Recasting the Golem: The Construction of Central European Jewish Culture, 1808-2003

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Although the concept of the Golem as an artificial man of clay animated by a ritual of words first appeared in medieval Jewish mysticism, the range of tales told around this figure today result from its secularisation. This process began during the seventeenth century with the first mention by Christian authors of a Polish-Jewish Golem tale (Wuelfer and Arnold 1674), followed later by German-Jewish sources. After Grimm's 1808 publication of this tale, Christian authors such as Achim von Arnim (1812) and E.T.A. Hoffmann (1822) played a decisive role in establishing the Golem as a popular literary figure and asserting its authentic status within Jewish culture. Following Berthold Auerbach (1837), Jewish authors began to respond with their own literary variations and folktale stories on the Golem, now set in the German-speaking realm of Prague and equally asserting an authentic base in Jewish folk traditions. In particular Judl Rosenberg's Golem stories (1904) and their widely influential publication by Chajim Bloch (1919), which Gershom Scholem (1933) exposed as a literary invention, have constituted the blueprint for the contemporary conception of the Golem as a Jewish folk motif. The Golem is now a widely known and pervasive symbol of Jewish culture in the German-speaking context, and it has made appearances in works by a wide range of non-Jewish and Jewish writers, poets and film makers including Gustav Meyrink (1915) and Paul Wegener (1920), Nelly Sachs (1949) and Paul Celan (1962), as well as more recently Benjamin Stein (1995) and Esther Dischereit (1996). Critical literature to date has noted the widespread fascination with the Golem in German culture without finding a convincing explanation for the omnipresence of this theme in representations of Jewish culture. Offering the first comprehensive and analytical study of the Golem in German-speaking literature and film, the proposed project sheds light on the intricate reflections of the non-Jewish perception of Jews in the German-speaking lands in the Golem figure and the conflicting role that non-Jewish images of Jews have played in the shaping of German-Jewish culture and identity.