ys that the Sefer Yezirah is unique among ancient Jewish texts in encoding the creative principle in the 22 letters of the alphabet and the names for God. Such encoding, or recipes, are associated with the Ashkenazi tradition and Rabbi Eleazar of Worms (Idel (b) 21). It was such text that was seized upon by thirteenth-century commentators who basically constructed specific techniques or recipes for manipulating the letters to form creatures (or anyway concepts for creatures). Idel suggests that the thirteenth century rabbinical commentators were the first to suggest that the creation of the literal clay Golem figure would come about as a consequence of manipulation, ritual, incantation, and articulation of the recipes, by righteous individuals, of the letters and names for God. When the creator of the figure sinned, the Golem would turn to dust (Idel 60). Now such literalism has a metaphorical aspect to it, as Idel indicates when he says that "the correspondence between letters, limbs and cosmological things is treated here in the frame of a creative pr
...