Moshe Idel's Opening

A Hebrew University scholar whose Kabbalah: New Perspectives (1988) challenged Gershom Scholem's dominance over the field — arguing for phenomenological and comparative approaches to Kabbalistic sources alongside Scholem's historical-philological method, and for taking mystical and ecstatic experience seriously as a subject in its own right rather than only as a text to be dated and sourced.

⚠ IDEL DOES NOT DISCUSS JUNG, AND THIS NODE DOES NOT CLAIM HE DOES. What he opened is the methodological room this whole wing is standing in: once experience and comparison across traditions count as legitimate scholarly objects rather than a category error, a wing asking what a psychologist's vision has in common with a kabbalist's doctrine is doing recognizable intellectual work rather than committing a category mistake by definition. The permission is structural, not personal.