Skip to main content

The Prague Golem, a Czech-Jewish legend

Still from the 1920s film, The Golem

The legend of the Prague Golem is one of the most well known old stories closely linked to the Prague Jewish community.

The Prague Golem was a creation of a Rabi Low ben Bacalel, who had made the Golem in order to protect the Prague Jewish community from the more violent and prejudiced Christians who oppressed Jews of the Prague Ghetto.

According to legend, Bacalel created his Golem in 1580 together with a 'sem' (a small ball which brought the Golem to life). Although Golem served his master and the Prague Jewish community well, after an accident in 1583, Bacalel decided to bury his creation and remove it from the world.

During one of Jewish celebrations, Bacalel forgot to take the sem out of Golem's forehead and, without its master's supervison, the Golem became violent and attacked the people whom he was meant to protect.

Today, the the legend of the Prague Golem is mostly known thanks to a famous Czech comedy film 'Cisaruv Pekar a Pekaruv Cisar' with Jan Werich in a leading role.

In the comedy, in 1552, the emperor Rudolf II moved the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire to Prague and the comedy is about how the emperor decides to switch jobs with the baker on a bet. Rudolf was famous for surrounding himself with charlatans and mystics and believed in the supernatural and he was one one of the first chemists. He was very interested in science and that's why he is said to have owned the Golem. Of course the movie is an improvisation around the story of the Golem.



By Ondrej Zemanec

[The story of Frankenstein is obviously plagiarised from the story of the Golem - Ed.]

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Guardian: Kate Harding's reactionary censorious blog on CiF

It should go without saying... ....that we condemn the scummy prat who called Liskula Cohen : "a psychotic, lying, whoring ... skank" But I disagree with Kate Harding , (in my view a pseudo blogger), posting her blog in the Guardian attacking bloggers. It's a case of set a thief to catch a thief. The mainstream media is irritated by bloggers because they steal its thunder and so they comission people like Kate Harding , people with nothing to say for themselves, apparently, other than that they are feminists, to attack bloggers. I'm black. So I can legitimately attack "angry white old men". I'm a feminist, so I have carte blanche to call all anonymous bloggers "prats." Because yes, that is her erudite response to bloggers. No I don't say that the blogging medium can't be used to attack progressives in whatever context. Of course it can. But to applaud the censorship of a blogger by a billion dollar corporate like Google, and moreov...
32 comments
Read more

The Guardian books bloggers' poetry anthology

There more to composing poetry online than this. ..isn't there? I don't really like conventional poetry of knowing. I love the poetry of words coming into being. The Guardian is going to publish a printable book online with our poems in it and the Irish poet, Billy Mills is getting it together with Sarah Crown, the literary editor. Good for them. Let's also remember that Carol Rumens got the ball rolling. Does Des feature in this anthology? Taboo-busting Steve Augustine decided not to join in. So what are we left with? In the anthology we will be left with a colourful swatch of well-meant, undeniably conventional, occasionally clever, verses - some of them. But there could be, there should be and there is a lot more to on-line poetry than this. Than agile monkeys, koalas and sad sloths climbing up word trees. Perhaps we should focus in on translation, because in translation there is a looseness of form and a dynamism such as, it seems, we can't easily encounter in our...
24 comments
Read more

Guardian books blog fringe: Norman Mailer

FLASHING THE GUARDIAN -- A BOOKS BLOGGERS' REBELLION :  The unheroic censor with a death wish Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation By ACCIACCATURE 3 February 2009 When Norman Mailer died in 2007, informed opinion – in the blogosphere, people who had read at least two of his books – was split. The army of readers who saw him as one of the most despicable misogynists writing fiction in the 20th century was perfectly matched by warriors on the other side, who raged that the label wasn’t just unwarranted but tantamount to heinous calumny. Before commenters returned to bitching-as-usual, tempers were lost on literary sites all over the net in debating temperatures high enough to bring to mind tiles burning off space shuttles re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. After I'd agreed to a spontaneous suggestion by our good friend Sean Murray -- a pioneer and stalwart of the comments section of The Guardian’s books blog – that we re-...
71 comments
Read more