Hanukkah, the festival of lights, begins at sundown tonight. This historic more than religious holiday celebrates Jewish miracles and heroes and in commemoration of this occasion I’ve decided to write about my favorite Jewish monster… The Golem. Now maybe monster is a bit harsh but growing up a Congregationalist and lay Fabulist I didn’t discriminate between Frankensteins, Draculas, Hunchbacks or Golems; they were all monsters and they were all good. Let them be praised!

Isn’t it strange
That princes and kings,
And clowns that caper
In sawdust rings,
And common people
Like you and me
Are builders for eternity?

Each is given a bag of tools,
A shapeless mass,
A book of rules;
And each must make—
Ere life is flown—
A stumbling block
Or a steppingstone.

R.L. Sharpe

In Hebrew, the word “golem” can be taken to mean “shapeless mass,” “unformed” or “raw materials.” In the Talmud, a golem is a body without a soul. The most popular golem legend concerns the 16^th century Maharal of Prague, Rabbi Loew, who is said to have constructed a golem to protect the inhabitants of the Prague ghetto against anti-Semitic attacks during the Easter season of 1580. Lowe’s golem was imbued with life due to the recitation of holy words and/or (sources vary) the insertion of a scrap of paper inscribed with said holy words into the golem’s mouth. The various legends telling the tale of Rabbi Loew differ greatly in their particulars but agree that the golem eventually went berserk, causing considerable damage. In addition to the symbolic importance of this third act complication to Jewish mysticism, the leitmotif of a monster on a tear would work its way into the secular canon of monster tales.

Austrian writer Gustav Meyrink is credited with writing the first book about the golem, titled (appropriately enough ) Der Golem. Meyrink began putting his story together (based on the Medieval myths) around 1908 and published the material first in periodical form in 1913. The novel was published two years later. The eponymous man of clay makes only a symbolic appearance in Der Golem, which differs greatly from the German Expressionist classic Der Golem, wie er in die Welt cam (“The Golem, How He Came into the World,” 1920), codirected by Carl Boese and Paul Wegener, who played the titular simulacrum. It isn’t widely known that this influential film was actually the third part of a trilogy created by Wegener and begun in 1915 with a film simply titled Der Golem. Nosferatu (1922) writer Henrik Galeen was Wegener’s co-director and co-writer. Wegener followed this with Der Golem die Tänzerin (“The Golem and the Dancing Girl,” 1917), a fantasy (co-directed by Rochus Gliese) in which Paul Wegener plays himself and which got the recursive jump on the Scream trilogy by over sixty years in reflecting on our relationship to our own horror myths. Once a member of Max Reinhardt’s Berlin troupe, Wegener used the medium of film to explore his pet subject of the Occult and later became something of a negative golem himself as a propagandist (and State Actor) for Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich.

It’s easy to see the Golem’s shadow in horror fiction and film from the silent period onward, in the curvy robotrix from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), in the undying monster of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and his cranky Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and in the obedient robot companion Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1950).

A more obscure golem vehicle was Herbert J. Leder’s It! (1966), in which necrophilic mama’s boy Roddy McDowell compels a withered-looking golem to do his bidding, which entails (but is not limited to) carrying around an unconscious Jill Haworth. Although It! failed to spark a new golem renaissance, the spirit of the golem lives on, in films such as The Iron Giant (1999), in a trilogy of movies directed by Amos Gitai, in the music of Gary Lucas, in award-winning literature on the order of Cynthia Ozik’s The Puttermesser Papers and Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, in the 1997 Caldicot Award winning children’s book by David Wisniewski and even on the 2006 Halloween episode of The Simpsons. And what is that Yuletide standard Frosty the Snowman but a thinly-disguised golem scenario about an inanimate ice sculpture brought to life by dint of a magic hat?

In 2002, a fully restored "authorized" print of Der Golem: wie er in die Welt cam was included in Kino on Video’s wonderful box set German Horror Classics, alongside Robert Weine's Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920), F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu, a Symphony of Terrors, 1922), and Das Wachsfigurekabinett (Waxworks, 1924). Kino does sell Caligari separately and their transfer is available from Netflix .

If you haven’t yet seen The Golem… compel yourself!

Sources:

Wigoder, Geoffrey , Ed. The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia. NY: Facts on File, 1992.

Bridger, David. Ed. The New Jewish Encyclopedia. NY: Behrman House, Inc. 1976.

Oreck, Adam, Jewish Virtual Library. “The Golem.”

Bucher, Felix. Germany: An Illustrated Guide & Index. Zwemmer-Barnes. 1970.

Eisner, Lotte. The Haunted Screen. University of California Press. 1952.

Kreimeier, Klaus, The Ufa Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company 1918-1945, NY: Hill & Wang, 1996.

Endnote: I dare you to say "titular simulacrum" five times fast.