Man is so constructed that he always wanted to become like God - also to become the Creator, the Creator. In principle, this is probably inherent in the very nature of man, for it is said that God created us in his own image and likeness. In sacred books such as the Bible, the Koran about it is said in great detail.
For example, in the 32nd surah "Claim" it is said that Allah created Adam from clay: "He is the One who knows the hidden and the obvious, the great, merciful, who made everything that exists beautiful, and created the man for the first time from clay”(32: 6-7).
Apparently, therefore, man and tried all the way to create his own kind, in addition to the natural path - reproduction. In a later version, this is Pinocchio (in the Russian version - Pinocchio), in an even later version - all kinds of humanoid robots, creating a person from a test tube, cloning, etc. But here we have not invented anything new, because the creation of an artificial man from earth, clay is found in the anthropogonic myths of many peoples, for example, Egyptian, Sumerian-Akkadian; in particular, there is an Akkadian legend about the creation of people from clay figurines, and they were created in pairs, and life in them was infused through the umbilical cords - almost as it should be by nature. The same is said in other sources. But it is simply unrealistic to consider all of them, so we will focus on one representative of the ancient myths - the Golem.
Golem is a character in Jewish mythology. A man made of inanimate matter - clay, revived by Kabbalists with the help of secret knowledge - all by the same analogy with Adam, whom God created from clay.
The word "golem" comes from the old Hebrew word "gel", meaning "raw, raw material", or simply "clay". The root -GLM- occurs in the Tanakh in the Old Hebrew word galmi, meaning "my raw form." Then, in the old Yiddish, the word "goyle" acquired the figurative meaning of "idol", "stupid and clumsy person", "blockhead", which migrated into modern Hebrew.
Jewish myths found their unexpected continuation in the very widespread Jewish folk legend that arose in Prague about an artificial man created from clay to perform various "black" jobs, difficult assignments that are important for the Jewish community, and, mainly, to prevent blood libel by timely intervention and exposure. Further, according to legend, the Golem, having completed its task, turns into dust. The folk legend attributes the creation of the Golem to the famous Talmudist and Kabbalist - the Chief Rabbi of Prague Maharal Yehuda Ben Bezalel or Rabbi Lev (Leib), a person, by the way, quite real, who was born at the beginning of the 16th century. This legend dates back to the beginning of the 17th century. It was presented in the novel "Golem" by Gustav Meyrink.
Other golems are also known, created according to folk tradition by various authoritative rabbis - innovators of religious thought. It is also believed that the Golem is reborn to a new life every thirty-three years.
Later, the theme of the Golem was often used in poetry, and in fiction, and in theatrical plays, and in films, and even in computer games. One of the very first films is the 1920 film Golem: How It Came Into the World. The then stars Paul Wegener and Lida Salmonova shone in it.
Promotional video:
But how was it created - according to the legend of old Prague? It was back in 1580. Jews, as you know, settled in Prague in a heap - in the so-called. They lived quietly in the Jewish city (at that time Josefove), did not interfere with anyone, on the contrary - they only helped. Among them were jewelers, doctors, usurers (bankers) and representatives of other useful professions. However, the church periodically persecuted them, but everything somehow calmed down. And now one clergyman named Tadeusz, an ardent opponent of the Jews, once again tried to disturb peace and harmony and provoke new superstitious accusations against the Jews. Rabbi Leo then suggested to the Prague cardinal to organize a scientific spiritual polemic. The greatest interest was aroused by the questions whether the Jews used the blood of Christians during the celebration of Passover (Passover) and whether the Jews were guilty of crucifying Jesus Christ. Rabbi Leo has convincingly provedthat according to the Talmud, the use of any blood, including animals, is strictly prohibited for Jews. On the question of the guilt of the Jews in the death of Christ, Rabbi Leo stated that Christ died on the cross in order to atone for the sins of mankind. This happened with the help of the Jews, because God decided so. Christians, on the contrary, should be grateful to the Jews, because otherwise Christianity might not have arisen.
