The Golem

Brought up in a Hasidic home in Skaryszew, Russian Empire (today in Poland), Yudl Rosenberg received a traditional education and gained a reputation as a rabbinic prodigy, though he also read Haskalah literature and learned Russian fluently. In the early twentieth century, he worked as a rabbi in Tarlow, Lublin, Warsaw and elsewhere across Poland, apparently attempting to gather his own Hasidic following in the process. In 1913, he immigrated to Canada, where he would play an important role in Canada’s Orthodox Jewish community. Throughout this transatlantic period, he wrote prolifically in Hebrew and to a lesser degree in Yiddish, producing commentaries on rabbinic literature, pietistic homilies, responsa and novellae on halakhic issues, and a notable seven-volume translation of the Zohar into Hebrew. he also wrote popular fiction based on traditional and folkloric legends, dressed up in several cases as rediscovered historical manuscripts; the most popular of these, and certainly his most lasting contribution to Jewish and general popular culture, was his highly inventive version of the legend of the Golem of Prague and the mystical deeds of the famed early modern Prague rabbi, which he published first in Hebrew in 1904 as Nifla’ot Maharal ‘im ha-golem and in 1909 in a reworked Yiddish version.