Search Results

This essay is a historical and philological investigation of reproduction as it was understood in ancient Near East societies. It explores the differences in embryology as conceived by various cultures in the ancient Near East (primarily among the Babylonians, Assyrians, and Israelites) and their points of similarity. Embryological theories run the gamut from “high” science, with truths still accepted, to superstitions that said that female fetuses were carried on their mother’s left sides, required a longer pregnancy, and drained their mothers’ strength more than did male fetuses.

The Conclusion considers the meaning of Jewish primitivism in light of the catastrophic destruction of Jewish life in Europe during the First World War and its decimation in the Holocaust. Through a reading of two short texts by the Czech-German-Jewish journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, I show how Kisch exposes the limits of Jewish primitivism as a constructive critical force, compromised by capitalism, by extremist political ideologies, and by violent death. In these stories – one about a search for the Golem of Prague, the other about a search for “Indian Jews” in Mexico – Kisch’s primitivism catalyzes a sense of solidarity with the presumed primitive. It is a solidarity born of the common experience of violence and traumatic loss, but it generates a melancholic humanism that was the end of an aesthetic that, after the Holocaust, no longer had the same meaning.

This chapter traces the career of a well-known folkloristic and literary motif that purports to speak to the cultural life of Jewish Prague during the northern European Renaissance and locates its “modern” origins within elite Jewish circles in the city during the first half of the eighteenth century. It notes that the “recovery” of this tradition as an element of the modern folk identity of both Jewish and non-Jewish Bohemians dates to the 1830s and 1840s. It further notes that the sixteenth century rabbi and communal leader Judah Löw ben Bezalel (known by the acronym Maharal) and the creature that he was credited—posthumously—with making entered the pantheon of Czech folk tradition as markers of local identity and historical memory. It emphasizes that the version of the Golem legend, which ascribes to the artificial being a redemptive role in saving the Jewish community in Prague from Gentile accusations of ritual murder, is the most recent creation of all.

This chapter discusses early European horror, identifying elements that would go on to become 'monster movie' convention. It looks at Paul Wegener and Carl Boese's Der Golem: Wie er in Die Welt Kam (The Golem: How He Came into the World, 1920). Most discussions of German Expressionism's influence on the horror genre tend to concentrate on stylistic traits such as the distinctive lighting and camerawork, and the break from traditionalist modes of visualisation and representation. Whilst this is certainly an important area, one must not neglect the thematic concerns of films such as Der Golem, Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1919), and Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922), which bind them both to the Expressionist movement and to the horror genre as it would later develop. The movement's pre-occupation with unpredictability, irrationality, chaos and instability found voice in tales of fatalism, alienation, ambiguity, and loss of personal control or identity.

The chapter addresses the popularization of the main acquisitions of social constructionist sociology in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), done by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch in the volumes of their Golem trilogy, dedicated respectively to science, technology and medicine. The polemical target of the trilogy, the "flip-flop" understanding of science, technology and medicine, that induces the public to oscillate from an unconditioned trust in scientist, engineers and medics as god-like figures, to a complete skepticism and distrust and vice versa. The chapter also addressed the reasons behind the harsh confrontations between constructionist sociologists of science and scientists occurred in the '90s, known as "Science Wars", and some events connected to the confrontations, like the famous hoax by Alan Sokal.

The chapter continues the reading of Celan’s poem “TO ONE WHO STOOD BEFORE THE DOOR,” shifting the focus from the “tropic of circumcision,” as Derrida calls it, to the figure of Rabbi Löw and the mystical tradition of golemic creation, a creative practice based on a certain performance of the divine Name. Celan conjures this tradition only to alter it from within, basing his own practice no longer on the properness of an unpronounceable Name but rather on a wound that will have gathered in its place. Here again Celan is viewed as a writer who is first and foremost a reader, and what he reads in this particular poem is the gathering wound that will have opened both in the body of the name “Kafka” and in the disease-ridden larynx of the writer. Celan gathers own his poem around this throttling silence in Kafka’s throat, reminding us of the way reading and gathering come together in the German verb lesen. Drawing his poetic reading of Kafka together in this way, Celan opens his language to the untranslatable violence of an unspeakable and irrepressible pain stuck in the throat, a pain that cannot simply be silenced or voiced.

This chapter focuses on two authors who show monstrosity and the supernatural in a whole new light: Maurice Sendak and Virginia Hamilton. It first reads Sendak's 1963 picture book Where the Wild Things Are and how its power of fantasy makes the protagonist, Max, an Isaac unbound, as well as how Sendak's notions of monstrosity are informed by his renderings of Jewish ethnicity. It then analyzes Hamilton's “god chile” Pretty Pearl, which both does and does not escape the binding experienced by Jephthah's daughter. It also considers Hamilton's retellings of African American folk tales, with particular emphasis on those that feature women with magical powers, alongside David Wisniewski's picture book Golem. The chapter explains how Sendak and Hamilton move away from the myth of redemptively sacrificed children and toward more nuanced ways of articulating American identities through pain.

This chapter documents the genesis of arguably Stanislaw Lem’s most grandiose intellectual undertaking. Having taken him more than ten years to complete, the plotless and heroless ‘narrative’ metafiction of Golem XIV features several lectures delivered by a supercomputer intellect in the form of a fourteenth-binasty machine with an IQ of 600. The chapter proceeds to examine the critical—even skeptical—reception of this one-of-a-kind ‘fiction’.