Sefer Yetzirah, and a Legend With a Date

Behind the Prague story lies a much older and quite different Jewish tradition. Commentaries on Sefer Yetzirah, the short and obscure work of letter-cosmology that circulated from late antiquity, discuss the making of an artificial anthropoid through combinations of the letters of the alphabet, and the medieval German pietists developed this into a described practice: a solitary or paired exercise, performed on virgin soil, involving the recitation of letter-combinations over a shaped figure. In those accounts the point is contemplative rather than practical. The creature is made in order to demonstrate that the practitioner has understood the creative process, and is usually undone immediately, sometimes by walking the recitation backwards. Nothing in that tradition involves protecting anybody from anything.

The attachment of a golem to the Maharal specifically cannot be traced before the nineteenth century. He died in 1609 and left a substantial body of writing that does not mention it, and his contemporaries do not associate him with one. The story appears in print in the early nineteenth century in German-language collections, and the full narrative most people now know was published in 1909 by Yudl Rosenberg, who presented it as an old manuscript by the rabbi's son-in-law; scholarship treats it as Rosenberg's own composition. From there it passed into a Czech and German literary culture already fascinated by Prague, into an influential silent film cycle, and thence into the wider modern idea of a made servant that outgrows its maker.