Golem: A Historical Study

First published in Prague in 1924, this is one of the earliest serious attempts to trace the Golem legend back to its roots - and further than most readers expect. Dr. Oldřich Eliás, a lawyer and practicing occultist, follows the trail of animated clay servants from the tombs of ancient Egypt through folk magic in China and Japan, into the Talmud and Kabbalah, and finally to Prague itself: the creation of Rabbi Judah Loew's Golem in a riverside clay pit, his years of quiet service, his undoing in the rafters of the Old-New Synagogue, and a detailed, previously untranslated account of what became of him afterward, drawn from a manuscript the author tracked down during the First World War.The book closes with a technical chapter on the Shem ha-mephorash, the seventy-two-lettered Name said to give the clay its life, including the author's own reconstruction of it.Part cultural history, part folklore survey, part occult treatise - this is the study that first placed the Prague legend inside a much older and wider tradition. Now translated into English for the first time.