A sealed room is an enigma that contains other enigmas inside. In Prague, in the attic of the Old/New synagogue, visitors are prohibited from entering the place where, according to legend, the remains of what could be the first artificial intelligence in history are kept.
Various versions of the Golem populate Jewish tradition. The best known, however, is the one that attributes its paternity to Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, also known as the great Maharal or the Kabbalist of Prague, a Talmud scholar, enormously respected by his contemporaries and a great connoisseur of mystical texts.
The story – rather the legend – takes place around the year 1600. We find ourselves under the reign of Emperor Rudolph II of Habsburg, one of the most unique and eccentric monarchs of the Holy Roman Empire. In that motley court where magicians, astrologers and alchemists were welcomed into the palace, the Jewish community enjoyed a short-lived golden age of relative security. Loew himself and the emperor met with some regularity and talked about the Kabbalah. And yet, dangers lurked.
There was jealousy and a rumor that in the Jewish quarter of Prague the blood of Christian children was used to perform dark rituals. In this climate, threatened and persecuted, the Jews of Prague request the help of the great Maharal. He initially hesitates, but ends up finding a way to protect the Hebrew community. That night, the rabbi leaves with his disciples to the bank of the Vltava River (Vltava, in Czech) and orders the crowd gathered there to pile up buckets of clay.
From clay, according to the well-known story, Judah Loew models a giant in human form. Immediately afterwards, the wise man and his students walk in circles around the creature. The impossible happens: the Golem rises and acquires a reddish color. The Maharal then draws a word on his forehead with Hebrew characters: “Emet” (truth). He also inserts a tablet with Torah verses into his mouth and whispers a final incantation. In that moment, the being comes to life. The first artificial human begins to move.
The Golem, the fruit of the cabalistic spell, is created with the purpose of protecting the congregation. He is a guardian, a protector, a friend. But once the attacks stop, he will be relegated to household chores and caring for the synagogue. Lacking a brain, the instructions for the humanoid had to be very precise. It is said, for example, that on one occasion the rabbi’s wife ordered the Golem to bring water from the Vltava. She did not indicate how many buckets she wanted, and within a few hours she found the synagogue flooded.
Over time, the problems became more serious. The neighbors lost respect for the creature. The children made fun of his clumsiness. The Golem spell required that every week, coinciding with the observance of the Sabbath, Rabbi Loew removed the tablets with the letters of the Torah to put him to sleep.
Only one day would the Maharal forget to comply with this warning. The oversight was slight, but fateful. At that moment the Golem goes crazy. He escapes from his home, rampaging and setting fire to several houses. The fire in the Jewish ghetto causes dozens of deaths. In his madness, the mud monster unleashes chaos. The protector has become a threat against everyone.
It is then that, distraught, the Jews of Prague turn to Rabbi Loew to put an end to the monstrosity. The rabbi agrees. Much to his chagrin, he approaches the place where the creature is. Seeing his father, the Golem seems to calm down. The Maharal approaches his forehead and erases a letter: instead of “Emet” (truth), the resulting word is “Met” (death).
The Golem, born from mud, returns to mud. The rabbi then dismantles it and carries his remains up to the attic of the Old/New synagogue. He has resided there since then. In some versions it is said that he wakes up one night every thirty-three years. Other sources claim that he never slept at all, he just waited. He will return, they say, the day the Jews of Prague feel in danger again.
Today the Golem is one of the icons of Prague, often sold as a talisman or as part of the Czech capital’s tourist merchandising. And yet, this is just one of the many variants of the myth. From the Talmud and the Bible through the fictions of Goethe and the German expressionist cinema of the 1920s, the Golem has not stopped evolving, reflecting the fears and desires of each era.
The word Golem appears in the Old Testament, to be exact in Psalm 139:16, the moment in which Adam thanks God for his birth from the earth: “When, in secret, I was being formed, | and weaving in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my still formless being.” In this way, the word Golem could be translated as “embryonic substance”, “primitive element” or “formless earth”.
Even before the Prague Kabbalist and his creature, there are legends about the Golem in Lithuania and Poland. In the Polish city of Chelm there is talk of the figure of a pious rabbi who built a Golem as protector of the local synagogue. In all cases the same series of elements are repeated.
As Moshe Idel writes in his work The Golem: Magical and Mystical Traditions of Judaism about the creation of an artificial man, “in the method, whatever the variants, the central value of letters and figures is found again.”
Idel, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and probably the greatest living authority on the subject, maintains that “since the 13th century, the instructions for the creation of the Golem have been known, both in the ceremonies of body modeling and in the transmission of the Sacred name.”
The power is in the word. According to Jewish Kabbalah, words not only convey meaning and a vibration, but would be emanations of divine origin. This is a principle present in the Book of Creation.
According again to Moshe Idel: “The most influential text on later versions of the creation of the Golem was the Sefer Yetzirah, an ancient cosmogonic and cosmological treatise. The Sefer Yetzirah sets forth, far more comprehensively than any other ancient text of Jewish mysticism, an explicit cosmology based on the notion that the technique by which the universe and all the matter it contains was created consisted of a combination of letters. .
It can be said that each technological leap brings with it a new interpretation of the Golem myth. His shadow can be sensed, for example, behind Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. The British Mary Shelley generated indescribable terror in the readers of her time by connecting ancestral fears with a still budding energy whose discovery opened the door to an almost divine power: electricity.
Before her, it is known that the German Goethe traveled to the Staronová synagoga (Old/New synagogue) and was inspired by old rumors to shape The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Already in the 20th century, in 1915, Gustav Meyrink achieved million-dollar sales with his most popular novel, The Golem, where the monster is more of an ominous presence that flies over the Jewish neighborhood of Josefov. Inspired by the novel, with the popularization of cinema, the creature went from paper to the screen in Paul Wegener’s classic. The story so seduced viewers that it would end up giving rise to one of the first trilogies in the history of cinema.
Nowadays, facing the second decade of the 21st century, the advance of robotics and artificial intelligence seem to bring back a creature connected to our dreams and nightmares that, in reality, never completely left us.
The Golem, in essence, constitutes an unavoidable reference when thinking about technologies that could escape our control. Both in Rabbi Loew’s Prague and in the startups of Silicon Valley, approaching the domain of the creator unleashes an existential risk on the human species.
Also today, programs that generate text like an oracle make the debate about the creative power of language topical. Is something you talk intelligent? The astonishing similarity between the drawing of the Kabbalistic tree in the Book of Creation and the neural networks with which computer engineers have put our world in check with programs like ChatGPT is still very significant.
The idea that the universe is a language and that with millions of combinations of words it is possible to shape an autonomous intelligence would have sounded familiar to Rabbi Loew. Or, quoting Moshe Idel’s book again: “How can we not see, if not a return of the magicians, at least that of a fascination with magic and the enchantment of the world that it produces? Here the question of manufacturing living beings and perhaps even humans no longer requires legend and illusionists. It has become current and real in our laboratories and in our clinics.”
