Scully: …Apparently he’d been watching this tape when he was strangled to death.
Mulder: Very Old Testament.
Scully: Yeah. But with a new twist. The Brooklyn Homicide detectives contacted the FBI civil rights branch with an interesting set of fingerprints that they pulled off the boy’s body.
Mulder: Interesting how?
Scully: Interesting in that they belong to Isaac Luria.
Mulder: Spectral figures are not often known to leave fingerprints. Casper never did.
Somehow the killer got ahold of Isaac Luria’s fingerprints. And we have been asked to prove how.
Jacob Weiss (David Groh): When we called the police, they said that there was nothing to worry about. That we were paranoid. They always say that when someone threatens the Jews.
Mulder: So there was a specific threat of violence?
Jacob: The threat is always there.
Ariel Luria (Justine Miceli): Do what you feel is necessary. But leave us alone. Let us mourn in peace.
Mulder: Anybody delivering justice to a people who’ve known that kind of persecution and hatred, why wouldn’t they protect him?
Scully: Justice or revenge?
Mulder: I’m not saying those kids don’t warrant full prosecution under the law, but the hatemongering goes both ways.
Scully: Yes, but the right to free expression doesn’t extend to murder.
Curt Brunjes (Jonathan Whittaker): Well sure I knew him, the man owned the store right across the street. But I’d be lying if I said I was surprised it happened.
Mulder: Why’s that?
Brunjes: Well, you know how they are. Always trying to find ways to make money off of honest folks who work for a living.
Mulder: Can you think of anyone who might have held a grudge?
Brunjes: I can’t think of anyone who didn’t.
Mulder: Did you?
Brunjes: Why? I’m not under any kind of suspicion, am I?
Scully: No, not directly. But these young men are. And we have reason to believe that you know them.
Brunjes: What kind of Jew trick is this?
Mulder: A Jew pulled it off 2,00 years ago.
Scully: We’re just relating the evidence, you can draw your own conclusions.
Clinton Bascombe (Jabin Litwiniec): Are you sure about this?
Derick Banks (Channon Roe): I heard them, man. I’m not waiting around to find out if it’s true.
Mulder: I think they came here because they were afraid.
Scully: Afraid?
Mulder: Afraid the man they hated enough to kill wasn’t really dead.
Brunjes: I never told you to kill anyone. I never said to do that.
Derick: No? What’d you expect me to do? Hide back here in the dark, licking envelopes like you?
Brunjes: We’re working to spread the truth.
Derick: The truth? Man, you’re as pathetic as they are.
Mulder: Is there anything that distinguishes this particular Sepher Yetzirah from other such books?
Kenneth Ungar (David Wohl): Yes, but it’s barely legible because of the burning. It’s a name engraved in the leather or stamped in the leather.
Scully: A name?
Kenneth Ungar: Yes, a Hebrew name. Weiss. Jacob Weiss.
Ariel: It was a communal wedding ring made in Kolin, a village near Prague. My father was an apprentice to the man who designed it.
Scully: It’s beautiful.
Ariel: Every woman who got married in the synagogue wore this ring as a symbol that she was a queen, her husband a king, and the home they made a castle—not only on their wedding day but for the rest of their lives together. But most of those lives ended in one day in the spring of 1943. Nine thousand Jews were massacred after digging their own graves.
Scully: But your father survived.
Ariel: Because he was ten years old and he was a jeweler’s apprentice. He had small fingers to make bullets at a munitions factory.
Scully: And through all this, he hid the ring?
Ariel: Even after the war, he hid it. Even from my mother.
Ariel: They say you confessed. Why are you doing this?
Jacob: To protect you.
Ariel: From what?
Jacob: I think you know.
Kenneth Ungar: The early cabalists, they believed that a righteous man could actually create a living being from the earth itself, fashioned from mud or clay. But this creature could only be brought to life by the power of the word.
Scully: Oh my god. It’s Isaac Luria. He’s still alive.
Mulder: I’m not so sure about that.
Mulder: I don’t think it was hate that created this Golem, Scully. It was love.
Jacob: The boys that killed him, their hate took him from you. And you tried bringing him back with your love. But what you brought back—you have to understand, Ariel—it isn’t him. It’s an abomination. It has no place among the living.