Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City

by Peter Demetz

  He was the right man to be in charge of Prague’s Jewish community in the age of Rudolf II, who made him his privileged Hofjude, and over the course of the centuries he was always remembered as a farsighted and honest benefactor, humble and extremely generous. He made loans, interest-free, to the Jewish poor, gave financial support to suffering communities elsewhere, and, in Prague, built a magnificent Jewish town hall (still standing and in use), a hospital for the old and the sick, a synagogue, ritual baths, and schools, and he supported private scholars who did not yet have a community appointment. Actually, he provided much of the financing of Rudolf’s war against the Turks, and Rudolf decreed that Maisel would be free to do with his money and his properties exactly as he liked in his last will and testament. But the truth was that Rudolf could not resist the lure of cash: a few days after Maisel’s death, he reneged on his formal assurances, had Maisel’s house searched, and immediately impounded what was found in the name of the crown. It was a Prague scandal that in reports of correspondents and embassies reverberated throughout Europe.

  The intellectual golden age of the Jewish community did not dawn overnight but was long anticipated by a learned consortium of scholars who, by 1512, began publishing Hebrew books of prayers, blessings, and commentaries for the first time north of the Alps (sharing financial responsibility for their projects); and their activities were continued by Gershom ben Salomon ha-Kohen, who came to Prague from Verona and, after 1527, and by imperial privilege, began publishing the most elaborate volumes, among them his renowned Story of Passover with its sixty woodcuts (reproduced as late as 1960 in Jerusalem and in New York); one of Gershom’s sons (the one who traveled to Rome to see the pope) revived this publishing business after the expulsion, and the family continued to print for hundreds of years. The rabbis of Prague were all eminently learned men who, far from being backwoods provincials, had been studying in yeshivot in Germany, Egypt, or Poland before settling in Prague and, at times, going on to Verona, Venice, or Cracow. It is easily forgotten that Rudolf’s Prague had many centers of higher learning—the scholars at court, the Utraquist university of old, the new Jesuit school at St. Clemens, and the yeshivot of the Jewish community—yet it has to be said that they were more often than not isolated on their islands of religions; it was difficult to transcend the late medieval boundaries, and the exceptions are all the more glorious.

  Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (later called the august Maharal) is better known to the world as a magician who created the mysterious golem rather than as the most original and intense mind of the Jewish community of Prague. The many attractive legends have done little to define his noble and lonely achievements, which rest on his many books and commentaries, among them Netivot Olam, on ethical questions; Tiferet Yisrael, on the Commandments; or Be’er ha-Golah, on the dignity of the Torah (published in Prague in 1598). We have come to accept, perhaps too easily, that Rabbi Loew symbolically incarnates mystical and Kabbalistic Prague. Actually, he was not born in Prague; many scholars believe that he came from Worms (not from Polish Pozna, which has also been suggested) and he was born in 1520 (rather than 1512, as others assume). He never said anything about his early training and his teachers, whom he intensely disliked, and it is assumed that he studied for a long time at Polish yeshivot. He may have come to Prague to marry Pearl, after a long engagement, but we know for certain that he was rabbi of Mikulov (Nikolsburg) and chief rabbi of all Moravian Jews for twenty years (1553-73), though there was nothing mystical about the town or his activities there. On the contrary, he was well known as a superior administrator and legal expert, who unified the statutes of the Moravian Jewish community, introduced new tax reforms, regulated the election of the country elders, all the time insisting on the dignity of religious services (no conversation allowed), and challenged many by rejecting wine for religious services that had been handled or produced by gentiles (in the midst of the Moravian vineyards, certainly a tough demand).

