The Maharal of Prague and the Legend of the Golem

Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal, served some twenty years as rabbi of Nikolsburg in Moravia before moving in 1573 to Prague — then capital of Rudolf II's empire and one of Europe's great Jewish cities — where he opened a yeshiva. His life afterwards swung between two cities: Poznań from 1584, Prague again from 1588, and in 1592 Poznań once more, as chief rabbi of Poland. In that same year, 1592, the emperor received him; no record of their conversation survives. Only in 5357 (1597) did he become chief rabbi of Prague, holding the post until his death in 5369 (1609).

The Maharal was a thinker of rare scale. In Tiferet Yisrael, Netzach Yisrael, Gevurot Hashem and Netivot Olam he builds an integrated account of Torah, Israel, exile and redemption in a vocabulary of his own. In Be'er ha-Golah he defends the aggadah against mockery, showing that the sages' stories are parables about deep matters, not naive fables. His Gur Aryeh remains the standard supercommentary on Rashi.

Education was his passion. He attacked the reigning pilpul — ingenuity for its own sake — and demanded age-appropriate teaching: Scripture first, then Mishnah, and only a matured mind to the Gemara. A teacher who gives a child what the child cannot hold, he said, ruins both the child and the Torah.

The legend of the Golem — a clay man animated by the Divine Name to protect the community from blood libels — appears nowhere in his own writings and reaches print only in the nineteenth century. Yet it has fused with him permanently: Prague, the Maharal and the Golem are now inseparable.