"THE CLAY MAN COMETH": Philologos takes on the golem in the Forward. Excerpt (but worth reading in full):

It is only in early rabbinic times that one meaning of golem takes on a legendary cast, although this is still not the legend of the golem as we know it; rather, it occurs in a fable of Adam's first 12 hours on earth, in the second of which, so we are told by the Talmud, in tractate Sanhedrin, before God formed Adam's limbs and breathed life into him, "he was made a golem." And at the same time, golem in early rabbinic Hebrew simply can mean a thoughtless person or an idiot. Thus, we read in the Mishnaic tractate Pirkei Avot or "The Ethics of the Fathers" that "Seven traits characterize the golem and seven the wise man."

Yet the concept of a man-made humanoid, although the name golem was not given to it, can be found in the Talmud, too. Again in Sanhedrin, for example, we read about how the talmudic sage Rava created a man out of clay and sent him to his friend Rabbi Zeira, who ordered him to return to dust. Such legends grew more widespread among Jews in medieval Europe � and it was then that the word golem was first attached to them. The earliest known use of the word in this sense occurs in a commentary by the Rhineland rabbi, Eliezer of Worms (1176-1238), on the proto-kabbalistic Sefer ha-Yetsirah or "Book of Creation."