Yay, I've been looking forward to this all week!

Okay, let's talk about the Golem of Prague and one of my favorite historical characters, Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg. (I feel weird calling him a historical character because he's also the ancestor of several people I know, but I'm mitigating it by calling him my favorite- when my friend told me she was descended from him, I actually squeed.)

If someone were to ask the question of "what is the most famous Jewish folkloric story," I'm fairly certain that the story of the Golem of Prague would be the number one answer. Not only is it a very well-known story in the Jewish world (with some Jews believing that it is the absolute truth), but it has made inroads into popular culture as well- it has featured in science fiction and fantasy (this is a post I wrote about the use of the Golem in Terry Pratchett's Discworld, for one), in philosophy, in television, in gaming, in children's books... there's even a horror movie that just came out about a golem! But people are often shocked to discover- especially considering the great cultural attachment which the city of Prague now has to the Golem legend- that the idea of there being a Golem of Prague does not predate the 19th century, and that most of what we now think of as an integral part of the Golem story is actually the invention of Rabbi Rosenberg.

The idea of a golem, though, as in a man-made humanoid, is actually quite ancient. The root word dates back to the Bible (meaning "unformed, raw," and the concept of a human/humanoid figure being created dates back to the Talmud, in several forms (Adam is described in the Bible as being formed from dust of the earth, and in the Talmud is directly identified with the above Biblical citation relating to the golem; a rabbi in the Talmud is said to have created a human from earth due to his holiness and connection with God, which another rabbi demolished). From the same period as the Talmud is the Sefer Yetzira, the Book of Creation, a mystical text which was a central feature of many later accounts of the making of golems using the secrets of the Hebrew alphabet. There is a legend from the 11th century in Spain, in which the famous poet Solomon ibn Gabirol is said to have created (unusually, from wood) a female golem as a maidservant, which he demolished when some suspected him of using it for immoral purposes; a century or so later, the medieval German scholar Rabbi Elazar of Worms described in a book how to create both male and female golems using Divine names and the Hebrew alphabet.

The first really full-fledged golem legend is not from Prague at all- it's from Chelm, a town in Poland where lived in the 16th century Rabbi Elijah Baal Shem. A baal shem, a term meaning "master of the name," was a title used for mystical rabbis in Jewish communities who were known as healers or miracle workers. Rabbi Elijah was also known for the golem legend, which was recorded only about 100 years after his death (which is pretty contemporaneous for golem stories lol) by a non-Jew named Christoph Arnold, who recorded that Jews

make the figure of a man from clay, and when they have said the shem hamephorash [a holy name of God] over it, the image comes to life. And although the image itself cannot speak, it understands what is said to it and commanded; among the Polish Jews it does all kinds of housework, but is not allowed to leave the house. On the forehead of the image, they write: emeth, that is, truth. But an image of this kind grows each day; though very small at first, it ends by becoming larger than all those in the house. In order to take away his strength, which ultimately becomes a threat to all those in the house, they quickly erase the first letter aleph from the word emeth on his forehead, so that there remains only the word meth, that is, dead. When this is done, the golem collapses and dissolves into the clay or mud that he was. . . . They say that a baal shem in Poland, by the name of Rabbi Elias [Elijah of Chelm], made a golem who became so large that the rabbi could no longer reach his forehead to erase the letter e. He thought up a trick, namely that the golem, being a servant, should remove his boots, supposing that when the golem bent over, he would erase the letters. And so it happened, but when the golem became mud again, his whole weight fell on the rabbi, who was sitting on the bench, and crushed him.

(cited from Scholem, Kabbalah)

This legend became the basis of the golem story published by the Brothers Grimm in 1808, which then spread into German popular culture (and may have inspired Mary Shelley as she wrote Frankenstein). A similar story was recorded at around the same time as Arnold's by Rabbi Jacob Emden, but his story was less dramatic and did not end with Rabbi Elijah's death, but only with his injury. None of these stories included any connection whatsoever to the city of Prague.

So where did the connection with Prague come from?

The first place to start is by discussing the man who is meant in the stories to have created the Golem of Prague, the Maharal- an acronym by which Rabbi Yehuda Loew ben Betzalel is often called. He was a very real and very significant figure in Judaism in his era whose influence in the form of his writings still lingers strongly today. He was a leading rabbi in Prague over a number of years at the end of the 16th century and beginning of the 17th. He was known as a rabbinic scholar and not a baal shem, and while he had some interest in theoretical mysticism, in his life he never manifested any real interest in the kind of practical mysticism which would be necessary for the creation of a golem. There are no records of him or his students or descendants mentioning any connection whatsoever between him and a golem. While he was recorded by his student and his son-in-law as having met at least once with Emperor Rudolph, supposedly to talk about secrets of science and mysticism- a connection which is often used as a plot point in Golem of Prague stories- there is no other connection known between him and the court.

The first two written stories which linked the Maharal with a golem were printed in the 1840s in Germany, one by Franz Klutschak and one by Leopold Weisel. Both include themes from the earlier story about Rabbi Elijah of Chelm, but change the way that the golem was controlled- instead of by writing on its forehead, it is by the placement of a shem, or name of God, in its mouth. Both stories seem to indicate that the connection of the Maharal with a golem predated their writing of the stories, but it's unclear by how much or how the connection was made. In these stories, the golem runs amok in the famous Prague synagogue, the Altneushul, and the Maharal has to save the community from it by changing its shem.

But the story of the Golem of Prague had barely gotten started, and had certainly not reached the form which is so famous today. Now, it's known as the tool of the Maharal in saving the Jewish community from external danger. This is the legacy of Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg, but since I haven't eaten lunch yet, I'll get to this in part two.

