The Golem and the Jinni

In The Golem and the Jinni, Wecker pulls from the religious texts and folklore of Judaism to develop the rules of the magic system that allows Chava to exist. In Jewish folklore, Golems are created from earth and clay and are brought to life through rituals and incantations developed by Jewish mystics called Kabbalists, who have studied both the Torah and the Sefer Yetzira (the “Book of Creation”) and follow the predominantly oral tradition of Kabbalah (“Golem.” Jüdisches Museum Berlin). Kabbalah can be traced back to a form of mysticism called Merkavah mysticism that began growing in popularity around the 1st century CE (“Kabbala.” Britannica, 2 Jan. 2024). The goal of Merkavah mysticism was to better understand the Book of Ezekiel. It stems from the belief that God created the world through a series of complex arrangements of letters and numbers. In this type of mysticism, each word and letter in the Hebrew, as well as alternative alphabets, are woven with innate powers of divine creation. Kabbalah began to appear in 13th century Spain, and its guiding work, the Zohar, was first publicized by Moses de León, who claimed that the Zohar is based on the writings of earlier rabbinic sages.