Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism Add a review

Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism is a work on the history of the Jewish Kabbalah by Gershom Scholem, published in 1941.

The contents of the book were first assembled in the order in which they will finally appear as a series of lectures delivered in 1938 at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where he had been invited by Shalom Spiegel to give a course on Kabbalah. (Two of the eleven chapters or lectures appearing in the book, were delivered on other occasions as Scholem points out in the foreword).

In a letter to Walter Benjamin written March 25th of that year, Scholem notes that all of his lectures have now been delivered such that he would be free to spend the remainder of his visit (lasting until that June) reviewing the Kabbalistic manuscripts available in the library of the seminary. Thus the lectures were delivered between January and March. The historical backdrop and the timing of these lectures gives some context of the atmosphere in these lectures: A public decree that Adolph Hitler will assume absolute command of the German Army, having dismissed his former field-marshall, goes into effect on February 4th, 1938 shortly after the lectures would have begun and the Wehrmacht rolls into Austria inaugurating the Anschluss (Germany's annexation of Austria into the Third Reich) March 12th of that year during the final weeks of the course.