The Golem of Prague

The clay giant said to have been made by Rabbi Loew to protect the Jews of 16th-century Prague — folklore's ancestor of the robot.

In the best-known version, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel — the Maharal of Prague — fashioned a giant from the clay of the Vltava's banks and gave it life to defend the city's Jewish community from persecution. The golem was animated by a divine name, in some tellings written on a slip of paper (a shem) placed in its mouth, and was stilled each Sabbath. In several versions it grows uncontrollable and must be put to rest, its remains said to lie in the attic of Prague's Old-New Synagogue.

The golem is far older than Prague: the idea of a being formed from earth and animated by holy language runs back through medieval Jewish mysticism to the Sefer Yetzirah, and to word-magic in which the Hebrew emet («truth») on the creature's brow becomes met («death») when its first letter is erased. The specific attribution to the Maharal is a later crystallization, popularized largely in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The story's afterlife is enormous. It stands behind later anxieties about man-made servants that turn on their makers, and behind the very word «robot», from the 1920 Czech play R.U.R. — a resonance not lost on anyone building intelligence out of language today.