Moshe Idel

Kabbalah: New Perspectives (1988) — the field's second founding: against Scholem's history-of-ideas, Idel foregrounded experience and technique (unio mystica, Abulafia's methods, theurgy: the commandments as maintenance of the divine). Recovered the ecstatic pole of the tradition from the archive. The Scholem–Idel dialectic IS modern Kabbalah scholarship's own two pillars.