Quick Answer
One man built an entire academic field, and the field spent the next fifty years discovering how much of it was him. Scholem rescued Kabbalah from scholars who had written it out of Jewish history as an embarrassment, proved who actually wrote the Zohar, and produced a survey that is still the place to start. He also imposed his own tastes, for myth, rupture and catastrophe, so thoroughly that the strands he found less interesting went unstudied until the 1980s.
Key Takeaways
- It founded a discipline, which is not a figure of speech in this case.
- The Zohar authorship argument is real philology and has largely held for a century.
- His preferences became the field's blind spots, which Idel documented in 1988.
- Catastrophe explanations are overused in it, and the 1492 thesis is the clearest case.
- This is history, not practice. Scholem stood deliberately outside what he described.
🕑 15 min read
What This Book Is
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism was published in 1941, based on nine lectures Scholem gave in New York in 1938. It surveys the Jewish mystical tradition from late antiquity to the eighteenth century, movement by movement, with a chapter for each major development.
It is not a devotional work, not an introduction to practice, and not sympathetic in the ordinary sense. It is a work of historical scholarship, dense with manuscript evidence, dating arguments and philological detail, written by someone determined to establish that this material was worth the apparatus.
Eighty years on it remains the standard first book on the subject, which tells you both that it was very good and that the field has never produced a comparable synthesis to replace it.
On the notes. The endnote apparatus is enormous and is aimed at specialists arguing about manuscripts. General readers can ignore it entirely without losing the argument, and should, or they will not finish.
Who Gershom Scholem Was
Born in Berlin in 1897 to an assimilated, patriotic, thoroughly German-Jewish printing family, Scholem broke with all of it. He learned Hebrew, became a Zionist, was expelled from the family home by his father over his politics, and emigrated to Palestine in 1923.
He worked first as a librarian at the National Library, building its Kabbalah collection, and then became professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University, a chair that existed because he made the subject exist.
He was a close friend of Walter Benjamin, and their long correspondence is one of the significant intellectual exchanges of the century. Benjamin's death in 1940 while fleeing occupied France is part of the background against which these lectures were published.
He wrote, catalogued, collected manuscripts and argued for six decades. When he began, there were essentially no scholars in the field. When he died in 1982, there was a discipline with journals, chairs and successors, most of them trained by him.
What He Was Arguing Against
To understand why this book has the tone it has, you need the opponent.
Nineteenth-century Jewish scholarship, the movement known as the science of Judaism, had set out to present Judaism to a European academy as rational, ethical and philosophically respectable. That project had a problem: the mystical tradition, with its emanations, its divine anatomy, its magic and its messianic disasters, did not fit the picture.
So it was excluded. The dominant historian of the period treated Kabbalah as a degeneration, an infection of foreign superstition, a subject to be handled with distaste if at all. Manuscripts went unread. The Sabbatian movement was covered as a humiliation.
Scholem's argument is that this was not scholarship but apologetics, that a Judaism with the myth and the irrationality edited out was a bloodless invention of nineteenth-century respectability, and that the mystical current was not a foreign infection but one of the tradition's central engines.
He also thought, and said less openly, that the vitality of that current was what a modern Jewish renewal would need.
The Nine Lectures
The book moves chronologically and the shape is worth having in advance.
The first lecture sets out general characteristics of Jewish mysticism and its relationship to religious authority. The second treats the chariot mysticism of late antiquity. The third covers the pietists of medieval Germany. The fourth is on Abraham Abulafia and the prophetic Kabbalah. The fifth and sixth are on the Zohar, its authorship and its doctrine. The seventh treats Isaac Luria and the Safed school. The eighth is Sabbatianism. The ninth is Hasidism.
The fifth through eighth are the substance. The final lecture on Hasidism is the thinnest and Scholem later did better work on it.
The Chariot and the Palaces
The earliest material Scholem treats is chariot mysticism, from roughly the first centuries of the common era, built around the vision of the divine chariot in the book of Ezekiel.
What survives describes an ascent through a series of palaces or halls, each guarded, each requiring the correct seals and names to pass, culminating in a vision of the enthroned glory. It is not a mysticism of union. The gap between the visionary and what is seen is never closed, and the emphasis falls on danger, on the correct formula, and on the overwhelming scale of what is beheld.
