Paul's pick for May is "How the Golem Came to Prague" by Edan Dekel and David Gantt Gurley. The article appears in Spring 2013 issue of Jewish Quarterly Review.
This article examines the emergence of the Golem legend associated with
the Maharal of Prague in the first half of the nineteenth century, with
specific attention to the innovations found in two little-known versions
by important Jewish literary figures of the era: the Bohemian-born
Viennese poet and editor Ludwig Frankl and the Danish writer Meir Aaron
Goldschmidt. These versions, it is argued, reveal several crucial
mechanisms that help explain the shift from a Golem tale distributed
among various individual places and rabbis, to one with little or no
specificity at all, and finally to the Prague version that dominates the
subsequent literary and artistic manifestations of the legend.
Click here to download this free article and learn more about Jewish Quarterly Review.
Check the Penn Press Log in June for Paul's next pick.
