In a recent piece on these pages, Rabbi Mark Dratch noted that the Vatican’s new focus on Artificial Intelligence and human dignity borrows heavily from established Jewish philosophy—most notably Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s The Lonely Man of Faith. While it is true that these ethical frameworks are timeless, there is a deeper, highly original, and deeply urgent historical precedent that the Chief Rabbinate of Israel brought directly to the halls of the Vatican during our high-level discussions on AI ethics.

When addressing the Vatican on the profound dangers of unbridled technology, I did not begin with modern algorithms or 20th-century essays. I began in the 16th century, with the Maharal of Prague and the legend of the Golem.

Because if we want to understand the existential risk of AI, we must look at the original robot.

The Prague Roots of the Modern “Robot” It is no historical coincidence that our very language for this technology traces its path straight back to Prague. The word “robot” did not emerge from a computer laboratory in Silicon Valley, but from the cultural memory of Bohemia. It was introduced to the global lexicon in 1920 by the visionary Czech writer Karel Čapek in his science-fiction play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).

Čapek and his brother Josef (who actually coined the word from the Slavic robota, meaning forced labor or servitude) were writing in Prague, entirely steeped in the atmosphere of a city haunted by the Golem. They were explicitly influenced by the Maharal’s ancient tale of........

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