Scholem's point here does real work for the rest of the book. From the beginning, this tradition is theurgic and visionary rather than unitive, closer to a technology of ascent than to the dissolution of self that characterises much mysticism elsewhere. That difference persists.
Who Wrote the Zohar
The two Zohar lectures contain the book's single greatest piece of technical work, and it is worth understanding how the argument runs.
The Zohar presents itself as the teaching of Shimon bar Yochai, a second-century sage, transmitted in Aramaic and recovered centuries later. It became the central text of Kabbalah and for many communities was treated as approaching scriptural authority.
Scholem, following earlier suspicions but going much further, argued it was composed in Castile in the late thirteenth century, principally by Moses de Leon, the man who circulated it.
His evidence is linguistic and it is not a matter of taste. The Aramaic is not the Aramaic of second-century Palestine; it is an artificial construction built from later literary sources, with grammatical patterns and errors characteristic of someone writing Aramaic as a learned language rather than speaking it. The text contains Spanish idioms rendered into Aramaic. It refers to institutions, practices and concerns of thirteenth-century Castile. Its treatment of Palestinian geography is confused in ways a resident would not manage. And the theological vocabulary belongs to a specific thirteenth-century milieu.
The argument has broadly held for a century. The main modification, argued by later scholars, is that the text is likely the product of a circle around de Leon rather than one hand, and that the composition was more layered than Scholem allowed.
What makes this a model piece of scholarship is that it does not depend on whether you find the Zohar profound. Scholem thought it was one of the great works of religious imagination and said so repeatedly, and he still dated it by the grammar. Those are separate operations, and keeping them separate is the whole difference between a scholar and an advocate. A reader can take the same posture toward any text they love: what it is worth and when it was written are different questions, and the second one has an answer that does not care about the first.
Luria and the Broken Vessels
The Safed chapter covers the sixteenth-century system that became the dominant form of Kabbalah, and Scholem's exposition of it is still the clearest short account in English.
Isaac Luria taught for only a few years in Safed before dying at thirty-eight, wrote almost nothing, and is known through his students. The system attributed to him restructures the whole account of creation.
It begins with a problem: if the divine is everywhere and infinite, there is no room for anything else to exist. The answer is contraction. God withdraws from a point, creating a space in which something other than God can be.
Into that space divine light is emanated, held in vessels. The vessels cannot contain it, and they shatter. Fragments fall, carrying sparks of light trapped in shells, and the world as we have it is the aftermath of that catastrophe.
Repair is the human task. Through observance, intention and prayer, the scattered sparks are gathered and raised, and the work of restoration is entrusted to people rather than to God.
Scholem is right that this is an extraordinary reversal. A cosmology in which the initial act is a withdrawal, the second is a failure, and the third is delegated to human beings gives the ordinary religious life a cosmic function and makes exile a fact about the structure of reality rather than a punishment.
The Catastrophe Explanation
Here is where a modern reader should apply pressure, because it is Scholem's characteristic move and it has not aged as well as the rest.
He explains the Lurianic system as a response to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. A community shattered and scattered produced a cosmology in which shattering and scattering are the structure of the world, and in which exile is not merely their condition but God's.
It is a compelling reading. It is also difficult to sustain. Safed Kabbalah develops most fully three generations after the expulsion, and several of its key components appear in earlier sources with no connection to 1492. The correlation is looser than the presentation implies, and later scholars have argued that Scholem reached for historical catastrophe as an explanation more readily than the evidence required.
The pattern recurs throughout the book, and it reflects Scholem's underlying historiography: he tends to see mystical developments as generated by crisis and as moving through dialectical stages. That is a philosophy of history brought to the material rather than derived from it.
The Chapter That Made His Name
The eighth lecture is where Scholem is doing something nobody else had, and it remains gripping.
In 1665 a young man in Gaza declared Sabbatai Sevi to be the messiah, and within months an enormous proportion of the Jewish world believed it. Communities across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East sold property, did penance, prepared to depart. It was, by any measure, the largest messianic movement in Jewish history since antiquity.
The following year Sabbatai was arrested by the Ottoman authorities and, given a choice, converted to Islam.
