"Have I Got a Monster for You!": Some Thoughts on the Golem, The X-Files and the Jewish Horror Movie

The golem, then, is us, but without a soul--which many commentators note is only God's to give. Part of the meditative aspect of the golem legends is understanding how monstrous we would be without a soul.

The X-Files

The golem narrative I have been meditating on comes from the Fox Television show, The X-Files. When the episode, entitled "Kaddish," was first aired around Valentine's Day 1997. I was thrilled to see that the writers and producers of this show had tackled a topic from Ashkenazi folklore, namely the golem story. [2] In this episode, Isaac Luria, a young Hasidic shop owner, is brutally murdered by Tony Oliver, Derrick Banks and Clinton McGuire, three young white boys. It is presumed to be a hate crime. The boys are all associates of a local photocopy shop owner, Carl Brunjes, who is known for distributing anti-Semitic pamphlets throughout the Hasidic neighbourhood. When one of the young murder suspects turns up dead, Agents Mulder and Scully enter the investigation. What makes this an "X-File" case rather than a straightforward murder investigation is that the fingerprints found around the neck of the victim are those of the dead man. Has Luria risen from the grave to extract his revenge on his killers? Or is this a hoax designed to draw attention away from the real killer? The truth is much more arcane. Luria's fiancee, Ariel Weiss, daughter of one of the Hasidic community's leaders, Jacob Weiss, was so overwrought by the death of Isaac that she fashioned a golem in his exact image. This Isaac-Golem kills all three of his own killers, as well as the anti-semitic shop-owner Brunjes, but is stopped before it can run amok and turn on the Jewish community itself.

This X-Files episode keeps well within the tradition of Ashkenazi golem legends. The golem is fashioned out of mud, and animated by the inscription emet. It is an "incomplete" creature without a soul; and, in attacking the white supremacists who are threatening the Jewish community, it is defending the community. Finally, like the golems from Ashkenazi lore, Isaac-Golem returns to dust by the removal of the "aleph," which transforms emet to met, "truth" to "dead." Even the primary victim's name, Isaac Luria, is an intentional echo of the medieval Kabbalist, Isaac Luria.

The Internet Discussion

The X-Files theme, reiterated in the opening credits each week, is "the truth is out there." One of its central characters, Fox Mulder, is a believer out to demonstrate the truth in the face, not only of the U.S. Government but also his rationalist partner, Dana Scully. It is likely that episode writer, Howard Gordon, used the emet-met dichotomy in the golem story as a metatextual reference to the character of Fox Mulder. Certainly many X-Files fans contributing to the Internet newsgroup alt.tv.x-files (known as "X-Philes") interpreted the episode this way. Sharon Goldstein, a long time X-Files fan noted: