The Golem of Prague

A famous legend attached to Europe’s oldest active synagogue

The Golem of Prague lives in the Old New Synagogue in Josefov, the old Jewish quarter of Prague. Completed in 1270, it is Europe's oldest active synagogue and one of the earliest Gothic buildings in the city, with a double nave of six vaulted bays. Its name carries a legend of its own. Old-New may simply mean a New or Great Synagogue that grew old once newer ones went up in the 16th century, but it sounds like the Hebrew al tnay, on condition, and the story goes that angels brought stones from the Temple in Jerusalem to build it, on condition that they go back when the Temple is rebuilt.

Its golem is the best known of all. Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal, rabbi of Prague in the late 16th century, is said to have made a man of clay from the banks of the Vltava and brought him to life to defend the ghetto, in some versions against expulsion or massacre under the emperor Rudolf II. The creature, called Josef or Yossele, came alive when a slip bearing the name of God, the shem, was placed in his mouth or head, and the rabbi took it out every Friday evening so that he would rest on the Sabbath. One Friday the rabbi forgot. In the version the Jewish Encyclopedia gave in 1906, he caught the golem in front of the synagogue just before the Sabbath began and pulled out the shem, and the golem fell to pieces; other tellings have it running murderously wild first. Its remains went into the genizah in the synagogue's attic, to be woken if ever needed, and Loew forbade anyone but his successors to go up. One successor, Rabbi Yechezkel Landau, fasted, immersed himself in a mikveh and climbed the steps, then came straight back down trembling and repeated the warning.

Historians mostly see the Prague story as a German literary invention of the early 19th century, set down by Jewish writers from the 1830s. No Hebrew work of the 16th to 18th centuries knows of a golem made by the Maharal, and his own writings never mention one. Yudel Rosenberg's Wonders of Maharal of 1909, presented as an eyewitness account by Loew's son-in-law, is generally regarded as a literary hoax.

A newer legend has a Nazi agent entering the attic during the Second World War and dying mysteriously; the Gestapo apparently never went up, and the building survived the war. The lowest three metres of the outside stairs to the attic have been removed, the attic is closed to the public, and both a renovation in 1883 and an exploration in August 2014 found no trace of a golem.