The golem as combatant and weapon still walks among us, molded and remolded in novels, television shows, and video games. Likewise, the “golem condition”—our confrontation with the boundaries of mortality precisely as our machines and technologies grow in strength and intelligence—continues to reign in the popular imagination. In current cinema, this condition appears in two forms: films about highly intelligent and humanized robots, who reveal qualities superior to those of human beings (Spike Jonze’s Her and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina) and films about comic-book-inspired superhuman heroes (or villains) who threaten to destroy the world even when formed or intended to save humanity (Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Days of Future Past and Joss Whedon’s Avengers: Age of Ultron). Although the first type of film often features female, enticing robots, in contrast to the masculine golem-like superheroes, it still conveys, in Daniel Mendelsohn’s words, the new urgency that the “anxiety about the boundaries between people and machines has taken on.”1 The golem, molded in the image of the human, is one of the central prototypes in Western culture for the anthropoid that, even when created to defend us, threatens to usurp our place and to annihilate us.
This book has interpreted the surging appeal of this narrative of artificial creation precisely during periods of great destruction and human loss. Twentieth-century culture inherited an aggressive, if dim-witted, golem, a clay monster prepared to slaughter the enemies of the Jews or else to attack its creator and the Jewish community. In twentieth- and twenty-first-century manifestations of the golem story, however, it conveys new ethical dilemmas stemming from the development of war technologies capable of mass, indiscriminate killing. The literature and art of the modern golem story challenges us to reconsider, for example, the stark divisions into friend and enemy, Jew and non-Jew, and even human and machine.2 It reveals the leveling effect of war that turns soldiers fighting on both sides into injured, muted, and dehumanized beings, at times even uglier and more debilitated than the legendary golem of Prague. The powerful but deficient clay monster has thus invited modern reflections on the monstrosities of mass warfare.
As we have spanned multiple continents and delved into the creations of German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and American cultures, we have seen the pervasiveness of the golem’s association with the violence of war. The golem’s unique attributes—its prodigious strength and aggressive nature and its duty to serve and follow orders, combined with its lack of consciousness, language, and what might be called a soul—all have contributed to its common deployment as a figure of war. The golem has embodied the ideal compliant and powerful soldier or else the automated weapon, whether missile or computer; but it has also represented the overall chaos of war and the soullessness of societies engaged in brutal conflict. Over the course of the twentieth century, artists have evoked the idea of an anthropoid that does not always cooperate with its established mission, in order to critique the race for weapons development and underscore the self-destructiveness of nations and citizens who engage in modern warfare.
As Paul Wegener’s silent film trilogy reveals, the golem was reborn in the trenches of World War I, formed of the same muddy earth in which soldiers lived, fought, and died. Wegener’s stoic cinematic golem stood in contrast to the “shell-shocked” veterans, including the actor himself, whose “nerves” could not withstand endless days of listless waiting and terrifying bombardment. The World War I golem went beyond the embodiment of the fantasy of a nerveless or mechanized soldier, however, exposing the unethical use of human beings as disposable combatants. Wegener’s acting, as well as his physiognomic aesthetic, reanimated not only the golem itself but also postwar society, conveying the necessity of considering every life as equally worthy and treating others with empathy.
Writers and journalists across Europe and the U.S. evoked the golem story also as a metaphor for war itself—not just one battling side or the other but the multinational aggression that threatened to wreak havoc on the whole population of Europe. World War I loomed larger, in its destructive capacity, than any single army; unlike the golem of Prague, it could not be subdued. In the early twentieth century, the golem thus became war incarnate, a massive being that revealed the indiscriminate destruction wrought both by the new use of clay trenches and by emerging war technologies. The next step was to imagine a total war in which only mechanized weapons inhabited the battlefield, controlled from afar by humans. Especially after World War II, the golem was associated with apocalyptic destruction and the possibility of humanity’s self-annihilation. When imagined as a protector and a redeemer, however, the golem also embodied the messianic promise of a utopian era that could restore the peaceful Sabbath. Living a futureless life controlled by others, the golem paradoxically enabled writers to imagine a dramatic range of (Jewish) futures.
The “golem-cult” or “golem epidemic” of the early twentieth century, which spread on both sides of the Atlantic, is still with us in crucial ways. War’s reliance on technology has only grown in recent decades, as both digital and robotic technologies dominate the postmodern battlefield. It seems ever more likely that the wars of the future will be fought among actual golems—intelligent robots and cyborgs that outperform individual humans. If the medieval Jewish mystics who wrote about molding golems were, according to Isaac Bashevis Singer, “fiction masters of their time,” more recent scientists have been compared to the literary Maharal of Prague, intent as they are on replicating human evolution and intelligence by artificial means.3 Their endeavors have wide-ranging applications since technological progress can always be co-opted for military uses. In Lem’s 1981 Golem XIV, the term golem is an acronym for a computer—“General Operator, Long-Range, Ethically Stabilized, Multimodeling”—that was designed and produced by other computers. In 2000, the scientists Hod Lipson and Jordon B. Pollack embarked on the Golem Project (Genetically Organized Lifelike Electro Mechanics), creating for the first time robots that can design and manufacture other locomotive robots by using their own “chemical and mechanical medium,” which includes everything from “thermoplastic motors” to “artificial neurons.”4 In this instance, science seems to imitate art rather than the other way round, and the golem easily traverses both scientific and literary discourses, inhabiting the “heavily trafficked zones between the figurative and the literal.”5
If metaphors are themselves “liminal monsters,” monster figures provide us with master metaphors for fundamental issues such as human beings’ relationships to their machines.6 The golem story promoted such reflections on the human condition in the war-torn twentieth century, but it also maintained its Jewish characteristics, even as this story has emerged through Jewish-Christian negotiation. The golem’s violent rebelliousness enabled artists to portray and comment on the Jewish participation in European wars and on Jewish political causes and movements. The golem figure, most often imagined as excessively strong and large, provided a bodily template for the imagined “makeover” of the diaspora Jew into a “muscle Jew” or else a literary ba‘al guf (strapping man). Such performances of exaggerated, ethnically transgressive physicality are met with ambivalence and criticism in many of the works discussed in this book. The notion that the golem embodies what Michael Chabon called the “lust for power” of a “powerless people” has elicited a range of responses—from Israeli denial of this supposedly diasporic myth, through American ambivalence toward Jewish power and its ethics, to Quentin Tarantino’s macabre embrace of performative Jewish violence.7 The indeterminate golem invited new cultural constructions of Jewishness for the violent twentieth century, just as it also questioned the dichotomous depictions of Jews as either utterly passive or overly vengeful.
