Recasting the Golem: The Construction of Central European Jewish Culture, 1808-2003

Lead Research Organisation: University of Manchester
Department Name: Languages Linguistics and Cultures

Abstract

Although the concept of the Golem as an artificial man of clay animated by a ritual of words first appeared in medieval Jewish mysticism, the range of tales told around this figure today result from its secularisation. This process began during the seventeenth century with the first mention by Christian authors of a Polish-Jewish Golem tale (Wuelfer and Arnold 1674), followed later by German-Jewish sources. After Grimm's 1808 publication of this tale, Christian authors such as Achim von Arnim (1812) and E.T.A. Hoffmann (1822) played a decisive role in establishing the Golem as a popular literary figure and asserting its authentic status within Jewish culture. Following Berthold Auerbach (1837), Jewish authors began to respond with their own literary variations and folktale stories on the Golem, now set in the German-speaking realm of Prague and equally asserting an authentic base in Jewish folk traditions. In particular Judl Rosenberg's Golem stories (1904) and their widely influential publication by Chajim Bloch (1919), which Gershom Scholem (1933) exposed as a literary invention, have constituted the blueprint for the contemporary conception of the Golem as a Jewish folk motif. The Golem is now a widely known and pervasive symbol of Jewish culture in the German-speaking context, and it has made appearances in works by a wide range of non-Jewish and Jewish writers, poets and film makers including Gustav Meyrink (1915) and Paul Wegener (1920), Nelly Sachs (1949) and Paul Celan (1962), as well as more recently Benjamin Stein (1995) and Esther Dischereit (1996). Critical literature to date has noted the widespread fascination with the Golem in German culture without finding a convincing explanation for the omnipresence of this theme in representations of Jewish culture. Offering the first comprehensive and analytical study of the Golem in German-speaking literature and film, the proposed project sheds light on the intricate reflections of the non-Jewish perception of Jews in the German-speaking lands in the Golem figure and the conflicting role that non-Jewish images of Jews have played in the shaping of German-Jewish culture and identity.

Publications

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Description • My research created significant new knowledge by discovering the importance of the golem tale for the construction of modern Jewish popular culture, and hence for the construction of modern Jewish cultural identities more broadly. My research monograph unearthed the deep connections between the presumed folktale and literary configurations of the golem, which according previous scholars separated authentically Jewish from fictionalised non-Jewish storytelling traditions on this figure. My discovery thus opened up a new, postmodern vision of modern Jewish culture beyond the fixed notions of ethnicity that continue to pervade discussions of Jewish culture in particular.
• The first to look the golem material analytically and in international perspective, my project opened up important new research questions about the current globalisation of Jewish culture and its further erosion of fixed national or ethnic literatures. This necessitated the development and application of a new theoretical framework incorporating theories about constructions of race and ethnicity in Jewish, and Diaspora and Migration studies more broadly with current discussions around cultural globalisation.
• The golem project led of three noteworthy research collaborations and partnerships:
- The collaboration with Sander L. Gilman on the international conference on Jewish Culture in the Age of Globalisation (2011), which was funded by the Rothschild Foundation and British Academy as part of Manchester's JudaicaFest;
- Our co-edited volume of conference proceedings, Jewish Culture in the Age of Globalisation, which appeared as a special Routledge journal issue in 2011 and received such widespread scholarly attention that it was republished as a Routledge hardcover volume in 2014;
- My recent collaborative AHRC-funded research project with Sander L. Gilman, Cosmopolitanism and the Jews, which followed on from the discussion of cultural globalisation and cosmopolitan cultures that I developed in the golem monograph.
Exploitation Route I believe that my study will be of continued importance to researchers in German and Jewish studies in the UK, Germany, the US and Israel. The monograph is likely to attract further interest from folklorists and scholars of religion, as well as from literary writers, filmmakers and artists in the UK, Germany, and US and Israel, where interest in the golem remains substantial. Given the ongoing fascination with this topic, I expect that my work will also continue to draw attention from lay audiences (see also under public engagement).
Sectors Communities and Social Services/Policy,Creative Economy,Education,Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
 
Description My findings were disseminated to scholars in German and Jewish Studies, as well as lay audiences through • My research monograph The Golem Returns: From German Romantic Literature to Global Jewish Culture, 1808-2008, which appeared with the University of Michigan Press in 2011, has since been used in a number of follow-on studies, including Barzilai (2013), Dekel and Gurley (2013) and Reiter (2013); • Eleven invitations with all expenses paid to lecture nationally and internationally on the topic; • My co-edited (with Sander L. Gilman) special journal issue (2011) Jewish Culture in the Age of Globalization, which has since been republished as a Routledge hardcover issue. • Although the 2008 AHRC grant did not yet feature a stated impact agenda, I undertook two engagement activities: - My interview on 18 July 2011 with BBC Radio Manchester, which has a total of 207,000 listeners per week. - My cities@manchester video interview, which developed the findings of my golem study towards my recent AHRC-funded project on cosmopolitanism.
First Year Of Impact 2008
Sector Creative Economy,Education
Impact Types Cultural