A closer look

Before Gershom Scholem came along, Jewish mysticism was treated by respectable scholars as the embarrassing, irrational uncle of Judaism. Scholem single-handedly took the ecstatic trances, demonology, and dizzying cosmic mechanics of Lurianic Kabbalah and repackaged them into a hyper-intellectual university discipline. He essentially proved you can make literally any wild esoteric practice sound sane if you use enough German footnotes.