«El gólem se rebelará contra su creador»

“The golem will rebel against its creator” is Shaltiel Abravanel’s metaphor for the danger of political Zionism’s use of religious and messianic fervor: energies recruited for a modern, secular national project could escape their founders’ control and devastate what they meant to build. Its force lies in the reversal it predicts, from a movement wielding inherited hopes to those hopes becoming an uncontrollable power of their own.

Shaltiel’s warning

Gershom Wald recalls that Abravanel sometimes spoke to him after reading Davar, arguing that Zionism’s founders had deliberately redirected generations of Jewish religious and messianic longing into a political movement that was secular, pragmatic, and modern. Abravanel’s warning was not that he had ceased to be a Zionist. Rather, he believed the movement’s leaders had strayed from its path and become captive to nationalist and messianic impulses they had sought to employ.

The golem image gives this political diagnosis a compact, ominous shape: what the founders created to serve their project might turn on its makers. Abravanel predicted that the irrational religious energies behind the movement would one day erupt and destroy what its founders intended to establish. The metaphor makes the danger internal to the project itself; the threat is not simply an outside opponent, but a force cultivated and empowered from within.

The state and the messiah

Abravanel’s concern belongs to a wider dispute over the language and promises of national politics. Shmuel Ash criticizes David Ben-Gurion for leading a nationalist state while surrounding it with empty biblical language about restoration and the fulfillment of prophecy. Wald, by contrast, praises Ben-Gurion as a far-sighted leader who understood that Jewish security could not depend on Arab acceptance or outside protection. Their disagreement puts the metaphor’s warning into sharper relief: political necessity and religiously charged national aspiration may reinforce one another, but they do not mean the same thing.

Abravanel feared that a movement founded as a secular, contemporary undertaking could inherit the messianic force it had mobilized and be remade by it. In Wald’s account, Abravanel described Ben-Gurion as a false messiah and predicted that the struggle for liberation could lead the oppressed to dream of becoming oppressors. The golem image thus resonates with his broader suspicion that a project promising collective rescue may reproduce domination rather than overcome it.

Isolation and retrospective force

Abravanel’s dissent brought political consequences. He was expelled from the Zionist Executive and the leadership of the Jewish Agency after being given a choice between submitting a resignation letter and facing formal expulsion. He wrote a reasoned letter, but it was concealed, and later officials denied that it had ever existed. He died alone in the house, politically isolated; after his death, Atalia found no papers or manuscripts apart from his will, suggesting that he had destroyed his private archive.

The expression survives in Wald’s recollection rather than in a preserved statement by Abravanel. That transmission gives the warning a double significance: the man who foresaw the loss of control over a political movement is himself remembered through another person’s account, while the documents that might have recorded his arguments are gone. The golem’s rebellion remains a prediction, not a narrated outcome, but the novel’s political debate keeps its question alive: can a national project command the powerful hopes it has called into service?