  Rabbi Judah Loew returned to Prague when he was more than sixty years old, teaching at the “Klaus,” a school built and privately financed by Mordecai Maisel. He seems to have been respected in the community but was not given an official appointment; informally, he established groups for the study of the Mishnah and was called to draft the statutes of the Hevra Kaddisha, the lay group that prepares the dead for burial. On the Sabbath of Repentance in 1583, he was asked to preach at the Old New Synagogue, but his stern views did not endear him to the elders, who rejected him as a candidate for the office of chief rabbi of Prague. He left the town, served three years as chief rabbi of Pozna, and though he may have returned to Prague to continue teaching, the Prague elders rejected him again, after a sermon on the great Sabbath before Passover in 1589; again he left for Poland and returned to Prague only in 1597; after some delay he was finally appointed chief rabbi, being eighty years old. He served for nearly ten years, died on August 17, 1609, and was buried at the old cemetery, where his grave has attracted much attention through the centuries. Judah Loew’s wife, Pearl, who gave him many daughters and a son who died early, followed him after ten years and was buried at his side. Their daughters, in turn, were the mothers of many distinguished scholars and rabbis: learned Vögele married Isaac Katz, who became chief rabbi of Moravia; Gittel, the third daughter, married Rabbi Samson Brandeis—she and her husband may have been distant forebears of Adolf and Frederika, who were born in Prague but left after the revolution of 1848 for Indiana and Kentucky, where their son Louis Brandeis was born, the U.S. Supreme Court justice, after whom Brandeis University was named.

  In the view of his contemporaries, Rabbi Judah Loew was an intransigent scholar who, after twenty-five years and more in Moravia and Poland, became firmly devoted to necessary reforms of ritual and pedagogy. He was a radical conservative, if not a fundamentalist, whose harshness offended Prague’s elders, more comfortable with inherited attitudes rarely questioned. His conservative ideas and communitarian engagement made him dear to the later Hasidim, and in the twentieth century he is seen through their eyes by his great defender Gershom Sholem. Rabbi Loew’s disgust with wine handled by gentiles was but one highly characteristic symptom of his severity; he was similarly unwilling to tolerate his colleagues’ habits of accepting gifts for fulfilling ritual duties or of appointing rabbis with the support of outside authorities (he believed it was a matter for the Jewish community and the community alone). His reform plans, above all, included changes in education; teaching, as the later Czech pedagogue Comenius demanded, should take into account the age and the grasp of the young people, and Rabbi Loew energetically argued against “pilpul,” long dominant in Prague, which gave the highest rewards to sophisticated casuistry in handling commentaries and metacommentaries, appreciating cleverness rather than wisdom, and disregarding the fundamental sources. As if inspired by the tenets of the Renaissance, Rabbi Loew demanded an immediate return to the sources—that is, to the Torah, the central text revealed to the Jewish people, and in Talmudic writing to the Haggadah, to those narrative texts that had been unfortunately neglected by the legal inquiry of the Tosafists and especially the pilpul teachers.

  The demands for a rigorous reform of the rabbinate, strict education of young people, and a turn away from pilpul to the more rewarding study of the Torah and Haggadah are intimately related to Rabbi Loew’s idea that the Jewish people should not, in a late moment of their history, encounter the coming of the Messiah unprepared. It is curious that he expressed these ideas, ultimately aiming at self-assertion, in Aristotelian terminology. To Rabbi Loew, the non-Jew is but unformed matter, but the Jew is form; and from these assumptions (and after the Jews had been cruelly persecuted and expelled from Spain in 1492) he derived other definitions that elevated the Jew above the non-Jew. For him the non-Jew, biblically incarnated in Amalek (the Israelites’ first enemy after their crossing of the Red Sea, Exodus 17:6-7, 8-16), is but matter, water, accident, and history; the Jew, incarnated in Israel, lives in the sphere of form, fire, the necess
ary, and eternity; it follows (though not all Jewish contemporaries were ready to accept these deductions) that the non-Jew can become a Jew, matter seeking its form (as woman, or matter, longs for man, the principle of form). Jews, even those who converted to Christianity, as happened during the expulsions in Spain, cannot be disloyal to form and remain Jews. Anticipating the ideas of the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (later used in the defense of the Slavic peoples), Rabbi Loew declares that each group of people is called to fulfill its own and proper tasks; each must remain pristine and unsoiled in its beliefs, idiom, ways of behavior, even its code of dress. A cohesive community cannot be of evil but, on the contrary, constitutes the precondition of all integrity.

