ware of her German contemporary Jakob Grimm's 1808 writings about the Golem when she published Frankenstein in 1816. In the most famous version of the narrative of the Golem of Prague, supposedly created by the rabbi of that city in 1580 or 1590, the Golem is destroyed by the rabbi after it has accomplished its mission (to protect the Jews of Prague from a pogrom) (Goldsmith 49). The point is that the Golem may be effective but is far from perfect. Goldsmith cites the single biblical reference to the creation of the golem "'in the lowest parts of the earth,' from which came his 'unperfect substance' (Goldsmith 16). Thus the Golem appears to lack the capacity to form self-conscious mental states or exercise anything like moral judgment. It could be said that the Golem is a soulless being, sentient without being sensible, conscious without consciousness or conscience, a creature of human immanence and an artifact of human construction that, however, does not perforce remain under its creator's control.
The imperfection of the creation is the relevant point, for the Golem is not a creature of God but a creature of man. Thus the Golem is identified as something imperfect partly because it is the material representation of human beings' attempt to use the Book of Creation to replicate the divine creative process. Idel sees evidence of an impulse toward magical replication/creation as far back as Jewish antiquity and continuing as a strand of Jewish mystical thought into later periods and influenced by the encounter of Jewish thought with the thought of the Greeks and their Hellenistic and medieval interpreters, as well as with astrology and magic (Idel (b) 16).
Idel sees in the encounter between pagans and Jews of the Talmudic era evidence that Jews were aware of statuary idolatry. It is in this period, he says, that the imperfection of earth-formed statuary can be connected to the biblical condemnation of idolatry ((b) 19-20). Idel sa...