Origins of the Kabbalah

Gershom Scholem was the foundational modern scholar of Jewish mysticism, and this Princeton University Press book, translated into English by Allan Arkush, is his foundational scholarly history of the origins of Kabbalah, tracing its emergence including the early Bahir text in medieval Provence. Its strength is that it remains the foundational work that established Kabbalah studies as a serious academic field, grounded in Scholem's own extensive manuscript research. Its limit is that it is a foundational mid-twentieth century work, and later scholars, including some of Scholem's own students, have refined and in places revised specific elements of his historical reconstruction, so a claim about the current scholarly consensus on Kabbalah's origins may need a more recent source alongside this still standard foundational history.