The Industrialization of Intelligence by Noah Kennedy

Author:Noah Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351164887
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

6

Of Little Men and Monsters

It is said that a strange and powerful creature roamed the crooked streets of Prague’s Jewish ghetto in the sixteenth century, a man-made, man-like automaton that had been created out of a desperate attempt to protect the Jews of that city from the unremitting stream of physical intimidation and libel visited upon them by the Christian population that ringed their crowded quarters. It patrolled the streets under cover of darkness, intercepting Christian interlopers as they planted false evidence against innocent Jews and carrying out secret missions for the Rabbi who had brought him to life. The creature was the golem, and his creator was the virtuous and scholarly leader of the Jewish community, Rabbi Loew, who had fashioned him of clay and brought him to life through a magical ritual in which the name of God was invoked to bring life to lifeless mud. The golem was a fearless and indefatigable warrior, since he was stronger than any man, knew no pain and feared nothing except his immediate deactivation, which the Rabbi could do at any time, and which inevitably became necessary.

Rabbi Loew was able to animate the creature through the mysteries of the kabbalah, an ancient oral tradition that was said to have been handed down from Moses. The kabbalah offered the promise of magical power over man and nature to those who knew its mysteries. At a time when the Jews of Europe were being systematically and cruelly persecuted in their urban ghettos, the urban Jews’ fascination with kabbalah and its power was intense.

There are conflicting versions of the story of the golem, but all of them share certain powerful themes that resonate in the human psyche and were later borrowed in some of Western culture’s most powerful stories of man and his creations. In all accounts, the golem was fashioned in a ceremony that evoked elements of the Genesis account of the creation of man. But the creator of the golem was not God, but a man, and though the Rabbi was the most virtuous man imaginable, the creature intrinsically lacked some qualities of a man that only God could convey to him. The golem would for ever lack a soul, and so, though it was possible to teach him rudimentary reason, it was impossible to teach him true wisdom or understanding. He was mute, because being devoid of a soul, he was devoid of free will and could only mechanically respond to the stimuli with which he was presented. He could follow instructions, but it was extremely important that the instructions be expressed simply and with the utmost care, because he had a disturbing tendency to carry out his instructions with insane precision. He always instinctively knew the precise time of day.

In all versions of the story, syntactical tricks played a prominent role in the activation and deactivation of the golem. The magical powers of certain combinations of letters and words were the practical foundation of all kabbalah magic, expressing as it did the belief that profound mystical forces could be marshalled through creative syntax.

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