Then Rabbi Leo in a dream asked God Yahweh a question by what means to start the fight against the evil enemy. And God sent him an answer, clearly arranged in alphabetical order: Ata Bra Golem Dewuk Hachomer Wrtigzar Zedim Chewel Torfe Jisrael, which meant "Create a Golem from clay and destroy the vulgar rabble that devours the Jews."
Rabbi Leo, being a very strong Kabbalist, interpreted the "sent" combination of words so that he could, using the number of letters revealed to him by Heaven, create a living being out of the earth - clay. He called his son-in-law Yitzhak ben Simeon and his disciple, Levi Jacob ben Hayyim Sasson, and told them the secret about the possibility of creating a Golem, but explained that one could not cope: “I require your help because four elements are needed to create it: you Yitzhak, you will be the element of fire, you, Jacob - the element of water, I myself - the element of air, together we will create a Golem from the fourth element - earth. " He explained to them in detail that first you need to go through sanctification and purify in order to prepare for the great work of creating an artificial man, and taught them how to do this.(How exactly it was necessary to "sanctify" and "purify" is not directly related to history.)
When the two "volunteers" passed all the rituals and were ready, came the fateful "X-Day", which was also calculated using kabbalistic knowledge. The work took place by the light of a torch and with the reading of psalms. All three together sculpted the figure of a man out of clay and laid it face up. Then they stood at his feet so as to look directly into his face. Rabbi Leo ordered Isaac to walk around the clay body seven times from right to left, teaching him the preliminary sacred word from the book of Sefer Yetzira, with which you can revive the Golem. Yitzhak walked around and uttered the cherished words. After that, the clay body turned fiery red. Itzhak, as we remember, personified the element of fire.
Then Rabbi Leo ordered Levi Jacob to go around the body from right to left also seven times, telling him certain words for his element. When he completed his task, the fiery red color disappeared, and water flowed in the clay body; hair had erupted from the skin, and nails began to grow on the fingers and toes. Jacob thus fulfilled his destiny, acting as the element of water.
Here Rabbi Leo himself walked around the body of clay, put a shem written on parchment (a kabbalistic combination of letters of the name of God) into his mouth, and bowing to the east and west, south and north, all three simultaneously uttered the words: “And he breathed the breath of life into his face, and man became a living soul. Thus, thanks to the three elements (fire, water and air), the fourth element - the earth - came to life. The golem opened its eyes.
Seeing this, Rabbi Leo told him: "Get on your feet!" The golem stood up. Then they put on the clothes of a shames, and soon he looked like a normal person. Only the gift of speech was lacking. But later it turned out that this is even better. At dawn, all four went home.
While walking, Rabbi Leo decided to enlighten his brainchild, who he is and why he came to this world, and said: “Know that we created you out of a clod of earth. Your task is to protect Jews from persecution, your name will be Joseph, and you will spend the night in the rabbinate. You, Joseph, must obey my orders, wherever and whenever I send you - even into fire and water; you must obey my orders if I order you to jump off the roof and if I send you to the bottom of the sea. " Josef nodded his head in agreement. Rabbi Leo brought "Joseph" home and told his family that he had met a dumb stranger on the street, and since he felt sorry for him, he accepted him as the rabbi's servant. However, at home, he forbade the use of the Golem for personal needs.
Seven years have passed. All these years "Joseph" carried out all the orders of Rabbi Lev, he did it well. Further in the legend, the fallen Torah appears. It so happened that on the Day of Reconciliation in 1587 in the Old New Synagogue, where Rabbi Leo was praying, the head of the community dropped the Torah, placing it in the box after the afternoon reading. The event caused the most complete horror among all the assembled members of the community, since from time immemorial such an event was considered almost the most bad omen. Rabbi Leo was also agitated and immediately ordered everyone present to fast the next day. On Monday, he asked God in a dream what sin was the cause of this bad event. This time God did not give him a clear answer, “dictating” only individual letters, which Rabbi Leo could not interpret in any way. Then he wrote them down on a piece of paper and gave them to the Golem,instructing them to find the answer to him.
