Prague’s Maharal wrote mystical Torah—and inherited a golem legend
Judah Loew ben Bezalel (c. 1524–1609), the Maharal of Prague, authored Jewish philosophical and mystical works including Gur Aryeh al HaTorah on Rashi. Centuries later, folklore credited him with shaping the Golem of Prague from clay. His very surname means lion, a stand-in for the name Judah.
Löw tracks the German for lion, a substitute name paired with Yehuda because Genesis compares Judah to a lion; he even titled his Rashi supercommentary Gur Aryeh, meaning young lion. His Prague tomb bears a shield with a two-tailed lion that nods both to that name and to Bohemia's arms. Besides Talmud and mysticism, he is described as a mathematician, astronomer and philosopher.
He was probably born in Poznań, though one genealogist, Perels, wrongly wrote Worms, the Rhineland town his family came from. Proposed birth years range from 1512 to 1526. Perels traced the family to King David, a claim modern scholars such as Otto Muneles dispute. His uncle Jakob ben Chajim served as rabbi of the whole Holy Roman Empire, while an elder brother, Chaim of Friedberg, became a celebrated rabbinical scholar.
Lubavitch tradition says he left for Polish yeshivas at twelve to study under Yaakov Pollak, wandered for two years, then learned under Yitzchak Clover alongside the Maharshal and the Rema, and studied for twenty years before marrying. In 1553 he became chief rabbi of Moravia at Mikulov, choosing which Talmud tractate the province would study and rewriting the rules on communal elections and taxes. He retired from the post in 1573, yet Moravian Jews kept treating him as an authority.
In Moravia he fought whispered slurs about certain families' lineage that could wreck their children's marriage prospects, a slander that touched his own relatives; in 1583 he used one of the two great sermons of the High Holy Day season to condemn it. The golem of clay came much later, attached to his name by legend rather than by anything he wrote.
Source: Judah Loew ben Bezalel
