[UA] Golem Family Reunion

[David M Jacobs]

At 10:28 AM 16/04/02 -0400, Michael Dinowitz wrote:

>I missed the original thread so I'm starting here. Please note that I'm 
>referring to Golems from Jewish tradition more so than the 'game' Golems. 
>Please keep that in mind.

Thanks for that.  I'm admittedly a little fuzzy in some places.

>You mean Ladino.

Aha, that would be the one, although I have heard it referred to as Judezmo.

>It's Hebrew written with spanish letters and there are many speakers of it 
>in this generation. Not dead.

I wasn't sure about that.  IIRC, Matthew Broderick's character in "Biloxi 
Blues" mentioned Spanish Jews and their holidays; I just thought that he 
was using the subject as an excuse to get out of doing work.  I'd assumed, 
since the outlawing of Jews at the end of the Reconquista, that there 
wouldn't be too many speakers around.  I'd also read that it was some sort 
of Spanish dialect.  My sources obviously suck.

>Emes means truth and is one of the means to create a Golem (reference the 
>Maharal of Prague). Mase means corpse. Removing the first letter from Emes 
>makes it Mase, which 'deactivates' the Golem.

My original source on this (a third-party 1st-ed AD&D adventure) claimed 
that "emeth" was "life" and "meth" was "death", but I've since learnt that 
one of them meant "truth" (probably from X-Files, truth be known).  I 
decided to leave that bit out and let the experts deal with it.  #%o)

> >Whilst most appear to be of European origin, some are Middle Eastern, 
> one or two are Indian (ie, from India) and a handful are black African.

I just thought that I'd make a add on this.  IIRC, there's a large Jewish 
community in Mumbai (Bombay), India.  The African guys refer to Ethiopian 
Jews and the Lemba, a tribe that live in the Mozambique-Zimbabwe corner of 
Africa but practice a form of Judaism.

A few years back, some geneticist noticed an anomaly on the Y chromosome 
that was specific to Jewish men, handed down from father to son.  When they 
tested various Jewish groups, they determined that most Yemeni Jews must 
have descended from converts and not through direct kinship; the Lemba, 
OTOH, were direct descendants of the core group in the Middle 
East.  Everyone's been scratching their heads ever since.

>According to all sources on Golems (reference Talmud) a Golem can not speak.

True, but it wouldn't be much of a reunion if they all turned up and stood 
in mute, stony silence for a day or two, would it?  #%o)



David M Jacobs
dmjacobs at zipworld.com.au
http://www.zipworld.com.au/~dmjacobs/
ICQ UIN: 17027598

"'Kevin,' David interrupted, 'what the Germans should have done
was show the Russians a dead cat and ask them to explain it.'

"'That would have stopped the Soviet offensive right there,' I said.
"Zhukov would still be trying to account for the cat's death.'"

— from Valis, by Philip K Dick


_______________________________________________
UA mailing list
UA at lists.uchicago.edu
http://lists.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/ua