No other Prague legend has achieved such worldwide renown as the story of the Golem. The clay giant brought to life by the power of Kabbalah, the mute guardian of the ghetto who once lost control, has fascinated humanity for centuries and transformed Josefov into one of the most magical places in Europe. In Hebrew, the word golem denotes an incomplete, unfinished being, something akin to an embryo. In this sense the word appears just once in the Bible, in Psalm 139, where it refers to a human being not yet seen by God's eye. The Talmud extends the term to describe a crude and uneducated person still awaiting refinement. The decisive shift came with the kabbalistic Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation, one of the foundational texts of Jewish mysticism. It teaches that the world was created through combinations of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and that one who masters their secrets may imitate the divine act of creation and breathe life into a being made of clay. The Prague Golem transcended its linguistic origins and became a symbol of the city itself.
The idea of a clay being created and animated by a human is demonstrably far older than the Jewish tradition. It is attested in literary sources from ancient Egypt as early as the second half of the 6th century BCE, and is probably connected with ritual figurines known as ushabtis, placed in tombs to serve the deceased as substitute servants. The motif of a human fashioned from clay appears in Mesopotamian myths as well. In a certain sense, the biblical Adam was the first golem, for God created him by taking "dust from the ground and breathing into his nostrils the breath of life." Even the animating of Buddhist statues — into whose interiors a scroll bearing a mantra is placed before installation — shares the same archetypal motif from afar.
Rabbi Löw and Renaissance Prague
The legend is inseparably linked to the name of Judah Löw ben Bezalel (c. 1512–1609), one of the most significant figures of Renaissance Prague. This exceptionally learned man, revered in Bohemia under the title Maharal, served in the Prague ghetto as rector of the Talmudic school, chief justice of the Jewish community, and eventually chief rabbi of the Bohemian Crown. He excelled not only in religious law and philosophy, but also in mathematics, astronomy and astrology.
Rabbi Löw lived and worked in Prague during the reign of Emperor Rudolf II, who had made Prague the centre of European science, the arts and the occult. The Rudolfine court attracted astronomers such as Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, as well as alchemists, astrologers and Kabbalists. Rabbi Löw was not merely a distant observer of this world but an active participant in it. On 16 February 1592 he was received in a private audience by Emperor Rudolf II, accompanied by his brother Sinai and his son-in-law Isaac Cohen. The event was recorded by the Maharal's contemporary, the chronicler David Gans. The conversation most likely centred on Kabbalah, by which Rudolf II was deeply fascinated. In this environment, where the boundary between science and magic was still being drawn, the story of the animated clay being found its enduring place in the collective memory.
The Birth of the Golem: the legend
One night, the rabbi was said to have heard a mysterious voice commanding him to fashion a figure from clay that would protect the Prague Jews from the plots of their enemies. The aim was to guard against false accusations of ritual murder, the so-called blood libel, to which the Prague ghetto was repeatedly subjected. Rabbi Löw, aided by representatives of the four elements, moulded clay brought from the banks of the Vltava into the form of a giant and breathed life into it by means of a mysterious shem, a sacred parchment bearing the name of God, which he placed in its mouth. The being, named Yossele, rose and obeyed: it performed heavy labour, carried water, chopped wood and at night patrolled the ghetto to ensure the safety of its sleeping inhabitants. It neither ate nor drank, required no rest, and could neither speak nor think for itself. It took orders solely from the one who had created the shem. According to another version of the legend, Rabbi Löw inscribed on the Golem's forehead the Hebrew word emet (truth), which animated the creature; erasing the first letter left the word met (death), by which the Golem was deactivated.
Every Friday before the onset of the Sabbath, when no one may work according to Jewish tradition, the rabbi would remove the shem from the Golem's mouth and the creature would fall into motionless sleep. One Friday in 1593, however, the rabbi forgot. It happened at a time when his only daughter had fallen gravely ill. The desperate father nursed her day and night, but the illness kept worsening. On Friday evening he had to leave her bedside to attend the traditional service, and in his distraction forgot to remove the shem. The Golem awoke without an assigned task and began destroying everything within reach — precious furniture, sculptures, the entire contents of the rabbi's house. A terrified maidservant rushed to the synagogue just as the congregation was singing Psalm 92. The rabbi interrupted the service, ran outside and wrenched the shem from the Golem's mouth. The creature froze and crumbled into a heap of dead clay. The rabbi returned to the synagogue and completed the interrupted prayer. When he arrived home, he did not grieve over the lost objects or his clay servant, for his daughter had in the meantime recovered as if by a miracle. Since that day, Psalm 92 has been sung twice in succession in Prague's Old New Synagogue — the only place in the world where this is done — as an eternal memorial to that dramatic evening.
Rabbi Löw had the Golem's clay body stored in the attic of the Old New Synagogue. Access to the attic was strictly forbidden; the external staircase was demolished and replaced by iron rungs set at a considerable height. One of the few who attempted to climb up was Löw's later successor, the chief rabbi of Prague Ezekiel Landau. Before the ascent he fasted, immersed himself in the mikveh, and clad in a prayer shawl and tefillin began to climb. Near the top, however, he stopped, turned back and descended trembling and frightened. He never explained what he had seen. When the attic was renovated in 1883, no evidence of the Golem's existence was found. In 1920 the journalist Egon Erwin Kisch made the ascent and likewise found nothing. In the 1980s, Ivan Mackerle conducted a survey using ground-penetrating radar; the result was again negative. A more recent version of the legend adds one further unsettling epilogue: a Nazi agent who reportedly ventured into the attic during the Second World War died shortly afterwards under mysterious circumstances. Another version holds that the Golem's body was removed from the attic and buried in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Žižkov, where the Žižkov Television Tower now stands.
