Gershom Scholem גרשם שלום

He was born in Berlin in 1897, into a family that had left Jewishness altogether—and while still very young he turned back: to Hebrew, to the sources, to Zionism. In 1923 he went up to the Land of Israel. He worked at the National Library, spending years seeking out and describing kabbalistic manuscripts across the world; with the opening of the Hebrew University he became the first professor of Jewish mysticism anywhere.

What he did. The nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums saw superstition in kabbalah and went around it. Scholem showed that it cannot be gone around—that Safed, Chasidut, Sabbateanism and much of how Jewry thought about itself all passed through it. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) is the book with which the subject began as scholarship.

The Zohar. Tradition holds the book to be the word of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, spoken in the cave. Scholem, continuing what had been begun before him, argued otherwise: that the Zohar as we have it took shape in Castile at the end of the thirteenth century and that Rabbi Moshe de Leon wrote it; his arguments are the language, the range of concepts, the recurring turns of phrase. The dispute has run seven centuries and is not settled; both sides bring arguments that cannot be waved away. So it is set down in our article on the Zohar, and it is not set down otherwise here.

Sabbateanism. Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah reads the movement as having grown out of Lurianic kabbalah spread through the communities. Moshe Idel objects: before 1665 the Lurianic texts had barely spread at all. Both readings are named with us—here and in the record on Nathan of Gaza.

He died in Jerusalem in 1982. His argument with Hannah Arendt over the Eichmann trial and his friendship with Walter Benjamin are a separate story and not ours; in this reference they stand where they touch ours.