Don't be a Golem

Don’t Be a Golem

Among serious historians — Jewish and non-Jewish, frum and non-frum — the famous story of the Golem of Prague is universally regarded as a legend with no pre-19th-century evidence. Neither the Maharal nor his talmidim ever mention such an event, and no contemporary source records it.

1. The First Appearance: A Novel by a Maskil

The earliest known reference to a “Golem of Prague” appears not in any Jewish manuscript, but in 1837, in a fictional novel by the Maskil, Berthold Auerbach, Spinoza: Ein Historischer Roman. In a satirical depiction of Spinoza’s חרם, Auerbach has Spinoza declare that he does not believe in the Golem of Prague — and in the novel, this disbelief is presented as the reason for his חרם.

Auerbach’s intent was transparent: to mock frum Yidden by portraying them as people who place someone in חרם for rejecting fairy tales. These few lines are the first recorded mention of a Prague Golem in history.

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2. R. Yidel Rosenberg, a bestselling novelist

The legend gained traction only decades later through R. Yidel Rosenberg z”l, a respected Rav in Łódź and Warsaw who later served in Toronto and Montreal. Rosenberg was a תלמיד חכם — he translated the זהר into לשון קדש — but he also wrote popular Yiddish novels*.

Rosenberg claimed to have discovered manuscripts written by R. Yitzchak Katz zt”l, the Maharal’s son-in-law, in the “Great Library of Metz.” This library, however, never existed. One of these alleged manuscripts described the creation of the Golem in elaborate detail.

In 1908/1909, Rosenberg published this “manuscript” as נפלאות מהר"ל, and it was this ספר — not any earlier tradition — that popularized the Golem story among Jews and eventually among non-Jews.

To bolster credibility, Rosenberg asserted that the נודע ביהודה believed in the Golem and even invented a dramatic tale of the Noda B’Yehuda climbing into the attic to view the deactivated Golem**. No such story appears anywhere in the writings of the נודע ביהודה or his descendants.

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3. The Immediate Pushback: R. Mendel Eckstein (1909)

Within a year of Rosenberg’s publication, R. Mendel Eckstein z”l released a ספר titled ספר יצירה, in which he systematically refuted Rosenberg’s work and labeled it a fabrication. He presented 25 proofs demonstrating that the manuscript could not be authentic — including halachic contradictions and historical impossibilities.

One of his most compelling proofs:

The manuscript refers to a talmid named “Tosfos Yom Tov.” But in the era of R. Yitzchak Katz, no such sefer existed, and R. Yom Tov Lipman Heller was not known by that title.

The name “Tosfos Yom Tov” became common only after his פירוש was printed — long after the Maharal’s lifetime. It is impossible that R. Yitzchak Katz would have used that term.

Eckstein also noted halachic impossibilities in Rosenberg’s description of how the Golem was created and decommissioned — procedures inconsistent with the actual Sefer Yetzirah tradition.

Notes

* His grandson, Mordechai Richler, was one of the most famous Canadian novelists.

** The Rebbe Rayatz Zt"l (Frierdiker Lubavitcher Rebbe) climbed up the attic.
He never claimed to have seen the Golem there, but some Chasidim claim that he did.