Rachel Elior

[3] Rachel Elior's research into Hasidism and the Dead Sea Scrolls has elicited a range of scholarly responses, marking her work as a significant point of contention and endorsement within academic circles.

And that Elior, among others, "should revisit [the early writers of hasidic stories'] conceptual framework, in which sources coexist in a nontemporal fashion and freely talk to one another, as ideas in the Platonic world of forms.

"[7] Nonetheless, Joseph Dan defends Elior,[8] while Princeton professor Peter Schaefer criticizes her for blurring distinctions between texts and periods, and is not sensitive to important nuances, noting that her views of angels at Qumran and the calendar are wrong.

[11] Elior has posited that the Essenes, traditionally considered the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls never existed, suggesting instead (as have Lawrence Schiffman, Moshe Goshen-Gottstein, Chaim Menachem Rabin, and others) that they were really the renegade sons of Zadok, a priestly caste banished from the Temple of Jerusalem by Greek rulers in 2nd century BC.

[12] In contrast, James Charlesworth, director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project and professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, states there is "significant evidence for the Essenes’ existence" and "It is impossible that Josephus created a group already mentioned by Philo, who had visited Jerusalem," arguing against Elior's conclusion.