In common sense, history is considered as a series of events that follow one another in a one-dimensional, irreversible, and forward-looking direction. This is the familiar understanding that considers history as chronological. In this case, which requires imagining a timeline, past events are separated from future events by the present moment. Each of the events that took place in the past becomes inaccessible and turns into a lost past. The logical consequence of this approach is that the past does not return, and all previous events in the lost past are left irreversibly on the timeline. This can be considered the victory of the chronological time over the human. But man has never wanted to be a loser in this game.
One of the many reasons that explain this human desire is the issue of death. According to chronological logic, life is a line that begins with birth and ends with death. Man cannot cope with the passage of time. So, after death, life inevitably becomes a lost and inaccessible past. But this temptation has always been with mankind to save life from the bite of the passage of time and certain death. Every effort to realize this human dream requires the breaking of the power of time. Because the power of time stems from its chronological form, the human victory also requires overcoming the chronological logic of time and history. In this way, man can bring the sequence of past events out of the domination of the regulatory and stabilizing power of history, and summon the past. With the breakdown of the chronological and linear order of history, events such as life are no longer lost. At every moment, man will be able to regain the lost life as an event in the present moment. Also, man will be able to choose between past events and create a new sequence of them each time. In other words, he can reorganize all past events voluntarily in the present moment.
The history of human thought can be seen from the perspective of trying to realize this dream. In this regard, two types of human thinking can be distinguished from each other, on the one hand, the ideas that are formed through words and numbers, and on the other hand, the ideas that are formed through images. The former is represented in the form of writing, especially in the form of philosophy, literature, and mathematics, and has become the mainstream of Western Logocentrism, and the second, in the form of image, has become the mainstream of Western art. Both currents have gone through a fruitful history, and have produced different intellectual or technological apparatuses.
In this article, I have selected two intellectual and technological apparatuses to represent these two currents, firstly to show how these two apparatuses stand against chronological history, and secondly to show how their differences from each other change our understanding of the concept of history. These two are respectively Jewish mysticism and cinematography; the former is an extreme form of logocentrism, and the latter an extreme form of iconocentrism (image-centrism). This article explains both of them through a movie called The Golem: How He Came into the World (Paul Wegener/1920). The significance of this film is that it is related to both Jewish mysticism and cinema. On the one hand, the story of the film, as its title suggests, is taken from one of the stories of Jewish folklore, which is based on the mystical cosmology of Judaism. On the other hand, not only is this film one of the productions of cinematography due to its filmic nature, but also the narrative of the film implicitly refers to the ontology of cinematic image.
The legend of the Golem
One of the first sources of Western familiarity with the Golem legend is the very short entry that Jacob Grimm wrote in the early nineteenth century in the literary and folklore journal Zeitung für Einsiedler. According to this entry,
The Polish Jews, after saying certain prayers and observing certain fast days, make the figure of a man from clay or mud, and when they pronounce the miraculous word Shemhamphoras [the name of God] over him, he must come to life. He cannot speak, but he understands fairly well what is said or commanded. They call him golem and use him as a servant to do all sorts of housework. But he must never leave the house. On his forehead is written emeth [truth]; every day he gains weight and becomes somewhat larger and stronger than all the others in the house, regardless of how little he was to begin with. For fear of him, they therefore erase the first letter, so that nothing remains but meth [he is dead], whereupon he collapses and turns to clay again .( quoted in Dekel and Gurley 2013,242-243)
According to (Scholem 1995), the legendary expansion of Golem stems from the beliefs of the Hasidic Jews in medieval Germany (p 120). The beliefs were shaped by dissatisfaction with the influence of Greek philosophy on Judaism, as well as by a lack of interest in rational readings of the Talmud. The goal of these Jews was to return to the mystical conception of Judaism, and in this sense, they considered themselves indebted to the Kabbalah tradition. In this mystical view, one attains the magical and mysterious powers of letters and numbers through acts of worship and ecstatic meditations and uses this power to intervene in all events. The creation of Golem is also the result of achieving such power.