The golem, having looked at a piece of paper, immediately took out one prayer book from a bookcase, opened it and showed the chapter that was read from the Torah on the day of humility. The letters shown in Rabbi Levu's dream were an abbreviated form of the commandment "do not covet your neighbor's wife."
Seeing this, Rabbi Leo understood that the head of the community who dropped the Torah was in an extramarital affair, so the Torah slipped out of his hands. He called the head of the community to him and confidentially told him about the words from the dream. He, crying, confessed his sin that he really was the lover of a married woman, and asked the rabbi to appoint him to repentance. But Rabbi Leo went even further, having dissolved the marriage of an unfaithful wife and her husband according to the laws of Moses.
Further, the Golem performed many other assignments, but one day he became enraged. It happened on the eve of Shabbat. Rabbi Leo introduced the custom of giving the Golem on Fridays afternoons a kind of daily plan for the Sabbath day, because on Shabbat he only wanted to communicate with him as a last resort. As a rule, Rabbi Leo told him not to do anything else on Shabbat except to stand on duty and be careful. But one Friday Rabbi Leo forgot to give the Golem his plan for tomorrow after lunch.
So the Golem was left without a task for the first time. As soon as Friday came to an end and everyone was preparing for Shabbat (for Jews, Shabbat begins not from Saturday morning, but from Friday evening), the Golem began to run like mad in the Jewish quarter, beat and destroy everything around, and nothing could resist it powerful destructive force - he was so enraged and frightened by the fact that he was forgotten and he had no occupation. Seeing the rampages of the Golem, people ran away, shouting: "Joseph is crazy!" Immediately a terrible panic arose, and soon the news of this reached the Old New Synagogue, where Rabbi Leo was praying. He ran out and, not seeing the Golem, nevertheless shouted towards the street: "Joseph, stop!"
And then the people saw that the Golem immediately stopped rooted to the spot, overcoming the force of his rage. Rabbi Lev was told where the Golem was, the rabbi went up to him and whispered in his ear: "Go home and go to bed." And the Golem obeyed him like a child. Then Rabbi Leo returned to the synagogue and ordered the song to be sung again for the Sabbath. The agitated rabbi asked all witnesses not to report this story to the authorities, as he was very afraid of the synagogue closure for the blasphemous experiment to create an artificial man. Since this Friday, it has never happened that he forgot to give the Golem a task the next day, knowing that the Golem is capable of devastating all of Prague if he is not calm down in time.
After that, the Golem behaved obediently, still successfully defended the Jews, if necessary, but some time passed and the community was no longer threatened with malicious slander - Emperor Rudolph II promised that there would be no more attacks of Christians on Jews - and the existence of an assistant has become superfluous.
Then Rabbi Leo called Isaac and Jacob to him and said to them: “Now the Golem has become superfluous, since we no longer need to fear evil accusations. Therefore, we must destroy it. Everything had to happen in secret. It was at the beginning of 1593.
On the appointed day, Rabbi Leo ordered the Golem not to spend the night at the Rabbinate this time, but to move his bed to the attic of the Old New Synagogue and spend the night there. At two o'clock in the morning, Yitzhak and Yakob came to Rabbi Levu, and he asked them if the dead man, i.e. non-living, which, in theory, the Golem is, represent, like other dead, an object of pollution. This was a very important question, since otherwise the priest could not have participated in the destruction of the Golem, but Rabbi Leo decided that this question must be answered in the negative. In other words, if Gaullem was originally non-living, then there will be no sin of murder on the priest.
Having come to this decision, all three went up with a servant to the attic of the synagogue and began to destroy the Golem. They did everything exactly the opposite compared to that night when they created a person from clay, i.e. if on the night of creation they stood at the feet of the Golem, opposite his head, now they stood at his head and looked at his feet. Kabbalistic words were also read in reverse.
After all the procedures, the Golem again became just a lump of clay. Rabbi Leo then called a servant, Abraham Chaim, and ordered him to strip the Golem down to his shirt. He ordered the clothes to be burned unnoticed. The frozen Golem was then covered with old robes and the remains of books stored according to Jewish custom in the synagogue attic.
