Gershom Scholem

Gershom Scholem, was a German-born Israeli philosopher and historian. He is widely regarded as the founder of the modern, academic study of Kabbalah. He was the first professor of Jewish Mysticism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His close friends included Theodore Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and Leo Strauss, and selected letters from his correspondence with those philosophers have been published. He was also friendly with the author Shai Agnon and the Talmudic scholar Saul Lieberman.