Kabbalah by Harry Freedman

Author:Harry Freedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Golem

THE MAN WHO DIDN’T MAKE A GOLEM

The most famous golem of all didn’t exist. Of course, it is most likely that no living golem has ever existed, but even so there is no doubt in the mind of most historians and scholars that the humanoid allegedly made by Rabbi Judah ben Bezalel Loew, best known as the Maharal of Prague, was never anything more than a legend. Some say it was the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The Hebrew word golem means a lump or shape. A golem is an artificial person made out of a lump of earth or clay. Moulded into the shape of a human, and animated by signs and spells, a well-made golem is able to move and has enough understanding to obey the instructions of its creator. However, according to most authorities, it cannot speak and it certainly has no soul. It is a sort of medieval, clay robot made by magical, Kabbalistic means.

The person who makes a golem must be a skilled Kabbalist, learned and righteous. They have to be versed in the arts of golem-making, to know how to control their creation, and how to destroy it should it turn dangerous. Judah, the Maharal of Prague, had all these qualities and, although he almost certainly never made a golem, the legend of his humanoid became popular because everybody knew he could have made one had he wanted to.

Judah Loew was born some time between 1512 and 1526. He wrote prolifically, but in none of his books does he mention his birthplace, the date of his birth or any information at all about his early years and youth. The earliest known fact is that by 1553 he was the Chief Rabbi of Moravia, living in the town of Nikolsburg in the south of what is now the Czech Republic. Twenty years later, for reasons which are as uncertain as the events of his youth, he left his job and travelled to Prague. There, he devoted himself to a school he founded, and commenced his extensive literary activity.

Loew’s writings are dense and complex, but at first sight they do not appear to be particularly Kabbalistic. Until one realises that his ideas are rooted in Kabbalah. Unlike every major Kabbalist who preceded him he deliberately used non-technical language. Although he mentioned the sefirot often, and themed each of his major books around one of them, the whole thrust of his writing is directed, whether consciously or not, at people who are unfamiliar with the complexities of mystical jargon. He approaches the issues he writes about from the perspective of a Kabbalist, but while his head may be in the heavens, he keeps his feet firmly on the ground. So much so that, despite his Kabbalistic world view, his name and thought rarely figure in later Kabbalistic literature. Isaiah Horowitz, whose compendium of Jewish scholarship surveys the full spectrum of Kabbalistic literature, mentions neither his name nor his books.1

Yet Horowitz was a young scholar in Prague when Loew was its leading rabbinic intellectual.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.