Although there are references to the golem in the Bible and the Talmud, the manmade creature created from clay and incantations is usually attributed to Rabbi Loew of Prague, who was known as the Maharal (an acronym for Moreinu Harav Loeb, "our teacher, Rabbi Loeb"). The stories of his creation and the domestic tasks his creature performed circulated during the first third of the 19th century – this despite the fact that the golem is mentioned in none of the Maharal's writings nor in those of his disciples.

Curt Leviant's masterful "Introduction" to The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague lays out the golem's history, from the Middle Ages, when the notion of an artificial man or creature of clay arose (formerly a leymener geylem or "fool"), to later scholarly debates about the power of letters and words from the holy texts to bring inanimate clay to life. Once brought to (imaginative) life, the golem became a continuous presence in Jewish lore. As Leviant puts it, "The great eleventh-century Spanish Hebrew poet, Shlomo ibn Gabirol, is said to have made a female golem out of wood to serve as a housemaid. [I can only imagine what some Jewish feminists would make of that.] By the fifteenth century, stories of the golem were spreading throughout German Jewry and by the seventeenth century, golem tales had been common in the oral traditions of European Jews."

But of all the golem tales circulating throughout Europe, none was more famous, or more influential, than those attributed to Rabbi Loew (l525-1609), the spiritual leader of the Prague Jewish community. In truth, the deeds of Rabbi Loew's golem were restricted to fetching water and chopping wood. He was, in short, hardly the savior-golem who would come later.

Enter Yudl Rosenberg, whose 1909 The Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague forever changed how we think of the golem. As an Orthodox rabbi in Warsaw, Rosenberg was well aware that his congregants viewed literature as frivolous and utterly outside the traditional "kosher" pursuits of Torah and Talmud study. To have it known that he was the author of these golem tales would been professional suicide, so Rosenberg cleverly deflected such criticism by claiming that the book was a "discovered" manuscript, rather than one he had written himself.

Leviant unravels the layers of Rosenberg's various ruses in much the same way that he deconstructs the kabalistic layers explaining how a golem can be created. Lest general readers worry that the complicated layering of Rosenberg's fiction be too difficult, Leviant – in an e-mail – argues that the kabalistic references "add excitement to the book; these elements are seamlessly woven into the texture of the Golem. They are, if you will – or if you won't – the magical core of the Golem." The result is a detective story worthy of a man with Leviant's multiple talents; he is, in his own right, an author equally at home writing first-rate fiction or translating a complicated Hebrew work by Yudl Rosenberg. (Editor's note: Curt Leviant is a frequent contributor of travel articles and reviews to NJ Jewish News.)

For Rabbi Loew, the golem (for the first time given a name: Yossele) has a mission much more important than chopping wood. He is pitted against the anti-Semitic priest Thaddeus, who each Passover season levels new charges that the Jews of Prague have killed a Christian (usually a child) so that the blood might be used in baking matzas. In the 20-some stories in Rosenberg's collection, some interlocking, the golem serves as a protector/savior who effectively wards off the notorious blood libel charges.

Though Rabbi Loew's golem, like the golems before him, does not have the power to speak, he can read and write and can even initiate actions on behalf of the Jewish community. However, he is not, as many wrongly think, a Jewish version of Frankenstein's monster. Rather, the golem of Prague was an entirely beneficent creature.

Rosenberg's tales read like folk literature, even if he is the sophisticated presence behind their composition. There are parables, stories-within-stories, cross dressing, and the whole array of narrative storytelling. So good are Rosenberg's self-created "folktales" that it is easy to think of them as being told, and then written down, in the late 16th century.

Here is a representative snippet dealing with an attempt to implicate the Jews and showing how the golem saved the day: We pick up the story at the point when the golem thwarts a blood libel plot and a gentile butcher is being questioned by the police:

"The police understood at once the matter before them and immediately began to intensively question the gentile butcher…he was forced to admit that he had not murdered the child but stolen him from the Christian cemetery in order to perpetrate a blood libel against Reb Mordechai Meisl, who was pursuing him relentlessly to repay the money due him."

In Leviant's generous "Notes," he unpacks the linguistic mysteries at the heart of the Maharal's creation. Armed with this information, subsequent works revolving around the same subject – I.B. Singer's The Golem (1982), Elie Wiesel's The Golem (1983), and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2001), to name a few, become easier to understand.

Yudl Rosenberg did not receive the credit that his book about the Maharal deserved (he is given a passing nod in the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia's entry on the golem) and prior to Leviant's translation, his work was not available in English translation. As Leviant told me, "A friend of mine wrote an article about golem legends and mentioned this book. I found it…and decided to translate it." It was a decision for which we are grateful, one that resulted in Rosenberg's getting the attention he deserves and permitting his wonderful folk characters to live once again.

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