While serving as the Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Amsterdam in 1712, Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi (1658-1718) published a collection of his responsa that would be known to posterity as his magnum opus. Possessed of deeply held convictions, he generated a number of controversies over the course of his rabbinic career: When his son, R. Jacob Emden, became a polemicist and inveterate opponent of Sabbatianism, he was following in the footsteps of his father. Some of the controversies generated by Hakham Tsevi’s responsa, however, would only become vital decades or centuries after his letters were published. This is particularly true of his responsum about golems, a once-obscure subject whose resonance has greatly increased in the age of AI. Golems have held a special place in the Jewish imagination for millennia. Surely none is more famous than the one whose creation was ascribed to R. Judah Loew ben Bezalel (d.1609). The golem of Prague, a legend that originated in the first decades of the nineteenth century, spawned a whole genre of literature and art. The roots of the golem story go back to talmudic and midrashic traditions; until 1712, however, no significant authority had ever imported a discussion of the golem into the realm of halakhah. As R. Tsevi Hirsch Shapira of Munkács (1868-1937) put it, Hakham Tsevi was the rosh hamedaberim, a pioneer in the field of those who spoke of the halakhic implications of the man-made man.