Monsters!?!? Are you kidding? I'm all about monsters. I have so many lurking on my shelves it's hard to know where to begin. A good part of folk narratives are about bone-chilling entities people found terrifying. One example comes to mind because of the height of gruesome horror it attained.

The Northern Paiutes of the Great Basin have the paúngaa’a, which translates as “water baby,” a name that does not match the sinister quality of the creature. This ruler of the water plays an important role in a testimonial legend that tells of a woman who left her infant in a cradleboard by the water while she gathered edible plants. She hears her infant crying, and so she returns and attempts to suckle the baby. When the baby opens its mouth, it reveals huge fangs, and it bites into the breast of the woman. It is, in fact, the paúngaa’a, which has devoured the baby, assumed the baby's form, and is now chewing on the mother with its enormous fangs. The creature continues to chew and cannot be dislodged by force. The woman must quickly summon a shaman with paúngaa’a power to chant the demon away. The supernatural being responds by retreating back into the water. This legend warns about the dangers of the water and about not being an attentive mother. To achieve this, it calls on the belief in a ruler of the water. I had a student in 1980 who was able to obtain an excellent example of the legend from his grandmother.

There is a counterpart to this found in the widespread European legend of the changeling (classified as Migratory Legend 5085 by the Norwegian folklorist, Reidar Th. Christiansen). This, too, was a terrifying account: it describes an elf, fairy, huldrefolk (the name changes from place to place, but the crime remains the same) who exchanges a member of her group with a human infant. Typically, the mother is distracted as occurs in the Paiute narrative, and here, also, the substitute supernatural being assumes the form of the stolen infant. In this case, the abducted human baby becomes part of the fairy cohort where it is not necessarily mistreated. Eventually, the mother realizes that "her baby" is failing to thrive, and she suspects it is a changeling. Here - again, like the Paiute story - there is an effort to "disenchant the supernatural being." Accounts take two forms: the first is to do something startling in front of the changeling - brewing beer in an egg shell or cooking porridge with the pot filled with spoons. The changeling - which has never spoken before - says something on the order that he had seen the local forest burn and grow several times, but he has never seen anything so absurd. A more sinister alternative involves the abuse of the changeling: stories describe the infant being left out on the dung heap all night, or worse, of its being beaten or placed in the fire. Much has been made of how these accounts likely reflect actual practices of infanticide to get rid of an unhealthy infant. In these stories, the fairy mother returns with the human infant and complains to the human mother that her stolen baby was never treated so harshly. In expressions of this migratory legend, the human infant is returned, and usually all is well. There are also accounts of people who "really did know of a changeling in the neighborhood," meaning a local infant that failed to survive. Of course, these were not exchanged for the "real human infant"; rather, they lingered in households who were known to possess one of these infants, who were almost certainly victims of some disease or genetic issue.

In the European story, there was genuine horror at the prospect of losing an infant: in modern terms, being abducted by the fairies seems like something that would be a great deal of fun because fairies have been "Disneyfied" into charming, magical, gracious neighbors. For pre-industrial folk, an abduction meant an eternity of servitude and bleak existence. Most importantly, it also meant that the abductee would be deprived of eternal salvation - and this was the most terrifying thing of all.

The two traditions - the paúngaa’a and the changeling - were both terrifying in their own ways. They are almost certainly not historically related. Rather, they draw on common themes of the human condition: fear of the unknown and fear of the loss of an infant, inspired in part by infant mortality. The Paiute legend always ends horribly: the human infant is devoured and the mother's breast is permanently maimed. European stories usually turned out well, but the belief in the possibility of abduction resulted in many real cases of child abuse (if not murder) and community suspicions about neighbors who harbor one of these entities.

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad, weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah, oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra ofer hronrade hyran scolde, gomban gyldan. Þæt wæs god cyning!

Thus begins one of the best known medieval monster stories, Beowulf.

We have the man eating Grendel and his mother, mentions of sea monsters, and a literal dragon on buried treasure all making appearances! Indeed, I have a feeling that the first part of Beowulf would make a rather excellent slasher film.

Now what's perhaps most interesting, is that many of the monsters go relatively undescribed in their appearance. Grendel has at least one arm that gets ripped off and that's about it in terms of the physical characteristics. There are other descriptions, kin to Cain, and such, but little in the way of physical traits. In art and more contemporary depictions of the story, Grendel has been portrayed as a kind of wolf man (John Gardner's cover for his Grendel), a weird kind of giant scaly swamp thing, (the movie from the aughts), and as a rival warlord (in another film adaptation).

The dragon meanwhile, is quite different from our common conception of a medieval dragon, it is relatively small and doesn't fly for example. It doesn't soar from the skies and slaughter villagers and steal cattle, it lairs underground and hoards gold.

Medieval Burgundy had a particular fascination for wyverns ( Vouivre or Vivre depending on the texts). According to most of the legends, it was a woman with the body of a snake and a fish tail, supposed to haunt some specific villages, fountains and springs deep in the forest.

Every century since 1328, the village of Couches organize a Vouivre festival, at first to repeal the creature who allegedely terrorized the village.

The legend also survive nowadays in some local toponyms : for exemple, towering Dijon (the capital of the Dukes of Burgundy), there is La Combe-à-la-Serpent, literally "the Snakewoman's Vale", an hillside forest where the Vouivre supposedly lived between the IXth-XIth century, bathing in the nearby fountains and ponds close to the city limits, and which today is a nature reserve.

I also visited in the region an old medieval fountain locals suposedly built in the medieval era to appease the creature, but I'm pretty sure it's been built at most from the XVIth century.

The legends are pretty similar to Mélusine in Poitou/Alsace/Champagne, and are thought to be coming from the neghboring region of Franche-Comté.