The Maharal of Prague, Harav Yehudah Lowe, entered this world on the night of the first Seder in 5272/1512 in Posen (Poznan in Polish), today Poland’s fifth-largest city. His early appearance brought a yeshuah (salvation) to the Jews of his native
city.
When the Maharal’s mother, a daughter of Rabbi Chaim Issenheimer, realized during the Seder that the birth was imminent, albeit not when expected, the family ran to call a midwife. Imagine their utter shock and horror when they discovered, loitering in the dark near their home, a man dropping off a sack with a dead Christian child in it!
The plan of the anti-Semite was to falsely accuse the Maharal’s father, Harav Betzalel ben Chaim, the Rav of the community, of having murdered a Christian child to use his blood for their matzos.
After admitting that he wanted to implicate Rav Betzalel in a blood libel, he was arrested. Thanks to the early birth of the Maharal on that fateful Seder night, a great tragedy was averted.
• • •
Many legends have been woven around the Maharal’s decisive role in saving the Jewish community of Prague from
blood libels when he later served as Rav of that city, between the years 5348/1588 and his death in 5369/1609. These
legends tell of the creation of a golem, a lifelike clay figure that breathed and moved. (It should be noted that whether the
stories of the golem are accurate or not, there is no doubt that the chachmei Yisrael did have the ability to create a man. The only controversy is regarding the specific golem attributed to the Maharal.)
The golem was said to have been created by a beis din of three: a Yisrael (the Maharal, a descendant of Dovid Hamelech); a Kohen, the Maharal’s son-in-law, Rav Isaac ben Shimshon HaKohen; and a disciple of the Maharal who was a Levi.
Each of the three fasted and immersed in a mikveh before going to the banks of the Moldau River with some clothing
with which they were going to dress the figure that they were fashioning out of clay. First the son-in law, the Kohen, circled
the clay figure, followed by the Levi and then the Yisrael (the Maharal), each of whom would recite Hashem’s Names and
other holy words and letters.
At the conclusion of this mystical scene, the Maharal is said to have placed a parchment with the letters alef, mem, saf,
which spell emes (truth), one of Hashem’s less-known Names, into the mouth of the golem. When he wanted the golem’s spirit to cease to exist, the Maharal would remove the parchment and return it to the golem’s mouth with the alef which stands for Elokim, missing, so that it would spell meis (a dead person). The name of Hashem was always the necessary ingredient for the golem to “live.”
The golem was mute, and according to tradition would patrol the Jewish ghetto and catch sinister individuals,
especially before Pesach, in the process of placing dead bodies near the homes of Jews to implicate them in blood libels.
In one story related about the golem, the Jews were accused of murdering a Christian cleaning lady who had served as
a Shabbos goy and had disappeared. She had in fact left the city of her own volition, disappointed when she had not been
given a raise in salary. The shochet who had employed her was accused of murdering her and using her blood for matzos.
The Maharal sent the golem to search for her in neighboring cities with a note offering her a raise to bring her back. The
woman appeared with the golem in court, very much alive, shocking all the people assembled. They had been viewing a
glass held by the prosecutor allegedly containing blood from her dead body.
• • •
Many of the legends about the Maharal’s golem are known to us from a book published in Hebrew and Yiddish that first
appeared in 1909 in Pietrovka entitled Niflaos HaMaharal MiPrag. The book was described in its introduction as being based on an ancient manuscript written by the son-in-law of the Maharal; this was actually a literary device employed by its author, Rabbi Yehuda Yudel Rosenberg, a rabbinic genius born in Skarachev, Poland (near Radomsk),
who became known as the Skarachever iluy. Rabbi Rosenberg served on the beis din and was Rav in several Polish cities including Tarlow, Lublin and Warsaw, and eventually in Toronto and Montreal Canada, where he passed away in 1935 at the age of 75.