Over the centuries, under the influence of changes in regional folklore, the story of Golem has expanded and converged in the form of various legends. The most famous story we have today is based on a combination of several similar legends in the mid-eighteenth century. In this legend, Rabbi Loew, the influential 16th-century Rabbi who lived in Prague, is introduced as the creator of Golem. Consequently, the setting of Golem’s story has been moved to sixteenth-century Prague (Scholem 1965, 202). Paul Wegener’s cinematic adaptation of Golem, The Golem: how he came into the world (1920), is also loosely based on this popular version. (1)
In his film, Rabbi Loew is the Jewish religious leader in the Prague Ghetto. One night, while observing the stars, he foretells a bad omen for his people. He thinks of a way out and soon finds it; building a golem, a creature with the transhuman power capable of defending the Jewish ghetto. The bad luck that Rabbi predicts will soon come true. The emperor signs a decree expelling the Jews from the city. So, Rabbi Loew quickly completes the construction of the clay statue of Golem but needs a code name to bring the statue to life. One way to achieve this code name is to overcome one of the devilish leaders of hell, Astaroth. Astaroth has the code name. According to ancient texts, by performing mystical acts of worship, Astaroth says the code name. Rabbi Loew, along with his staff, prepares the ceremony and uses cryptic gestures and words to overcome Astaroth. Astaroth’s resistance is broken, and the steam from his mouth becomes a code word; the word is Aemaet. Rabbi Loew writes the word on a piece of paper and places it in the star-shaped piece and sticks the star piece to the chest of the golem. The golem opens its eyes and thus becomes a living being. Wenger’s film, like other classic Golem mythical narratives, is based on the proposition that the cause of life is the word. But this is not only an exciting sentence in a local story but also one of the theoretical pillars of Jewish mysticism and the gateway to the enormous complexities of its vast cosmology. Wegener’s film, like other classic Golem mythical narratives, is based on the principle that the cause of life is the “word”.
Jewish mystical Logocentrism and Golem
According to the cosmology of Jewish mysticism, which is specifically formulated in the book of Zohar, God is inaccessible and hidden at the level of essence (deus absconditus). This hidden and unattainable God is called En-sof. According to Kabbalah’s teachings, creation began when the En-sof contracted into itself in the process of the Tzimtzum, and as a result of this contraction or reversal, an empty space was formed and then a light beam from the En-sof shone into this space. In this way, En-sof manifested itself in the world. (Scholem 1995, 271-277)
En-sof manifested Himself in the form of ten emanations. Thus, the universe consisted of ten spiritual spaces, each of which is called the Sefira (Sephirah) and the plural of them is called the Sefiroth (Sephirot). The Sefiroth communicate with each other through 22 communication channels, corresponding to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Kabbalah does not consider the letters (Hebrew) only as units of a conventional language, but the letters, along with the Sefiroth, are the means of creation in the divine system. This is a doctrine that has always been at the heart of Jewish mysticism, and in Sefer Yetzirah, one of the sacred books of Jewish mysticism, it reaches an extreme. As (Aptekman 2011) concludes:
According to Sefer Yetzirah, the twenty-two letters of the alphabet produced the material world, for they are the formative powers of all existence and development. By means of these elements the actual creation of the world took place, and the ten Sefirot, which before this had only an ideal existence, became realities. Both the universe and mankind are viewed in Sefer Yetzirah in as products of the combination these mystical letters. The linguistic theories of the author of Sefer Yetzirah are the fundamental component of his philosophy. Sefer Yetzirah introduces the idea that later would become essential for Kabbalah: the idea that God created heaven and earth by means of divine alphabet (p. 11).
So, everything, including life and death, is a different assemblage of letters. There is also a special importance of words and letters in the story of Golem. Rabbi Loew’s knowledge is how to use the power of letters and words. And it is through this knowledge that he gains the power of creation. You can clearly see the shadow of the infidelity that exists in this story. Rabbi Loew is placed in the place of the Creator God because, like him, he has attained the logocentric formula of creation. The knowledge of using these two formulas is derived from two Jewish mystical books. “The Zohar represents absolute truth, and the Sepher jezirah (Sefer Yetzirah) provides the means by which we may seize, appropriate and make use of it” (Westcott 1893, 3). In other words, the Zohar reveals the topography of truth through letters, and Sefer Yetzirah shows instructions for using letters.
But both books acknowledge that the most important thing in understanding the sacred order of letters is the Torah. In this mystical vision, the Torah is not only a collection of historical and educational narratives but also the wisdom of Jehovah (Hokhmah) and the second stage of His manifestation before the creation of the world. This belief dates back to before Kabbalah, and even in Aggadah the Torah is a tool of creation. But Jewish mysticism takes it to the extreme. God reveals part of Himself in creation through the Torah, and the Torah will be the living and transcendent truth as the highest sacred combination of letters, from the dawn of creation to the end of the world. The obvious result of this formulation is the idea of the Torah as an eternal and timeless manifestation. The consequences of this extreme insight invalidate all chronologies, including historiography, in the face of the truth of the Torah. According to this belief, the Torah is not in history, but history in the Torah.
Therefore, if “Time” is a later creation than letters and numbers, it can be played by them. In this regard, Life is not a chronological history between birth and death, but the product of a magical formula that is always available. Similarly, Golem’s life is not a historical event marked by the two irreversible points of birth and death, but an event that is always reversible and available. Although Jewish mysticism has left the limits of the game solely to the moral integrity of high-level mystics who are said to have nothing to do with their personal desires, they have never considered any practical restrictions on the game’s capabilities. The game is determined by emergencies. As in Wegener’s film, an emergency for the Jewish people persuades Rabbi Loew to play with letters and create a golem.
Condemnation of Images and Troublesome word Tselem
But in Wegener’s film, how does the Golem save the Jewish people? The emperor invites Rabbi Loew to one of his annual entertainment events. The emperor considers Rabbi Loew a skilled magician, and the emperor plans to see his last act of sorcery before expelling the Jews from the city. The Rabbi comes to the ceremony with Golem and tells the emperor that his magical act consists in showing the history of his people. Before the show begins, the Rabbi reminds the emperor that if anyone loves his life, he should neither talk nor laugh during the show. The emperor and other celebrants sit in front of a wall. Rabbi Loew raises his hands and immediately a film of Jews leaving Egypt is shown on the wall. In the film, tired and thirsty Jews walk a long line in the dry desert of Sinai. Women and children are exhausted and men are tired. It seems that what the film narrates on the wall is a familiar account of the Torah that is an integral part of Jewish history. Moses frees the enslaved Jews from Egypt and marks the turning point in this history. It is a history that derives all its credibility from the Torah narrative, the sacred order of the letters. Even after modern archeological excavations and research have found no evidence that Jews were present in the Sinai Desert, nothing significant happens in believing in this history. In the Jewish perspective, the reference to this history is the scriptures, which have a higher authority than any other excavation or narration.
Following the film, the Jewish leader is shown. But their leader is not Moses. The Intertitle on the screen calls the leader Ahasverus, an ignorant Jew who mocked Christ and was condemned to eternal wandering on earth until the end of history. The image of Ahasverus in the film is similar to the image that medieval Christians had in mind: a bald fool who, like a novice comedian, scratches his long beard. This comic scene makes the emperor laugh, and with the height of his laughter, the audience joins him. The condition that Rabbi had set was broken. From inside the film, Ahasverus notices this ridiculous laughter and angrily moves to the foreground, and when he takes a step out of the screen, Rabbi Lowe stops showing the film in confusion. Immediately after the show stopped, the palace shook, the walls cracked and part of the roof collapsed. The terrified emperor asks the Rabbi for help, promising to repeal the expulsion of the Jews. The Rabbi accepts and orders golem to save them. Hence, the deportation order is revoked.
Contrary to the Golem’s creative process, Rabbi Loew does not use letters in this magic. He uses the images. But the image is what Judaism has always been pessimistic about. This pessimism officially begins with sacrificing two types of images in the second command:
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth (Exodus 20:4)
Here ‘the graven image’ and ‘Likeness of anything’ are English translations of the Hebrew word Pesel, and Temunah, respectively. In this way, the lavas of the Ten Commandments set fire to sculpture, engraving, painting, and iconography together. This command has been issued specifically out of fear of idolatry, that is, fear of replacing tangible forms with the invisible God. Although it seems that letters and numbers can also be included in the tangible forms, Jewish logocentrism does not accept this. In the Jewish scriptures, many words, including Adonai, Elohim and Shaddai are used repeatedly to refer to God. In other words, letter combinations can easily replace God, but when it comes to replacing images with God, strict prohibitions apply. What saves letters and numbers is not their tangible aspect but their non-representative form. This corresponds to the doctrinal revolution that separated monotheism from ancient paganism. Unlike the gods of paganism, which were derived from natural images and figures, the monotheistic God does not have a natural and representative form.
The Hebrew Bible uses violence almost everywhere in response to images. One of the most egregious examples is the command that God issues in the book of Numbers when the Israelites attacked Canaan.
Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land [Canaan] from before you, and destroy all their figured stones, and destroy all their molten images, and demolish all their high places [worship centers] (ASV, Num 33:52)
In this verse, too, the images are placed next to the idols and temples of polytheism and share in their bitter destiny. However, the Hebrew word translated as “image” is neither of the two unfortunate words in the second commandment. The word “image” is a translation of the Hebrew word tselem. A closer look at the Bible reveals that the tselem is not just a simple synonym for words like pesel or tenumah. This is exactly the word that appears in the book of Genesis
And God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness […] And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him (Asv, Gen 1:26,27, emphasis added)
Here, the image is no longer a representation made by man to refer to God, but a mark, trace, or effect of God on man. Yahweh creates the image, which is exactly what makes him angry in Book of Numbers. It seems that the image is more divine than being made by human hands. The fact that God makes man from his own image means that man is made of an image that is neither a resemblance to God nor a symbol of God, but is derived exactly from God himself. According to Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs (Zeman 1977, 22-39), it can be said that this image is neither an icon nor a symbol, but an index that contains the traces of God. The Torah is well acquainted with this aspect of the index. Ten Commandments was not a human scripture that carefully conveyed God’s commands, but according to the Torah, the Ten Commandments were directly “inscribed on tablets of stone by the finger of God” (Exodus 31:18) The Torah is an indexical sign whose existence is a direct continuation of God’s existence. Similarly, the image of Yahweh is an index that is always related to its origin. It is as if God has made a mold of Himself and filled it with clay. In other words, man is like a mask made of mold. And this is similar to the example of André Bazin in describing the photographic and cinematic image (Bazin 2005, 12).
Tselem as Cinematic Image: Towards a New Narrative of History
It seems that the cinematic image is the best example that can explain the tselem. The cinematic image, like the ghost and shadow of real objects, although separate from those objects, maintains its ontological connection with them. The cinematic image is the result of lights moving from real objects to the film, burning the film’s sensitive emulsion. In other words, there are images that the fingers of world inscribe on the celluloid film. The world presents its image to cinema, and cinema shows these images as the ghosts of the world. From the earliest days of cinema, when educated audiences such as Maxim Gorky went to see the silent, colorless, and gray films of the Lumière brothers, interpreting them as fake lives, cinema has been condemned as the realm of illusion (Gunning 1995,465). Even after that, the notion of cinema as a medium based on illusions and fantasies found its way into film theory in order to separate the original reality of the world from the unreal and illusory images of cinema.
This is exactly the same as the Jewish-Christian ascetic view that separates the material world from the real spiritual world in God’s kingdom. In the book of Psalms, the grieving man, after complaining about the shortness and futility of life, calls the world a “vain show”. (ASV, Psalm, 39:6) The issue becomes more interesting when we know that the word “vain show” is an English translation of the Hebrew word ” tselem “. In this verse, vain show (tselem) means illusory and fancy life, as opposed to real life.
The word tselem is repeated in another verse of the Psalms. In this verse, the lives of the wicked are compared to images that are despised by the resurrection of the Lord. (ASV, Psalm 73:20) In this verse, too, Yahweh’s dislike of the image is revealed in a new form. In the Jewish-Christian perspective, the reason the material world is inferior to the spiritual world is the transience and mortality of the material world. In this view, man, by contemplating his short and transient life, becomes aware that he should not be attached to life in this world. In fact, the reason for the inferiority of the material world is that it is caught up in a chronological and irreversible time. Although the Bible, with the exception of the book of Genesis, considers the tselem to be a temporary ghost, it is not easy to dismiss it in the book of Genesis. The word in the book of Genesis is like a deep, irreparable crack in the Bible.
For all biblical commentators, overcoming such a contradiction about the use of the word image (tselem) is a great challenge. Most of these commentators try to interpret the word metaphorically in different verses according to their context. They mainly consider this word in the book of Genesis a metaphor for soul or spirit, and in the book of Numbers to mean the familiar and common meaning of the image. This is the same system of interpretation that has found its way into English translations and has led to several different equivalents for the word. But in Wegener’s film, Rabbi Loew turns away from this interpretive system, because he is equipped with a new kind of image, the cinematic image.
The cinematic image saves events from the bite of time. In Rabbi Loew’s show, the exodus event is not just an event whose eternity depends on becoming sacred words in the Torah, but also a recurring event in its visual reality. Thus, the power that logocentrism has given to the sacred words is transferred to the enemy, the image. This transfer leads to the reversal of a system that assumed the image of events to be vain shows. Here, Rabbi Loew is confronted with his first magic, the creation of the Golem. The creation of the Golem, with the help of sacred words, is perfectly compatible with a system that considers intangible, abstract, and spiritual qualities superior to real and visual events. Giving life to Golem is a summoning of life. In this sense, life is nothing but a sacred code that is activated by the arrangement of letters. What Rabbi Loew creates through the arrangement of letters is life as an abstract, timeless, and image-less quality. There is no mystery in Golem’s tangible and physical aspects. Golem’s body is just a rough clay mass made by the Rabbi as an amateur sculptor. True magic is the summoning of an abstract, intangible, and spiritual quality called life. In this sense, Rabbi Loew, by arranging the sacred letters, breathes life into the clay body of Golem. This is an example of the same transcendent system of interpretation that interprets the image of God (tselem) as an abstract quality, intangible and superior to the tangible and visual reality of the image.
