that this scholar--once the Rabbi of Poznan—was Phillip Bloch. ) The analysis of Judaism carried out by the Wissenschaft school was flawed in two ways, according to Scholem: It studied Judaism as a dead object rather than as a living organism; and it did not consider the proper foundations of Judaism, the non-rational force that, in Scholem's view, made the religion a living thing. In Scholem's opinion, the mythical and mystical components were at least as important as the rational ones, and he thought that they, rather than the minutiae of Halakha, were the truly living core of Judaism. 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. In the worldview of Scholem, the research of Jewish mysticism could not be separated from its historical context. Starting from something similar to the Gegengeschichte of Friedrich Nietzsche, he ended up including less normative aspects of Judaism in the public history. Specifically, Scholem in his scholarly writing that Jewish history could be divided into three periods: During the Biblical period, monotheism battles mythology without completely defeating it. During the Talmudic period, some of the institutions—for example, the notion of the magical power of the accomplishment of the Sacraments—are removed in favour of the purer concept of the divine transcendence. During the medieval period, the impossibility of reconciling the abstract concept of God of ancient Greek philosophy with the personal God of the Bible, led Jewish thinkers, such as Maimonides, to try to eliminate the remaining myths and to modify the figure of the living God. After this time, mysticism, as an effort to find again the essence of the God of their fathers, became more widespread. Elsewhere, in oral presentation or informal reflection, Scholem inflected the three periods within a different frame of reference: there was the primordial inscription and enunciation of the Law in the Torah and the Talmud, the mystical reflections of the Kaballah, and the post-metaphysical phase of mystical writings represented by (for example) the writings of Franz Kafka or the critical mysticism of his friend and correspondent Walter Benjamin. 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 Kaballah, and elsewhere remarked that, "among the