Scholem became a lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He taught the Kabbalah and mysticism from a scientific point of view and became the first professor of Jewish mysticism at the university in 1933, working in this post until his retirement in 1965, when he became an emeritus professor. Scholem directly contrasted his historiographical approach on the study of Jewish
mysticism with the approach of the 19th-century school of the
Wissenschaft des Judentums ("Science of Judaism"), which sought to submit the study of Judaism to the discipline of subjects such as
history,
philology, and
philosophy. According to Jeremy Adler, Scholem's thinking was "both recognizably Jewish and deeply German," and "changed the course of twentieth-century European thought." At the time Scholem entered his field of study, Jewish mysticism was acknowledged as Judaism's weakest scholarly link by many of the scholars, publishers and cultural leaders of the Jewish community and gentile German scholars who sponsored Scholem's early career, including
Martin Buber,
Salman Schocken,
Franz Rosenzweig,
Robert Eisler, , Moses Marx,
Clemens Baumker,
Fritz Hommel and
Walter Benjamin. Gesturing at the rabbi's library of documents, manuscripts and autographs written by the authors of the Kabbalah, some of which had been inscribed in
early modern or
medieval centuries, Scholem remarked, "How wonderful it is, Herr Professor, that you have read and learned all this!" to which "...the elderly gentleman replied: 'What! And I
also have to
read all this nonsense?!" there was the primordial inscription and enunciation of the Law in the Torah and the Talmud, the mystical reflections of the Kabbalah, and the post-metaphysical phase of mystical writings represented by (for example) the writings of Franz Kafka or the critical mysticism of his friend and correspondent Walter Benjamin. Scholem often told his students that the modern reader must read Franz Kafka in order to enter into the frame of mind native to the Kabbalah, and elsewhere remarked that, "among the peculiarities" Benjamin's writings was its "enormous suitability for canonization; I might almost say for quotation as a kind of Holy Writ." The notion of the three periods, with its interactions between rational and irrational elements in Judaism, led Scholem to put forward some controversial arguments. He thought that the 17th century messianic movement, known as
Sabbateanism, was developed from the
Lurianic Kabbalah. In order to neutralize Sabbateanism,
Hasidism had emerged as a
Hegelian synthesis. Many of those who joined the Hasidic movement, because they had seen in it an
Orthodox congregation, considered it scandalous that their community should be associated with a heretical movement. In the same way, Scholem produced the hypothesis that the source of the 13th century Kabbalah was a Jewish
gnosticism that preceded Christian gnosticism. The historiographical approach of Scholem also involved a linguistic theory. In contrast to Buber, Scholem believed in the power of the language to invoke supernatural phenomena. In contrast to
Walter Benjamin, he put the
Hebrew language in a privileged position with respect to other languages, as the only language capable of revealing the divine truth. His special regard for the spiritual potency of the Hebrew language was expressed in his 1926 letter to
Franz Rosenzweig regarding his concerns over the "secularization" of Hebrew. Scholem considered the Kabbalists as interpreters of a pre-existent linguistic revelation. == Scholem and the Kabbalah ==