In this system, letters and words are placed on the side of the soul and are added to current events by Rabbi Loew. The letters and numbers are the smallest and most spiritual units in the world that have been preserved from the damage of time and can be recovered each time in different combinations. Thus, although images of real events are lost in chronological order, spiritual and abstract qualities are always available. And the Jewish mystic will be able to summon these spiritual qualities according to special needs.
But in the second part of the film, where Rabbi Loew revives events that seem to be lost in a historical past, the system collapses. This revival is based on the principle of immanence; life is nothing but a collection of images of living people and events. In this sense, something called the summoning of life is meaningless. Only the summoning of past events and people is valid. In Rabbi Loew’s play, what comes back is not a conceptual and spiritual quality, but what Jewish logocentrism hates. It is not the spiritual qualities, but the images returns. This means retrieving history as the memory of events (rather than the memory of meanings, truths, and concepts). In Rabbi Loew’s play, the images of the “vain shows” return. Rabbi Loew’s show, with an image of Ahasverus replacing Moses in the Exodus, is a clear distortion of the history recorded in the Bible. According to the Bible, such a distortion is never forgivable, (2). Here a similar practice is formed with the mechanisms of Jewish mystical logocentrism, but with the reversal of tools. The basic premise in mystical-logocentric interpretations is that the Bible is merely one actual form of the innumerable potentials that are hidden, and the sequence of words in the apparent text is a mask for all the proportion and relations that, although not revealed, have already been written. And since letters and numbers are not caught in the chains of matter and time, it is possible to constantly reproduce their relationships. But the reversal occurs when the same mechanism is applied to the events and images of history, which seem to be trapped in matter and time.
In this sense, the history that has taken place is also just a sequence of innumerable events and images of history, and at every moment one can achieve other proportions and arrangements. In other words, the events of history are synchronic, not diachronic. All of these events are intertwined as parts of space-time, and each time one can choose between images and events as needed: Each time a new narrative and reorganization. Thus, instead of the image of Moses, Rabbi Loew is able to link the image of Ahasverus, who lived in the early years of Christianity, to the event of the Exodus. In this view, the present moment will be the moment of condensation of all the living and immortal images that have been preserved and are waiting to be selected in newer and more efficient narratives.
But why are these narratives made? It is these urgencies and necessities that determine how narratives are defined. If the Rabbi Loew’s film remained faithful to the story of the Exodus, and the Jewish vanguard was the same serious and glorious Moses that the Christians had in mind, there would probably be no laughter at the emperor’s ceremony, and that would mean the failure of the rescue project. The trap that the Rabbi has set for the emperor is also a trap for the orthodox narrative of the Bible. All that is solid melts into the air as needed. This is the same form of the radical thesis that Benjamin proposed: “Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it the way it really was. It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger” (Benjamin 2006, 391). Benjamin’s thesis is in stark contrast to the view that historiography is considered a scientific study of the historical past. Jeffrey Elton, one of the historians who is inclined to this scientific view, sums it up as follows: “The most valuable aspect of the historian’s work is the ‘rational, independent and impartial investigation’ of the documents of the past” (Munslow 2001, 20)
In this view, trying to properly understand history is an attempt to discover a unique, real, and true narrative that has not been influenced by stories and legends. This view clearly prefers history through the classic dichotomy that Aristotle established between story and history. In a sense, such a view prefers “what has been” to “what should be.” “What Has been” is an example of a chronological notion of history. A lost history that only needs to be discovered. But “what it should be” is the selection of past events, and assembling them in a new narrative, and the summoning of this assemblage to the present. This new assemblage, unlike chronological history, is political. The political is determined by necessity and is an attempt to save the present moment by means of past events. So, Rabbi Loew’s play is an attempt to turn history into politics, and this is not possible except by triumphing over chronological history.
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Notes
1. This is Paul Wegener’s third film based on the legendary Golem and has survived to this day. The first two films, the Golem (1915) and the Golem and The Dancing Girl (1917) are now on the list of lost films.
2. What thing soever I command you, that shall ye observe to do: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it. (ASV, Deut 12:32)
References
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___ (1995). Major trends in Jewish mysticism. Random House Digital, Inc
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