The expected outcome was collapse. What happened instead is Scholem's subject. A theology was constructed to explain it: the messiah's apostasy was the deepest phase of his mission, a descent into the domain of impurity to redeem the sparks trapped there, which only he could undertake and which necessarily looked like betrayal. Believers persisted for generations, some outwardly observant and secretly Sabbatian, some following their messiah into conversion.
Scholem's insistence that this deserved serious study, rather than being passed over as a humiliating episode, was itself a scholarly intervention. His treatment of the paradox, faith that survives by reinterpreting its own refutation, is the most psychologically acute material in the book.
The Most Contested Claim
He then goes considerably further, and this is where most disagreement concentrates.
Scholem argues that the antinomian theology of the Sabbatian aftermath, in which the law is transcended and sin performed in holiness, corroded traditional authority from within, and that when the Enlightenment arrived, the communities most receptive to it were those where Sabbatian currents had already loosened the ground. On this reading, a line runs from a failed messiah to Jewish modernity and secularisation.
It is a brilliant thesis and the evidence for it is thin. The connections are suggestive, the documentation is fragmentary by the nature of a secret movement, and it fits Scholem's dialectical temperament very neatly. Later scholars have generally treated it as a hypothesis rather than a finding.
Whether it is true, it is one of the boldest arguments in twentieth-century Jewish historiography and it is worth reading for its own sake.
What Idel Changed
The most important development in the field since Scholem is the challenge mounted by Moshe Idel, and any assessment of this book now has to include it.
Idel's argument, developed most fully in 1988, is not that Scholem got the facts wrong. It is that Scholem's selection created a distorted picture that the field then took for the territory.
Specifically: Scholem foregrounded the theosophical Kabbalah, concerned with the structure of the divine and the symbolism of the emanations, and treated the ecstatic and experiential strand, above all Abulafia's techniques for altering consciousness, as marginal. Idel argued the ecstatic tradition is far more substantial than Scholem allowed, that manuscripts documenting it sat unread because nobody was looking, and that Kabbalah was throughout a set of practices as much as a body of doctrine.
He also challenged the historicist habit, arguing that mystical developments frequently have internal, textual causes rather than being generated by external crisis, and that Scholem's preference for rupture over continuity was a philosophical commitment rather than a finding.
Idel's own reassessment, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, is now the standard second book on the subject, and reading it after this one is the correct sequence.
Standing Outside on Purpose
A point Scholem made about himself, and it matters for how to read him.
He was not a practitioner and did not claim mystical experience. He described himself as standing at the edge of the tradition, studying it with the tools of philology and history, and he was suspicious of scholars who blurred the line between describing a mysticism and adopting one.
This produces both the book's rigour and its limits. The rigour is that nothing is asserted on the strength of resonance. The limit is that a tradition understood entirely from its texts is a tradition with the practice removed, and Idel's criticism about the neglected experiential material is partly a consequence of that stance.
Scholem was also candid that he had begun in hope of finding something living and had ended as a historian, and there is a note of loss in the way he writes about it.
Against the Commercial Version
Worth stating plainly for readers arriving from the other direction.
The Kabbalah in this book is a Jewish tradition, written in Hebrew and Aramaic, developed within communities governed by Jewish law, by people for whom observance was the precondition of the whole enterprise. Its concerns are the structure of divinity, the meaning of scripture, the effect of human action on the upper worlds, and the problem of exile.
The version marketed in the late twentieth century as a universal wisdom system detached from Judaism, offering personal fulfilment and available for a fee, has almost no relationship to this material beyond borrowed vocabulary. That is not a claim about who may study what. It is a claim about what the historical tradition contained, and Scholem's book is the fastest way to see the size of the gap.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want to know what Kabbalah historically was, in what order, and on what evidence.
Read it if you are interested in how disciplines are founded, because there are few cleaner examples of one person creating a field and few clearer illustrations of the cost.
Read it before Idel, then read Idel, because the second book is written against the first and loses much of its force without it.
Do not read it for practice, for personal application, or as an introduction to the symbolism as a system to use. It is a history, written by someone who thought the difference between studying a tradition and inhabiting one should be maintained.
