Tea at 4pm

The golem as artificial man of clay animated by incantation first appeared in medieval Jewish mysticism and has today become a salient symbol of Jewish folk tradition. However, the tales told about this figure today largely spring from the close cultural interaction between Jewish and non-Jewish authors over the last two centuries. The golem today is often perceived to have Eastern European connotations. Its early secular invocations, however, emerged in the German-speaking world, in particular with German Romantic writers, who constructed through the golem the flawed physical, sensual and intellectual qualities of the Jew. This lecture focuses on the crucial period between 1870 and World War I, when images of ghetto culture and the Eastern Jew became essential markers of the golem trope, contending that the simultaneous emergence of Eastern European Jewish literature and its golem texts (e.g., Y.L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem) evince this Romantic residue. Showing how scholarly discourse, literary texts and early film constructed the golem as a Jewish popular culture theme, Dr. Gelbin argues that the golem's enduring popularity derives from its role to negotiate the contested notion of Jewish creativity and cultural authenticity in the modern Diaspora.

Cathy Gelbin (PhD, MA in German Studies, Cornell University) is Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the University of Manchester. She specializes in German-Jewish culture, Holocaust studies, gender and film studies. Previous positions include her work as Director of Research and Educational Programmes at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex.  From 1995-1998, she was coordinator of the Archiv der Erinnerung (Archiv of Memory), an interdisciplinary collaboration between Yale's Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and the Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies at the University of Potsdam, to  collect and research audiovisual Holocaust testimonies in Germany. Her publications include An Indelible Seal: Race, Hybridity and Identity in Elisabeth Langgässer's Writings (2001), as well as Archiv der Erinnerung: Interviews mit Überlebenden der Shoah (co-ed., 1998) and AufBrüche: Kulturelle Produktionen von Migrantinnen, Schwarzen und jüdischen Frauen in Deutschland (co-ed., 1999).    She recently completed a monograph on the cultural history of the Golem trope from German Romanticism to global Jewish texts, which is forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press.

By: Diana Franklin
Last updated: Tuesday, 19 January 2010