Widely regarded as the founder of modern academic study of the Kabbalah, Scholem was appointed the first professor of Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

[1] Scholem is acknowledged as the single most significant figure in the recovery, collection, annotation, and registration into rigorous Jewish scholarship of the canonical bibliography of mysticism and scriptural commentary that runs through its primordial phase in the Sefer Yetzirah, its inauguration in the Bahir, its exegesis in the Pardes and the Zohar to its cosmogonic, apocalyptic climax in Isaac Luria's Ein Sof that is known collectively as Kabbalah.

[2][3] After generations of demoralization and assimilation in the European enlightenment,[4] the disappointment of messianic hopes,[4] the famine of 1916 in Palestine,[5] and in the midst of the catastrophe of the Final Solution in Europe[6] Scholem gathered and reassembled these sacred texts from many of the archives that had been disarranged, orphaned, confiscated under Nazi rule or otherwise washed up in Genizah in the middle east.

As Scholem points out in his memoirs, the canon of sacred Jewish writings from the diaspora and the Middle Ages (re: "Kabbalah") had fallen into such a state of disrepair and oblivion—fragmented and effaced by persecutions from without as well as contortions, conversions and schisms from within Judaism—that many of the "finest writings..."[7] from the major currents of Jewish mysticism could only be found in long block quotations in antisemitic texts, where some "nincompoop who had quoted and translated the most wonderful, the most profound things,"[7] had assembled them "in order to decry them as blasphemies.

"[7] (This was a strong, somewhat exaggerated statement for expressive effect that Scholem attributes to Ernst Bloch in his memoirs—but there he co-signs the sentiment and appropriates it as his own description of the state of affairs in other places.

Scholem dedicated his book Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Die jüdische Mystik in ihren Hauptströmungen), based on lectures 1938–1940, to Benjamin.

[12] It may be considered notable that though Scholem's allegiance to the Zionist cause (or the reclamation of Palestine by the Jewish diaspora) is incontrovertible, his relationship to the manifest ethics of Zionism was more ambiguous and critical than Buber's.

[17] During the period that he was a librarian of ancient manuscripts at the library of Hebrew University, fragments of the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls and inventory from the Cairo Genizah--just to name a few notable exemplars--moved through the collections he was overseeing.

Though he started teaching smaller seminars at an earlier date, Scholem was not appointed as a full professor at Hebrew University until Hitler rose to power.

[6][13] Scholem told the story of his early research "at the start of my path" in 1922 when he went to Berlin to visit "the only Jewish scholar who had engaged in the study of Kabbalah in the previous generation.

"[24] 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!"

In particular, he disagreed with what he considered to be Martin Buber's personalization of Kabbalistic concepts as well as what he argued was an inadequate approach to Jewish history, Hebrew language, and the land of Israel.

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.

"[26] The notion of the three periods, with its interactions between rational and irrational elements in Judaism, led Scholem to put forward some controversial arguments.

[7] In addition to his Kabbalah scholarship, a significant portion of Scholem's working life postwar was spent recovering, editing and promoting the literary estate of his dead friend.

As a major, unofficial but widely acknowledged figurehead of mystical, historical and theological currents within both Reform and (much more controversially) Conservative Judaism after World War II and the Destruction of the European Jewry in the Holocaust, Scholem's stature within Jewish tradition is roughly comparable to the role played before the First World War and during the interwar period by Martin Buber.

[42] He has also influenced ideas of Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and George Steiner.

[43] American author Michael Chabon cites Scholem's essay, The Idea of the Golem, as having assisted him in conceiving the Pulitzer-Prize winning book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.