The Golem Returns: From German Romantic Literature to Global Jewish Culture, 1808–2008 (review)

The term golem first appears in Psalm 139 and its use to refer to an artificial man made of clay and animated by ritual incantation dates back to at least the 12^th century. In The Golem Returns, Cathy Gelbin quickly dispenses with this early tradition and jumps to the early 19^th century, when the golem becomes a subject of popular culture. Gelbin’s golem is a modern hybrid of a monster and an action hero, whose descendants include Frankenstein’s monster, the Hulk, and the Terminator. He is more at home in a German Romantic folk tale or a movie theater than in the Kabbalistic texts in which he originated. This pop-culture golem, Gelbin argues in her smart and engaging study, has “functioned over the last two hundred years as a touchstone for the contested notion of Jewish cultural authenticity in the diaspora” (2). Few, if any, Jewish traditions have enjoyed wider popularity among non-Jews, and Gelbin’s study adroitly shifts between Jewish and non-Jewish representations of the golem and their use in forming and negotiating “the modern image of the Jews both in the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds” (1). In Gelbin’s cleverly-conceived narrative, the golem serves as our guide through two hundred years of assumptions about Jewish identity, commencing with German-Christian notions of essential Jewish difference at the beginning of the 19^th century and culminating in a playful assertion of Jewish particularity (by Jews and non-Jews alike) at the beginning of the 21^st century.

The story begins with the golem’s (re)discovery in the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder, the Brothers Grimm, and other German-Christian Romantics. As part of the widespread interest in the collection and recording of popular folklore, the golem—as a story of flawed and potentially dangerous creation—became an anti-Semitic symbol for an unrooted and therefore corrupt and inauthentic Jewish culture. These stories, and not the earlier Kabbalistic tales, Gelbin argues, form the foundation on which all later golem tales—Jewish and non-Jewish, anti-Semitic and philo-Semitic—will build.

The now-dominant association of the golem with Rabbi Löw and 16^th-century Prague, Gelbin argues in the following chapter, arose as a response to these criticisms by asserting a strong connection with high-cultural models such as Goethe and Golden Age Spain. Chapter Three takes up a different response that also focuses on Eastern European origins, but now sees the golem as a marker of authentic Jewish tradition. This late 19^th-century Jewish response to Romantic accusations is, Gelbin notes, itself very much in line with the Romantic tradition of rooted authenticity espoused by writers such as Herder and the Grimms.

The remarkably adaptable golem enters the 20^th century as a reflection of Jewish ambivalence in the face of modernity, assimilation, Zionism, and mass culture. The two key golem texts of the 20^th century, which are the subject of Chapter Five, were both produced by non-Jewish Germans. Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 novel Der Golem and Paul Wegener’s 1920 film Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam both work to tie the ambivalent image of the Jew to modernism, mass culture, and the ambivalent conditions of modernity. Meyrink, Wegener, and their modernist golem would continue to exert a powerful influence in the post-Holocaust texts that seek to rewrite the golem into a high-cultural figure that signifies the disruption of Jewish lives and culture in the Holocaust. Gelbin discusses works by Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, and Esther Dischereit, but the figure of Gershom Scholem towers over Chapter Six, which is devoted to the golem tradition in the latter half of the 20^th century.

In recent years, Gelbin argues in her final chapter, the golem has finally broken free from the debates over rootedness and authenticity that had been established in...