The Old New Synagogue and the Old Jewish Cemetery
The Old New Synagogue has stood at the heart of Josefov since the late 13th century. It is the oldest surviving synagogue north of the Alps and as such has outlasted centuries of persecution, devastating fires and the demolition of the ghetto during the urban renewal of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. According to legend, it was built using stones from the Jerusalem Temple, which in the eyes of the faithful surrounded it with an aura of sanctity. Looking at the synagogue from Pařížská Street, one can make out a small door in the roof leading to the legendary attic, approached by the iron rungs mentioned above.
Nearby stands the Old Jewish Cemetery, one of the oldest surviving Jewish cemeteries in Europe. Among its gravestones you will find the tomb of Rabbi Löw himself. It is easy to recognise — it is covered with layers of small stones and slips of paper bearing wishes and prayers, brought by the faithful in the belief that the Maharal will help grant them.
The Golem in Literature and Culture
The story of the Golem has captivated writers around the world. Historians point out, however, a fundamental fact: there is not a single contemporary record showing that anyone in Prague wrote about the Golem in the 16th or 17th century. The extensive writings of the Maharal make no mention of a clay creature. The chronicler David Gans was likewise silent on the matter. When the Maharal's descendant Me'ir Perles wrote the first biography of the rabbi in 1727, he included various legends and miracles associated with his ancestor, yet the Golem was not mentioned. The Prague scholar Jedidiah Tiah Weil, who in the 18th century analysed older golem legends in detail, overlooked it too. Historians are unanimous on this point: no document from the 16th to the 18th century knows of a Prague Golem.
The story as we know it today was created only in the early 19th century, in the spirit of German Romanticism. It began with Jakob Grimm, who in his articles popularised the Polish tale of the Chelm golem of Rabbi Elijah Ba'al Shem, in which the creature runs amok and kills its creator in the process of being destroyed. The relocation of the Golem story to Prague and its association with the Maharal came about gradually — first as a passing reference in a novel by Joseph Seligmann Kohn (1834), then in works by Berthold Auerbach (1837) and Franz Klutschak (1841). The most widely disseminated version was created by Leopold Weisel, who in 1847 published the story Der Golem in the popular Prague anthology Gallerie der Sippurim. The collection became a bestseller and, over the second half of the 19th century, firmly embedded the legend in the public consciousness. It was also adopted by Alois Jirásek, who included it in his Old Bohemian Legends of 1894, which remain required reading in Czech schools to this day.
The Golem on Film
Gustav Meyrink drew on the atmosphere of the Prague ghetto in his novel The Golem of 1915, a classic of German-language fantastic literature that made Josefov world-famous as a literary setting. Franz Kafka, himself born in Josefov, drew on the oppressive atmosphere of the ghetto throughout his prose. Egon Erwin Kisch, the Prague journalist, made his way into the forbidden attic of the Old New Synagogue and turned the Golem mystery into a piece of reportage. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel also wrote about the legend. Umberto Eco, in his novel The Prague Cemetery, set a key scene in the Old Jewish Cemetery, where the greatest rabbis from across the world gather over the rabbi's grave at regular intervals.
On the cinema screen, the Golem first made a major impact in the silent Expressionist film The Golem: How He Came into the World by Paul Wegener, released in 1920. The very first film about the Golem had been made by the same Wegener back in 1915, of which only a few sequences survive. A French-language film simply titled Golem, shot on location in Prague, was produced jointly in Czechoslovakia and France in 1936. In Czech popular culture, the Golem left an indelible mark through the historical comedy The Emperor's Baker and the Baker's Emperor of 1951, in which the Golem figure — a clay giant reinforced with iron hoops — was sculpted by Jaroslav Horejc.
Practical Information for Visitors
The Old New Synagogue is located at Červená 2, Prague 1 – Josefov. It forms part of the circuit of the Jewish Museum in Prague, which also administers the Old Jewish Cemetery, the Maisel Synagogue, the Pinkas Synagogue, the Spanish Synagogue and the Ceremonial Hall. Admission prices and current opening hours are available on the Jewish Museum in Prague website (jewishmuseum.cz). The synagogue remains an active house of worship; services are held on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings.
The Golem can be encountered at several other locations in Prague. The Museum of Prague Legends and Ghosts on Mostecká Street in Malá Strana has a dedicated exhibition on the legend. Technology enthusiasts can experience the Golem in virtual reality in the Josefov quarter. The multimedia attraction Back in Time Prague at Národní 26 (Máj centre) also devotes an interactive exhibition to the Golem, using audiovisual technology to let visitors "witness" the moment Rabbi Löw breathes life into his creation. The atmosphere of the medieval ghetto is best absorbed on an early-morning or evening walk through Josefov, when the tourist crowds thin out and the winding alleyways recover the silence that once belonged to the Maharal's clay guardian.