The Golem of Prague: Legend and History

The legend starts at the river. It says Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal, shaped a figure from clay taken from the banks of the Vltava and brought it to life with Hebrew incantations, to defend the Prague ghetto. The golem was called Josef, or Yossele. To wake it, the rabbi wrote the name of God on a slip of paper, the shem, and placed it in the golem's head or mouth. Every Friday evening he removed the shem so the creature could rest on the Sabbath.

Location precision: The legend names the river, not a spot; the pin marks the Vltava embankment beside the old Jewish quarter.

This is the history behind the legend. Emperor Rudolf II moved his court to Prague in 1583 and kept his collections at Prague Castle. On 23 February 1592 Rabbi Loew had an audience with him, together with his brother Sinai and his son-in-law Isaac Cohen. The talk seems to have concerned Kabbalah. The Maharal's pupil David Gans wrote that their words were "mysterious, sealed, and hidden", and nothing in that early record mentions a golem. The legend says that under Rudolf the Jews were to be expelled or killed.

Location precision: The sources give the audience but not where in Prague it took place; the pin marks Prague Castle, Rudolf's seat.

Completed in 1270, this is Europe's oldest active synagogue, and it was spared when the Nazis destroyed synagogues. In some versions of the legend the golem goes on a murderous rampage, and the rabbi pulls the shem from its mouth in front of the synagogue; the golem falls in pieces, and its body is stored in the attic genizah, to be revived if needed. The legend adds that Rabbi Yechezkel Landau began to climb to the attic, hesitated at the top and hurried down, trembling. The attic is not open to the public, and a 2014 exploration found no trace of a golem.

Visitor guidance: It is an active synagogue; the attic is closed to visitors.

Rabbi Loew, a real man, died in Prague in 1609 and lies in the Old Jewish Cemetery, where his grave and tombstone are intact. His tumba is decorated with a lion and wine grapes. The cemetery was in use from the first half of the 15th century until 1786. Historians read the golem story as a German literary invention of the early 19th century; the earliest known source is an 1834 book by Friedrich Korn. The Maharal himself never mentioned a golem in his writings.

Visitor guidance: The cemetery is administered by the Jewish Museum in Prague.

Legends rarely stay put. Some versions of the tale say the golem was stolen from the genizah and entombed in a graveyard in Prague's Žižkov district, where the Žižkov Television Tower now stands. The tower is a transmitter built between 1985 and 1992. Nothing but the legend ties the golem to this hill.

Location precision: Only some versions of the legend place the burial here, and none can be checked; the pin marks the tower.

Gustav Meyrink's Gothic novel The Golem, written between 1907 and 1914 and published as a book in 1915, sold over 200,000 copies that year. It follows the jeweler Athanasius Pernath, who lives in the ghetto of Prague. Here the golem is a physical manifestation of the ghetto's collective psyche and its own "self". The real quarter, Josefov, was mostly demolished between 1893 and 1913; what remained were six synagogues, the old cemetery and the Old Jewish Town Hall.

Location precision: Meyrink's ghetto is a literary version of the old quarter; the pin marks the Old Jewish Town Hall, one of the few buildings left after the demolition.