A prolific author, he wrote more than 25 sefarim, including commentaries on the Gemara and an eight-volume translation from Aramaic into Hebrew of the Zohar. Rabbi Prof. Shnayr Leiman writes in his 2002 article in Tradition magazine that, based on his research on the writings and activities of Rabbi Yehudah Yudel Rosenberg, the Skarachev iluy never intended his readers to view Niflaos HaMaharal MiPrag as anything more than a literary work, similar to Rabbi Marcus Lehmann’s historical novels.
Whatever Rabbi Rosenberg’s intention, the Nifaos HaMaharal MiPrag was an immediate bestseller and was
translated into many languages, including Judeo-Persian and Judeo-Arabic. In 2007 Yale University Press published it
in an English translation with an introduction in which the publisher thanks the great-great-grandson of Rabbi Yehudah
Yudel Rosenberg for photocopies of the original bilingual Hebrew and Yiddish edition.
• • •
There is a controversy not only in the scholarly world, but in the yeshivah world as well, about the existence of the golem,
since the Maharal himself never mentioned the golem in any of his writings. The claim is that it has been only in the last
200 years that we hear about the golem, but for close to 250 years after the Maharal’s time, there was no mention of it in
any literature.
The gentile writer Jakob Grimm, world renowned as one of the authors of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, published in 1808 in the literary and folkloric journal Zeitung fur Einsiedler (Journal for Hermits) the following: “Polish Jews, after reciting certain
prayers and observing fast days, made the figure of a man out of clay … and when they say the miracle-working words
over it, the fi gure comes to life.… He cannot speak, but he understands what anyone says to him and commands him
to do. They call him golem and use him as a servant to do all sorts of housework, but he may never leave the house alone.
On his forehead is written ‘Emeth (Truth; G-d).’ However, he increases in size daily and easily becomes larger and stronger than all his housemates, regardless of how small he was at first. Therefore, fearing him, they rub out the first letter, so that nothing remains but ‘meth (he is dead),’ whereupon he collapses and is dissolved again into clay.”
Although Grimm claims that the golem was made by Polish Jews, the reference may very well be to the golem of Prague,
since Prague and Poland had both at one time been part of Moravia. What Grimm may have meant was that they were not German Jews but of Polish origin.
On November 16, 1836, a leading literary magazine in Vienna, the Oesterreichische Zeitschrift fur Geschichts und
Staatskunde (Austrian Journal for History and Civics) published a series of folk tales (“Tales and Legends of the
Fatherland”) in which the following appeared: Under the roof of the oldest synagogue in Prague (the
Altneuschul) there is preserved, in its original form and color, a piece of trunk-like clay, which is known by the name golem.
A wise Rabbi (still called “Hoche Reb Leib” by the Jews), who diligently occupied himself with the Kabbalah every night,
formed a human-like figure and put a secret Name (“Shem’’) of G-d under its tongue. Thus it was brought to life and performed the duties of a servant. But when the first three stars appeared in the sky on Friday evening, and the beadle announced the Sabbath, the Rabbi … took the secret name of G-d from under his servant’s tongue, so that he became again a lifeless piece of clay.
This was written by a Jewish writer, Ludwig A. Frankel, who had been to Prague to study at a music school there called the Pianists’ Gymnasium (School). It is evident that when he was a student there he had become aware of the stories circulating about the golem and the Maharal in the early nineteenth century.
German Czech journalist Franz Klutschak wrote a story in 1838 entitled “The Golem and Rabbi Loew,” for a popular
periodical, Panorama des Universums. In 1847 Wolf Pascheles mentions the Maharal’s golem in his Galerie der Sippurim, among his many fairy tales about famous Jews.
Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer published in Yiddish a story about the golem and the Maharal in the Jewish Daily
Forward in 1969, and in 1982 he wrote an English version of the story.
The Baal HaTanya, the founder of Chabad Chassidus, was a descendant of the Maharal of Prague. Today in Prague
Lubavitchers run a Chabad Maharal Center, a kosher grocery, and milchig and fleishig restaurants.