In the morning in the Jewish quarter, people were told that Joseph had disappeared from the city at night. Only a few people knew the truth. Rabbi Leo ordered to announce in all synagogues and houses of prayer a strict ban on entering the attic of the Old New Synagogue.
Here's a legend … For some time they forgot about it a little, but they started talking about Golem again at the end of the 18th century, when the Polish rabbi Elia from Chelm put forward his version of what happened in Prague and allegedly created the golem himself.
They say, however, that the Prague Golem was never completely destroyed, that the clay man continues to walk the streets of the Jewish quarter of Prague and frighten passers-by. That he was allegedly even seen, and more than once. But this definitely refers to the legends of the mysterious city of Prague, and more modern ones.
And now it's time to move from legends to reality. If you analyze legends and historical data, then three facts come to light that are definitely not fiction. The first of these is the suspension of the Friday services of Rabbi Lev in order to stop the atrocities of a certain Joseph. The second is a request to the parishioners (or those dedicated to history) not to inform the authorities about any experiment. And the third is the ban on entering the attic of the Old New Synagogue. The ban really existed, and even the outer staircase was dismantled so that no curious person could enter. Before the door to the attic, at a height of 10 m, there used to be a platform to which a wooden staircase led.
This was evidenced by the holes in the wall for the supporting beams. They were later walled up. In the 18th century, the chief rabbi of Prague, Ezekhiel Landau (1713-1793), visited the synagogue's attic by placing a portable ladder against the wall. Before going upstairs, the rabbi went through a strict ritual of purification, fasted and prayed. Then, in prayer robes and with straps on his head, Tefilim entered the mysterious attic of the synagogue, while his disciples waited below. However, he spent only a few minutes upstairs, and when he returned, he was trembling violently. What he saw in the attic, he did not tell anyone. "Let no one else dare to go up there and disturb the peace of the Golem!" - the rabbi updated the strict ban on entering the attic.
Today, there are no remains of the Golem in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue. But this does not mean that they were not there. The date 1883 is carved into one beam above the door, indicating that there was someone in the attic who could have removed the remains. By the way, the entrance to the attic of the synagogue is prohibited even today. For what reason? If because of the legend of the Golem, then this prohibition proves that this is not a legend!
Another confirmation of the reality of the Golem is the repetition of the 92nd psalm during the service in the Old New Synagogue. This tradition may be a reminder of the rabbi's longtime preaching suspension due to the Golem's rowdy. There is no such tradition in any other synagogue.
The mystery of the attic of the synagogue and the legends of the Golem were of great interest to the Czech researcher and writer Ivan Markel, who had been working on this issue for about thirty years. In 1984, he finally got permission to go up to the synagogue's attic, searched the entire attic with a radar, listened to the walls, but, naturally, found nothing.
By the way, for the entire twentieth century, Markel was the second who was allowed into the attic. The first was a German-language journalist of Jewish origin Egon Erwin Kish (1885-1948), also fascinated by the legend of the Golem. He visited the attic in the 20s. He had a friend, also a Jew, who was no less keen on this topic. Kish met him in 1915. He served in the Austro-Hungarian troops and copied some parts of the manuscript. The book he bought in the Polish city of Přemysl describes the fate of the Golem, an ancient clay robot. It was written immediately after the death of Rabbi Lev. It follows from the text that the body of the Golem probably did not remain in the attic of the Old New Synagogue. It may well be that it is temporarily hidden in one of the parts of the current Josefov.
Markel believes that the traces of the Golem's body can lead to several different places in Prague. To better understand this whole story, he studied a book published in 1909 by a Polish Jew, Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg. This book is the first detailed account of the life of Rabbi Lev and a possible Golem. Rosenberg claimed to have translated the original Hebrew text, The Miracles of the Maharal, by Isak Katz, Rabbi Lev's disciple and son-in-law. According to this work, the Golem was actually brought to life with the help of a shem, which corresponds to other versions of this story. It is possible that his friend told Kishu exactly about the book that served as the basis for Isak Katz's work.