  The question discussed for now more than two hundred years as to whether or not Rabbi Judah Loew was a Kabbalist of the mystical kind often coincides with the popular belief that “magic Prague,” or its mysterious Jewish community, has been an eminent and unique place of mystical practices and speculations. In the history of the Kabbalah, however, Prague never had the same importance as Safed in Israel or Gerona in Spain, and in Moshe Edel’s modern history of the Kabbalah, Prague does not appear at all. Rabbi Loew, who was chief rabbi in Moravia and Poland for many more years than he was chief rabbi of Prague, cannot be considered an incarnation of a Kabbalistic tradition in Prague, much as the recent tourist trade would like to sell him that way—quite apart from the historical circumstance that the traditions of rabbinical Prague were predominantly Tosafist or pilpulist, of the highest exegetic perfection. It is also true, however, that many of the Prague Tosafists—including Isaac ben Moses, in the Pemyslid period, as well as Jom Tov Lipmann-Mülhausen, the most prominent scholar of the post-Carolinian period and a valiant defender of the rationalist Maimonides—played speculative games with numbers and letters or both; it cannot be said that Rabbi Loew did not intimately know the Jewish mystical tradition (perhaps with the exception of books written by his contemporary Luria). The drama of new Renaissance ideas and Jewish tradition was played out in Rabbi Loew’s mind, and he did not hesitate to refer to the mystical tradition whenever he defended the old purity of the Torah against recent scientific doubts. When the Jewish Renaissance scholar Azariah ben Moses dei Rossi demanded that the truth of the Torah be tested against the new knowledge developed in many nations, Rabbi Loew angrily argued that scientific knowledge, though legitimate in itself and worthy of being known, could not touch the Torah, which was radically different. He used the Zohar (a collection of mystical texts written in 1270-1300) to show that, in contrast to the developing knowledge of nations, the Torah was totally above all history.

  Rabbi Judah Loew’s intellectual independence clearly emerged in the way in which he handled the concepts of the Sefirot, fundamental to Jewish mysticism. At the core of their teachings, the Kabbalists believed that God the invisible turned to the world of visibility in ten Sefirot, or “powers,” “energies,” and in various ways they defined these “powers”—e.g., knowledge, glory, or majesty—as essences, elements, or revelations of a divine unity-in-itself. Insisting on the invisibility and the distance of the Highest, Rabbi Loew argued against the Sefirot as concepts about the being of Being and accepts them in a mere anthropological sense—in a Kantian way, as it were. They have nothing to do with the Highest, and are only categories of human perception which are of help to our knowledge. He saw the only possibility of coming closer to God or “clinging” to him in the study of the Torah (not in pilpul casuistry) and in active fulfillment of the Ten Commandments. Later Prague Kabbalists, and the Hasidim particularly, attached themselves to Rabbi Loew’s active “clinging” to the divine, and in their stories and legends changed the learned scholar into a Zaddik, one of the miraculous and exemplary men of extraordinary power who performed many miracles and had the unusual ability to call God’s blessing upon a pious and closely knit community.

  The story of the golem (Psalm 139:16, an “embryo” in the appropriate commentaries and “imperfect matter”), or the Jewish Frankenstein, has done much more to strengthen the legend of mystical Prague than all of Rabbi Loew’s treatises and books about Jewish tradition put together. Yet the first creation of a golem antedates its appearance in Prague by many hundreds of years. A Hebrew commentary, written at Worms at the end of the twelfth century about the mystical treatise Sefer Gezirah, suggests that a golem can be created by a magic ritual in which gestures are as important as combinations of letters and numbers; such gematria was studied by the rabbis of Worms and Regensburg. Subsequent legends attach a golem to rabbis of mystical powers as proof positive of their skills, and in the late sixteenth century an early golem was ascribed to the great Rabbi Elijah Baal Shem of Chelm by the Christian writer Christoph Arnold. Rabbi Loew’s contemporaries did not speak of a Prague golem, though the situation may have changed a few generations later: in 1725, the Loews’ gravestone was piously restored, his descendants suggested that a memoir of his life and achievements should be published, and gentle hints about his more than intellectual powers began to appear in letters and responsa (no golem yet). Within a few decades the Jewish community was disturbed, if not rent apart, by conflicts between traditionalists and the followers of Shabbetai Zevi, a self-appointed Messiah and, later, of Jakob Frank (who claimed to be Shabbetai Zevi reincarnated), and everybody was eager to appropriate the heritage of Rabbi Loew, especially the later Hasidim of Eastern Europe. We cannot but speculate; at any rate, the first printed evidence of a Prague golem narrative, possibly long in oral circulation in Yiddish, is to be found only in the year 1841 in Panorama des Universums, a popular Prague German periodical. There, the story is told by the German-Czech journalist Franz Klutschak, who made a later career in Bohemian politics; he was not of Jewish origin himself and simply wanted to tell an exotic story.