The most transferable thing in this book is the Lurianic structure, and it survives being detached from its theology better than most cosmologies do. A world that began with a withdrawal, suffered a breakage that was nobody's fault, and left the repair to ordinary people doing ordinary things attentively, is a picture with unusual properties. It makes no promise that the damage was meaningful. It does not require that the breakage be justified. And it locates the work entirely in the small, unremarkable actions available to whoever happens to be present. Whatever you believe about divine light, that is a more usable account of living among wreckage than most of the alternatives.
The book that made a field, with its own fingerprints all over it.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of where the scholarship has moved past Scholem is set out above and is independent of the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism?
Gershom Scholem's 1941 book, based on nine lectures delivered in New York in 1938, surveying Jewish mystical movements from the chariot mysticism of late antiquity through to eighteenth-century Hasidism. It effectively founded the academic study of Kabbalah.
Who was Gershom Scholem?
A German-born scholar, 1897 to 1982, who broke with his assimilated family over Zionism, emigrated to Palestine in 1923, worked as a librarian and then as professor at the Hebrew University, and created a scholarly field where none existed.
Why was the book so important?
Because nineteenth-century Jewish scholarship had treated Kabbalah as an embarrassing superstition to be excluded from the story of Judaism. Scholem argued it was a central and vital force, and he made that argument with philological rigour rather than sympathy alone.
Who wrote the Zohar?
Scholem demonstrated on linguistic and stylistic grounds that the Zohar was composed in thirteenth-century Castile, almost certainly by Moses de Leon, rather than by the second-century sage to whom it is traditionally attributed. Later scholars have modified this toward a circle of authors.
What is Lurianic Kabbalah?
The sixteenth-century system associated with Isaac Luria in Safed, built on divine contraction to make room for creation, a catastrophe in which the vessels meant to hold divine light shattered, and the human task of gathering the scattered sparks.
What is Scholem's Sabbatian thesis?
That the mass messianic movement around Sabbatai Sevi in 1665, and the theology developed after his conversion to Islam, was a major Jewish phenomenon rather than an aberration, and that its antinomian aftermath fed into the emergence of Jewish modernity.
What did Moshe Idel object to?
That Scholem overemphasised the theosophical and mythic strands while underplaying the ecstatic and experiential ones, that he explained mystical developments too readily as responses to historical catastrophe, and that his own philosophical preferences shaped what the field looked for.
Is the expulsion explanation still accepted?
Not without challenge. Scholem read Lurianic Kabbalah as a response to the 1492 expulsion from Spain. Later scholars have pointed out the chronological gap and the presence of the key ideas in earlier sources, and treat the connection as looser than he presented it.
Is it a difficult book?
Moderately. It was written as lectures for an educated general audience, so the prose is clear, and it assumes some familiarity with Jewish history and uses Hebrew terms freely. The extensive notes are for specialists and can be skipped.
Does it teach Kabbalah as a practice?
No. Scholem writes as a historian describing what people believed and when, not as a practitioner or a guide. He was explicit that he stood outside the tradition he studied, and readers wanting instruction need an entirely different kind of book.
How does it relate to popular Kabbalah?
Almost not at all, and the contrast is instructive. Scholem's Kabbalah is a historically situated Jewish tradition in Hebrew and Aramaic, embedded in law and community. The modern commercial version is largely a twentieth-century construction with different sources.
Who should read it?
Anyone who wants to know what Kabbalah historically was rather than what it has been marketed as, and anyone interested in how a single scholar can create a discipline and in what that costs the discipline afterwards.
A founder is not a final word
The most useful lesson in the story of this book is what happened after it. Scholem was extraordinary, he was right about a great deal, and the discipline he built spent decades not looking at things because he had not looked at them. That is not a failure of his; it is what happens whenever one person defines a field. It is also a reason to read any authoritative survey with a specific question in mind: what would this author have found uninteresting, and who is looking there now? The answer is usually where the next thing is.
Sources & References
- Scholem, Gershom (1941). Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.
- Scholem, G. Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, the full treatment of the eighth lecture's subject.
- Idel, Moshe (1988). Kabbalah: New Perspectives.
- Liebes, Yehuda. Studies on the composition of the Zohar.
- Scholarship on Safed Kabbalah and the dating of Lurianic ideas.
- The Scholem and Walter Benjamin correspondence.
- Critical literature on Scholem's historiography and his dialectical framework.