ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on the Romantics’ skepticism about the purpose of artificial life, building on scholarship that associates misrepresentations of the golem with anti-Semitism. The golem, the being made out of clay and animated by the word of God by rabbis, represents humans’ uniqueness and the power of God’s word in Jewish tradition, as seen in Psalm 139 and the Talmud. Adaptations of the golem legend by Ludwig Achim von Arnim, Jacob Grimm, and Clemens Brentano equate golems with their creators. Their writing on golem lore influenced E. T. A. Hoffmann and Fitz-James O’Brien, who contributed to the persona of the evil, foreign inventor. An influential German Romantic text about a golem, Arnim’s Isabella of Egypt: Emperor Charles V’s First Love, allegorizes men’s need to control breeding. His novella stresses the necessity of patrilineal descent in building an imagined fatherland to curb the immoral, monstrous patterns of matrilineal breeding. Modern stories such as Yudl Rosenberg’s The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague remain popular because they provide artificial life with a moral purpose: protection. The legend of the golem resonates with concerns about the singularity, the idea that technology will soon surpass human capabilities and create the next generation of powerful beings. The lesson of the golem conveys that superhuman helpers can be controlled by turning them off. This chapter concludes by considering the influence of the golem legend on Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. Comparisons are also made to Pygmalion’s statue and Homunculus in Goethe’s Faust.
