The legend of the 16th-century rabbi, Judah Loew ben Bezalel, who used kabbalistic powers to create a golem that would defend Prague’s Jews from anti-Semitic violence, is widely known. Less widely known is the fact that this story was concocted in the early 1900s by a Canadian rabbi. Yet tales of rabbis creating golems do have a long history, often involving the use of an esoteric work of uncertain origin known as Sefer Yetsirah. (This same mysterious work is the basis of Ethan Dor-Shav’s provocative reinterpretation of Genesis, recently published in Mosaic.)

The first rabbi to consider these stories as a matter of Jewish law was Tsvi Ashkenazi (1656–1718), who spent his childhood in what are now Czechia and Hungary before pursuing study in Salonica—where he acquired the Sephardi title Hakham (sage)—and then serving for many years as the chief rabbi of Amsterdam. Yosie Levine writes:

Hakham Tsvi had learned that his ancestor, Rabbi Elijah of Chelm (d. 1583), had allegedly created a golem using the Sefer Yetsirah.

What is the halakhic status, Hakham Tsvi wondered, of such a man-made creature? On the one hand, not having been born to a Jewish mother, a golem cannot be said to be Jewish. On the other, the Talmud taught that one who adopted a child was considered to have sired that child. And paraphrasing a midrash, he noted that the handiwork of the righteous was likened to their progeny. In the end, he ruled that a golem could not be counted in a minyan.

Levine goes on to consider the debate Hakham Tsvi touched off, and its relevance in the age of artificial intelligence.

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.