Middle Age Golem

An overview of some essential Medieval Golem sources.

The first 3 Biblical Sources are background for our first central Golem source below:

Before moving on to the first Medieval Golem source that makes use of these texts, we need to understand them on their own.

1. What does each source mean in its original context?

2. What does each one teach us about the nature of the human condition?

Whoever studies Sefer Yetzirah has to purify himself and don white clothes. It is forbidden to study Sefer Yetzirah alone, but only in groups of two or three, as it is written: "and the souls they made in Haran." And it is written: "Two are better than one alone," and it is written: "It is not good for man to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him." Therefore, Scripture begins with a bet, bereshit bara, He created. It is incumbent upon him to take virgin soil from a place in the mountains where no one has plowed. And he shall knead the dust with living water, and he shall make a body [Golem] and shall begin to permutate the alphabets of 221 gates, each limb separately, each limb with the corresponding letter mentioned in Sefer Yetzirah. And the alphabets will be permutated at the beginning, and afterwards he shall permutate with [each of the five vowels]. And always, a letter of the [Tetragrammaton] with each vowel... --R' Eleazar of Worms

Historical Context for the previous Source:

Rabbi ELEAZAR BEN JUDAH OF WORMS (c. 1165–c. 1230), scholar in the fields of halakhah, theology, and exegesis in medieval Germany. Eleazar was the last major scholar of the Ḥasidei Ashkenaz movement. Born in Mainz, he traveled and studied in many of the centers of learning in Germany and northern France. He spent most of his life in Worms. R' Eleazar witnessed and suffered personally from the new outburst of persecution of the Jews by the Crusaders at the end of the 12th and the beginning of the 13th century. On a number of occasions in his commentary on the prayers, one of his major works, he noted the events that befell Worms, especially during the persecutions that followed the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin, during the Muslim conquest and colonization of the Holy Land. In one of these persecutions, Eleazar's wife, daughter, and son were murdered, and he was severely injured. Eleazar's wife was very active in the religious and cultural life of her community. It is reported that she led the women in prayer and even gave public lectures to the women on the Sabbath. This tragedy was described by him in detail both in a story and in a poem. His personal loss and the catastrophic situation in the Jewish communities in Germany explain his pessimistic outlook concerning the prospects of German Jewry. He felt that the German Jewry of his time was but a small remnant after the disasters of 1096 and the following years, and that this remnant was continually diminishing. (Encyclopedia.com)

1. What aspects of R' Eleazar's life are pertinent to his teachings about Golem making? What role does persecution of Jews play? How did his erudition inform R' Eleazar's response to this persecution?

2. Summarize R' Eleazar's commentary of Sefer Yetzira. In your own words, how does one create a Golem? Give a detailed step-by-step recipe.

3. Compare and contrast R' Eleazar's creation with Rava's (from the Talmud Sanhedrin 65b and Rashi's commentary there.)

Ben Sira wanted to study Sefer Yetzirah. A voice came out and said, "You cannot do it alone." He went to Jeremiah his father. Ben Sira is numerically equivalent to Ben Jeremiah (the son of Jeremiah), and they studied it and after three years, a man was created to them, upon whose forehead it was written 'Emet, as on the forehead of Adam. And the created one said to them: If the Unique One, the Holy One, Blessed be, created Adam, when [later] if God wanted to kill Adam, He erased a letter from 'emet and what remained was MeT (dead), even more so I would like to do it and you shall no longer create a man, so that people shall not err concerning him, as it happened in the generation of Enosh. This is why Jeremiah said: Cursed is the man who relies on Adam. The created man said to them: Reverse the combination of the letters backwards. And they erased the letter 'aleph from his forehead and he immediately turned into ashes. --Rabbi Judah the Pious

Sefer Gematriot is a collection of Chasidei Ashkenaz traditions from the end of the thirteenth century. The work records the various traditions in the name of R' Judah the Pious, author of Sefer Hasidim, and head of the esoteric circle of the pietists. (Sources and Studies in the Literature of Jewish Mysticism 6; 1998, 166 pp., in Hebrew)

1. In your own words, write a golem creation recipe from Sefer Gematriot.

2. Contrast the golem creation of Sefer Gematriot to the one from Rabbi Eleazar of Worms.

Next Source:

A man can make a Golem which possesses a living soul (nefesh chayyah) by the power of his speech, but the higher soul (neshamah) cannot be conferred by a person because it is from the Divine speech. Behold, you can understand the issue of the higher souls (neshamot) which are in the body (guf), hewn from the Throne of Glory, which are but their names, which are identical to their higher souls. --R' Joseph Ashkenazi

Rabbi JOSEPH ASHKENAZI (1525–1577), annotator of and commentator on the Mishnah. Ashkenazi, known as "ha-Tanna" of Safed, was the son-in-law of R. Aaron b. Gershon Land, who was rabbi in Prague and later headed the bet din of the Poznan community. Ashkenazi fought fiercely against philosophy and theoretical-philosophical Kabbalah. At Prague he denounced Maimonides as a heretic and was threatened with excommunication by the rabbis of Prague if he did not desist. Abraham ha-Levi Horowitz wrote a polemical pamphlet against Ashkenazi's father-in-law, which was mainly directed against Ashkenazi himself. After his father-in-law's death (1560) he went to Verona but it would seem that he did not spend many years there and that he subsequently went on to Egypt where he taught at a yeshivah. Here he was friendly with Bezalel *Ashkenazi and probably also with Isaac *Luria. Perhaps his contacts with these two scholars, who devoted themselves to the study of variant readings of the Mishnah and Talmud as they occur in manuscripts, influenced Ashkenazi to accept the usage of the Egyptian scholars. In 1569/70 he went to Safed, where, as was his custom, he roused violent controversies.