![]() There is a simple reason for this omission. While he refers to his own grandfather’s golem of Chelm, he fails to mention the most notorious-indeed, the dark prince-of all golems: the one widely believed to have been fashioned by the Maharal of Prague, Rabbi Judah Loew, in the previous century. Given the almost innumerable popular tales about the Golem published in about a dozen languages, as well as the stage and film productions of the Yiddish play Der Goylem, the Hakham Zvi’s ruling might today appear to suffer from a glaring historical oversight. ![]() which proves that cannot be counted towards the ten needed for all holy matters. Zeira would certainly never have killed it. Now, if we assume that the Golem is counted towards the ten needed for matters of Kedusha, R. I was unsure regarding the a human created using the Sefer Yetzirah, such as the one mentioned in Sanhedrin, “Rava created gavra ,” as well as the later testimony that my grandfather, the Gaon Elijah of Chelm counted the Golem he created towards a minyan for those things requiring ten, for example Kaddish and Kedushah. Although himself wary of Kabbalah’s dangers-a relentless Sabbatean-heresy hunter and outspoken opponent of the messianic mysticism of Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato-the Hakham Zvi(so named after the title of his collection of response) decided that, in this respect at least, golem lives do not matter: In one of the most bizarre, yet deadly serious rulings (about the undead) in the vast literature of rabbinic responsa ( She’elot u-Teshuvot), the renowned seventeenth-century sage of Amsterdam and London, Hakham Zvi Ashkenazi, was asked whether one may count a golemfor a minyan.
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