Cast as a soldier and weapon and as a metaphor for war itself, the modern golem both bridges the different war events of the twentieth century and reveals their distinct attributes. World War I cemented the connection of the golem story to the destruction of war, as well as to the potential for postwar recovery. Following the devastation of World War II, the golem was compared to a secret weapon of mass destruction and imagined as a ruthless avenger for the annihilation of Europe’s Jewry. Despite its visual appeal and its family resemblance to superheroes like the Hulk, Iron Man, and the Thing, the golem itself could not sustain a comic books series, however, for it explicitly merged, in an unsettling manner, Jewishness and retributive power. The American fantasy of Jewish revenge, through a powerful clay monster, stood in contrast to the Israeli narrative (constructed mostly via print media) concerning the battle between the golem-like Arab League and the small but courageous Israeli Defense Forces. The strength of the Arab army was imagined as mythic and unreal, created and animated by the British, in comparison to the integrity and righteous power of the nascent Israeli army.
Whereas American artists played with the notion of an invulnerable “supergolem” when seeking to transform the image of the post-Holocaust Jew, Israeli society acted as though it did not need such “artificial” assistance. Nonetheless, many artists have recognized the degree to which Israel itself has become a fortified state, a massive golem resurrected to protect the Jewish population in the Middle East but threatening to wreak havoc on its own population. In Eli Eshed and Uri Fink’s 2003 mock narrative Ha-golem: Sipuro shel komiks yisra’eli (The golem: The story of an Israeli comic book), the clay hero is an ironic archetype of Jewish nationalism and militarism. In these fabricated comic strips and books, the authors depict a Jewish superhero that combats and overcomes Arab forces, popping up at every turning point in Israel’s military history. Narrating the pseudohistory of Israeli comics, Fink and Eshed suggest that the Israeli nation can be compared to the featureless, monstrous golem intent on overcoming its enemies. First “published” in right-wing Revisionist magazines that stressed “values like courage and self-sacrifice for the sake of the nation,” the golem comics ridicule the mainstream Jewish leadership’s policy of restraint vis-à-vis Arab attacks, denouncing the leaders as “weak and pitiful” and depicting a Jewish golem that can crush the Arab “genie.” In the 1980s, the golem even fights against the “conspiracy of the Oslo Accords.” In Eshed and Fink’s mock comics, the golem embodies an aggressive brand of Jewish nationalism, one that does not tolerate otherness and repudiates the peace process and its more inclusive notion of the Israeli state.8
While this book has reconstructed the shifting resonances of the golem metaphor, it has also been concerned with the living-dead golem as a transgressive monster that enabled artists to call into question national narratives, as opposed to nostalgically portraying a Jewish minority and its desire for protection. Starting with H. Leivick’s The Golem, through S. Y. Agnon’s To This Day and Yoram Kaniuk’s Himmo, King of Jerusalem, to Stanislaw Lem’s Golem XIV, the artificial being revolts through its rejection of the mission of military violence. These modern golems, rather than only aiming their physical might against a named enemy, protest the destructive purpose for which they have been created. Originally written in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish and spanning the twentieth century, these texts all underscore the contradictions inherent to the golem condition. Devised as a strategic weapon and ultimate warrior, the living-dead golem reveals our inability to escape the fundamental condition of natality and mortality and the high price we must pay for striving to do so through artificial means. In the medium of film, moreover, the illusion of animation could be “magically” re-created, so that the tragedy of the golem’s short-lived existence as protector of the Jewish community is powerfully conveyed. In literature, wartime and postwar adaptations often endowed the traditionally mute golem with the capacity for speech and even a human-like intelligence, thereby enhancing its self-reflective, critical propensity.
The popular golem of war has haunted twentieth-century Western culture, unsettling our sense of national, religious, and ethnic selfhood and, more often than not, withholding the reassurance of protection and redemption. We are still living out the aftermath of the interminable and world-altering wars of the twentieth century as we continue to develop ever more advanced war technologies for the global wars of the twenty-first century. The golem metaphor serves to remind us that even though our wars are being fought from afar by automatic machines of different kinds, they still have devastating effects on the human body and psyche. Well into the twenty-first century, golem narratives continue to provide resonant material for scrutinizing the conditions and activities by which we define our humanity.