The First Rabbi to Ask Whether an Artificial Human Could Count in a Minyantest

The legend of the 16th-century rabbi, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, who used kabbalistic powers to create a golem that would defend Prague’s Jews from anti-Semitic violence, is widely known. Less widely known is the fact that this story was concocted in the early 1900s by a Canadian rabbi. Yet tales of rabbis creating golems do have a long history, often involving the use of an esoteric work of uncertain origin known as Sefer Yetsirah. (This same mysterious work is the basis of Ethan Dor-Shav’s provocative reinterpretation of Genesis, recently published in Mosaic.)