avraham Abulafia (b. 1240) of Spain and the so-called Pseudo-Sa‘adyah—a thirteenth-century text of French Jewish origin—similarly testify to the interest of medieval Jewish mystics in the “practical” arts of creation.

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Wikidata

Q215085

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