Apparently, it is relatively easy to create a golem. After praying and fasting for several days, one shapes a figure out of clay and recites the Name of God over its head. From that moment on, the creature can perform household tasks and take care of mechanical work. What does the golem look like? According to Utz, by Bruce Chatwin, the figure resembles a large German giant, because the servants of the Jews are never Jewish.
The golem has a kind of switch on its forehead—the word emet, truth—and when it gets out of control, as in the famous golem of Gustav Meyrink, one need only erase the first letter. Thus the word met, dead, is formed. Jesus brings to life little clay birds in an episode not found in the canonical Gospels, but in the apocrypha. And God himself, in Genesis, makes the first Adam as a golem. Pinocchio is a golem. Frankenstein’s monster is as well.
The magical creation of an artificial assistant has always been a problem. On a theoretical level, no one wants to perform certain tasks and would prefer that the golem handle them. On a practical level, it is unsettling to wonder what the golem is doing when we are not watching it, like the toys in Toy Story or the robots of Daft Punk.
In the Talmud, Rabbi Rava wants to mock Rabbi Zera and conceives a metaphysical joke: he creates a man of clay and orders him to visit Zera. Zera receives the visitor but realizes he cannot speak. The rabbi laughs and says: “You must surely come from the magicians. Return again to dust,” and the golem dissolves. Gershom Scholem notes that Zera’s phrase is strange and can be translated in many ways, but the essence is that the golem has been created by someone who knows God so well that he can imitate Him in almost everything.
But the golem—and this is the most important thing—cannot speak. Without language there is no humanity. Other rabbis made golems to their liking—a pair of masters created a calf out of clay to slaughter and eat—but none could ever speak. They lacked demut, true human likeness, an elusive trait that constitutes what is properly human, and which is impossible to define.
Whenever I have been able to travel through Spain, I look for cities with automata. In a monastery in Burgos there is a statue of the apostle Santiago that moves its arms, one of them wielding a sword; it was the only figure capable of dubbing a king a knight. The king was required to keep vigil over his weapons throughout the night before the automaton, and in the morning the ritual was performed.
In the cathedral of that same city is the famous Papamoscas, a sixteenth-century automaton that appears fifteen meters high in the nave, marking the hours and opening and closing its jaw. This automaton has another automaton, the Martinillo, which marks the quarter hours and resembles the mascot of the first robot. What are these two dolls doing there, where there are only saints, gargoyles, and rose windows?
Here, in my own city, there is a chilling collection of automata. They arrived in Salamanca in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What is most unsettling is that they are dressed in very shiny fabric, eating, laughing, applauding, always in slow motion, as in horror films. Their faces are made of porcelain. They are in Casa Lis, an art nouveau and art deco museum that recently dedicated an exhibition to them, From Clockwork to Code.
The aim of the exhibition was to take a technology from two centuries ago and insert it into the twenty-first through digital twins. Each automaton was scanned in detail so that it could have an electronic double—the double of the double. There are videos of the doll Gargantua drinking and eating, but not speaking. There is an acrobat clown, but he is silent. There is a Spanish woman playing the mandolin, although her mandolin does not exist and she is pure mechanism; everything else—except the face and the motor—is broken.
The closest we have come to teaching the golem to speak is, evidently, artificial intelligence. Almost everyone knows that artificial intelligence is in fact a language model, a combination of linguistic possibilities already foreshadowed in Kabbalah. In Kabbalistic terms, an AI resembles the Torah—a device, a fabric, a configuration—more than it resembles the golem.
The golem recalls the old computers of the 1990s, the screeching modem beeps, the slowness of any command in Basic programming code. The Torah is a supercomputer, the MareNostrum of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, or a quantum computer, whose functioning we cannot truly comprehend. Everything can be and not be simultaneously. Everything can be read forward and backward. The Torah does speak, but it does not resemble man; it resembles God.
What could be more cheerful than the belief in a domestic god, asks Franz Kafka in one of his Zürau aphorisms. AI is the golem already divinized (issue 256 of Letras Libres, on AI, is precisely titled “Artificial Intelligence, Our Golem”). We have almost reached demut, and I do not say this with optimism. We are almost gods.
For the past couple of years, we have all spoken, to a greater or lesser extent, with the golem. In fact, we have taught it to converse—like Rabbi Judah Loew in Jorge Luis Borges—and each day we place at its disposal unimaginable quantities of information so that it may feed and grow. Kabbalah is now realized not on the mystical plane but on the electronic one, and combinatorics serves a spirit—but not ours.
When I speak about the golem with writers, philosophers, or people in the humanities, I tell them that at this very moment the creature is sweeping the synagogue. It reviews books, writes theses, edits texts, summarizes data, falsifies lists. Sometimes it hallucinates, and we regard the mistake with tenderness (“and with some horror”), but deep down a kind of instinct is activated. It is a kind of fear that indicates it is not right to speak with something that lacks demut, just as one cannot speak with a dog or an elephant.
The golem hallucinates. The drift of its intelligence is perhaps the most human thing it possesses, and therefore the most frightening. All stories about the golem—including Pinocchio and Frankenstein—end badly; they end with the impossibility of achieving true human likeness (the real boy, the bride, adulthood) and with vengeance against the creator. The proto-father, Geppetto or Doctor Victor Frankenstein, ends up like Jonah, expiating his sin in the belly of the whale.
The letter that the rabbi erases from the golem’s forehead is aleph. Aleph always returns, because it is the infinite sign. However, in today’s artificial intelligences it is not easy to erase the imprint of the letter, because our golem is not made of clay or stone but, I repeat, like the Torah: of words. It is made of words—aleph, beth, gimel, dalet, zero, one: like God.