In his research, Markel also relied on articles by Egon Erwin Kish, in particular, on an article in the Sunday supplement to the Prager Tagblatt newspaper dated 9/12/1920. In it, Kish writes that it will be most effective to associate with the disappearance of the Golem the servant of Rabbi Lev Abraham Chaim, who took part in the destruction of the body. Probably, Chaim and his relatives secretly transported the Golem to the underground premises of the Prague Pinkas synagogue. A few days later, he moves it to another basement on the former Gypsy street - to a house that was then partly owned by the Prague Jew Asher Balbirer. From there, Asher Balbirer transported the body to a partially abandoned Jewish cemetery near the TV tower in Zizkov, on the former Sibenicni vrch Hangman Hill, now Fibichova Street.
Has the Golem remained there to this day? Is this not fiction? The origin of Kish's translation cannot be traced, and in his manuscript there are several historical inaccuracies, though not very important, and who is insured against inaccuracies, especially since we are talking about the events of five hundred years ago. The most important of the inaccuracies is that the Jewish cemetery for those who died from the plague did not exist at that time; it appeared ninety years later. But there could have been another cemetery?
The second trail leads to the Old Jewish Cemetery in Josefov. The trail is very plausible. The fact is that in the Prague archives there was a record that in 1883 the synagogue was renovated, during which the rotten beams in the attic were also replaced (that's where the numbers 1883 are on the beam) and a temporary staircase made of metal brackets was mounted on the outside. The attic was cleaned up, and the discovered things were lowered down and buried in the old Jewish cemetery. What kind of things they were, no one knows anymore, and archival records pass over this moment in silence: things, that's all. Together with the objects, they could endure the body of the Golem.
If we assume that members of the Jewish community in 1883 found human bones (or something incomprehensible, such as a clay figure) among the sacred books and prayer vestments, then the find would be hidden or secretly buried in a cemetery, because at that time a wave arose again anti-Semitism, and Jews were again accused of the ritual use of Christian blood.
By the way, about the things that were handed out and buried: what was the need to bury the old trash of four hundred years ago and the remains of books? And it was in the cemetery ?! Wasn't it easier to just burn it?
Then the story takes an unexpected turn that no one expected. In 1999, Ivan Markel was approached by Indonesian Teddy Sunardi, who is studying law at Charles University. He brings a surprising twist to the investigation. An Indonesian, whose mother is Czech, from childhood attends strange dreams and visions with an unfamiliar old square with a column or other places unknown to him, reminiscent of the streets of some old European city. He sketches these places and is terribly surprised when his mother recognizes the Old Town Square in his drawings!
The Indonesian later identifies his dreams with other Prague sites, most notably the old Prague Jewish City as it was before extensive rebuilding in the late 19th century. The young man came to Prague only to study, his mother did not take him there as a child, and he did not see these places even in photographs. But the Indonesian student knows details about old Prague that only specialists in its history can know. The chairman of the club "For Old Prague", Ph. D. Katezhina Bechkova, tested his memory by showing him old photographs of different parts of the Jewish city before perestroika. Teddy tried to answer what was where. The results were amazing - about 80 percent clear hits!
Psychics connected to the research found out that Sunardi in a dream talks with long-dead people, including the Prague rabbi Jakub Schmiles (1570-1634). In one of his dreams, he told a student that the body of the Golem lay in Prague's Josefov in a house where a man would die in sixty days. The calculated date fell on July 31, 1999, when death actually visited the house no. 849/6 on the Prague street at the Merciful. In the basement of this house, Markel then looked for the buried Golem, and again with a radar. The search was unsuccessful, but the Czech researcher came up with a shocking relationship: this house is located a few meters from the former Gypsy street, which is mentioned in Kish's manuscript!
Or the body of a Golem (a human skeleton, a clay figure or the remains of a mysterious mechanism - this version also took place, because Rabbi Leo was known for his wisdom, extensive knowledge of natural and secret sciences. He could, for example, build an artificial mechanism. Although this seems less plausible, but this version cannot be completely ruled out) is buried in another place and lies somewhere near this Prague street and is waiting for its discoverer?