  In 1838, Klutschak had published in the Panorama des Universums a few stories relating to the old cemetery and Rabbi Judah Loew, and he called his two-column contribution “The Golam [sic] and Rabbi Loew.” The rabbi created “by his magic powers” a near-human being, made of loam, Klutschak writes, and employed this golem as a servant in the Old New Synagogue. Unfortunately even Rabbi Loew was distracted by his scholarly studies at times and had forgotten a particular prayer while creating the golem. As a consequence, the golem, at least potentially, was more powerful than his creator, and the only way to discipline him was to slip an amulet into his mouth, every day of the week, and keep him, by that magic sedative, quiet and intent upon doing good. One day, the rabbi’s daughter Esther fell ill and her father’s magic powers were insufficient to alleviate her sufferings. It was near the evening of the Sabbath, and the rabbi decided to stay and pray with his daughter, but suddenly the cantor came running from the synagogue, all in terror, screaming that the golem was loose and raging. The rabbi had forgotten to put the Sabbath amulet in the golem’s mouth, and when he arrived at the synagogue the raging golem was shaking the old walls and the lights were tumbling down “as if the world had come to its end.” The rabbi immediately commanded the prayers to cease (as long as they had not been completed, the Sabbath had not begun), the earlier amulet in the mouth of the golem regained its original power, the golem turned docile again, and the community prayed in unison for the rabbi’s daughter Esther, who was soon healthy again. The golem, or what was left of it, was put in storage in the attic of the synagogue, Klutschak writes, a remark that later prompted Egon Erwin Kisch, when he was an eager local reporter and not yet star journalist of the Communist International, to write an entertaining story about how he put up a ladder and searched the attic of the synagogue for the golem but, alas, in vain.

  Klutschak’s story of the golem has long been forgotten, and now most scholars wrongly assume that the first printed narrative about the golem appeared in Sippurim, or “stories,” published in German in Prague in 1847. The Sippurim merely retell the Klutschak story in a simplified form, together with other legends about Rabbi Loew, and yet they are of essential importance in the cul
tural history of Prague because they constitute the first volume of a local Jewish literature written in German, not Hebrew or Yiddish, and prepare the way for future generations of Jewish authors writing in German, including Franz Kafka. The Galerie der Sippurim was a collection of fairy tales, legends, and biographies of famous Jews, published by Wolf Pascheles, an innovative Prague bookseller and printer who, sensing a change in the marketplace, was rightly convinced that there was a growing Jewish audience for texts in literary German, printed in German letters, not in Hebrew type. His project, later continued by his son-in-law, was eminently successful; the last popular edition of the Sippurim appeared in the early twentieth century. Pascheles, who had begun by selling prayer books from his Pinkel (backpack), employed young intellectuals of the first Jewish generation trained in philosophy, literature, and the law at Prague University (medical studies had been opened to Jews earlier) and, being rationalists, they all had a difficult time telling interesting stories of mystical purport in which they had long since ceased to believe. They belonged to a generation enchanted by Moses Mendelssohn’s Berlin Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah, and argued against the mystical and Kabbalistic aura that darkened the image of the Maharal and his contemporaries. The writers of the Sippurim distinctly favored enlightened rabbis; the ideal was not a scholarly pedant, living in clouds of dust and hidden behind “the entrenchments of the Talmud” (Talmudschanze), but a teacher of humane engagements. They argued “against a mysticism that contradicts common sense, and, like a Chinese wall, stands in the way of all progress, all culture, all science.” Divesting Rabbi Loew of mystical glory and speaking of Jewish community life in surprisingly unsentimental, often even self-ironic terms, the Sippurim are fully satisfied with a brief narrative reference to the golem (he is, evidently, below the dignity of an enlightened writer and reader), and, in a didactic story, Rabbi Loew warns a nobleman not to study the Kabbalah and practice magical arts. Another story (later used by Alois Jirásek in his famous Old Czech Legends and in Paul Wegener’s expressionist film The Golem) shows Rabbi Loew, at the emperor’s wish, magically conjuring up the patriarchs of Jewish history. The writers of the Sippurim, however, did not believe in this magic and dryly remarked that he had simply used a laterna magica, possibly being the imaginative inventor of that technological toy.