Rabbi Loew of sixteenth-century Prague. He is supposed to have formed an artificial human being — a robot — out of clay, just as God had formed Adam … - Isaac Asimov

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Rabbi Loew of sixteenth-century Prague. He is supposed to have formed an artificial human being — a robot — out of clay, just as God had formed Adam out of clay. A clay object, however much it might resemble a human being, is “an unformed substance” (the Hebrew word for it is “golem”), since it lacks the attributes of life. Rabbi Loew, however, gave his golem the attributes of life by making use of the sacred name of God, and set the robot to work protecting the lives of Jews against their persecutors.