Harav Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, writes in Likutei Sichos II the
following regarding his father-in-law, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Harav Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson (1880–1950), known
as the “Frierdike Rav (the Earlier Rebbe)”: Once the Frierdike Rav and his father, the Rashab, Harav
Shalom Dov Ber Schneerson, were in Prague and went to the Maharal Shul. The Frierdike Rav wanted to go up to the attic
where the golem was said to have been buried. He paid the shamash to get him a ladder so that he could ascend to the
attic. When he told his father what he saw, the Frierdike Rav intimated that he regretted having gone up there. He stated
“that it would take much time to undo” (whatever spiritual damage had been done as a result of what he saw).
• • •
In 1864 in Warsaw Rabbi Noach Chaim Levin edited and annotated Megillas Yuchsin, a family
chronicle written in 1727 by Meir Perles, a descendant of the Maharal. Rabbi Levin relates that he heard from the author
of Sho’el Umeishiv, Harav Yosef Shaul Nathanson, that when the latter went to visit Prague and wanted to visit
the attic of the Altneuschul to see the golem, a shamash told him the following: the Noda BiYehudah, Harav Yechezkel
Landau (1713–1793), had gone to the attic after first fasting and immersing himself in a mikveh. He then wrapped himself in a tallis, put on his tefillin and ascended to the attic. When he came down, Rav Landau announced that no one should go
up to the attic. When Rav Nathanson heard this story, he was afraid and refused to go up the stairs.
In the Shei’elos U’Teshuvos of the Chacham Tzvi, a teshuvah is published (#76) in which Rav Naftali Katz, the mechaber of
the Semichas Chachamim and a descendant of the Maharal, wrote that the Maharal was a gaon who made use of ruach
hakodesh.
The Bnei Yissaschar, written by Harav Tzvi Elimelech Shapiro of Dinov (1781–1841), a nephew of Harav Elimelech of
Lizhensk (1717–1786), contains a quote saying that the Maharal used the Sefer Yetzirah in the “magical sense.”
The Chida, Harav Chaim Yosef David Azulai (1724–1806), states in his Shem Hagedolim that he heard from an Ashkenazic
Rav a wonderful story that took place because of what was revealed to the Maharal from Heaven, and the Maharal spoke
about this for a long time with Emperor Rudolph II.
• • •
The many stories surrounding the golem have eclipsed the Maharal’s main contribution to Judaism. The Maharal
should really be remembered for his many writings, which include Gur Aryeh, a supercommentary on
Rashi’s commentary on the Torah; Gevuros Hashem, a commentary on the Haggadah; Nesivos Olam on ethics and morality; Be’er Hagolah, a commentary on Rabbinic sayings; and Netzach Yisrael on galus and Geulah; Tiferes Yisrael on
the greatness of Torah and mitzvos; Or Chadash on Megillas Esther; and Ner Mitzvah on Chanukah.
The Maharal had unique pedagogical theories on how to transmit Torah. He wanted children to know Tanach
thoroughly before they were taught Mishnah, and held that boys should master Mishnah before they were taught Gemara.
The Maharal established a yeshivah in Prague called the Kloiz. He was against teaching pilpul, using sharp analysis
when studying Gemara. He wanted his talmidim to learn the pshat, the simplest explanation of the Gemara, before delving
deeply into the subject. He believed children should not be taught certain Torah subjects until they were ready for them.
• • •
There are legends regarding the golem and World War II. One legend is told of a Nazi ascending to the attic who
tried to stab the golem but who perished instead. According to another legend, Nazi soldiers broke into the synagogue,
and the Maharal’s golem ripped them apart, limb by limb. In any event, the Altneuschul was spared during the Nazis’
destruction of the synagogues. The stairs leading to the attic from the outside have been removed and the attic is not open
to the general public.
There are some who state that the golem was stolen from The kever of the Maharal and his rebbetzin in
Prague.
There are some who state that the Golem was stolen from the genizah and entombed in a graveyard in Prague’s Žižkov district, where the Žižkov Television Tower now stands.
According to a tale told in Czech, the Golem will return to life when Moshiach comes.
Inyan Magazine of HaModia, April 7, 2016
12 Nissan 5776