peculiarities" Benjamin's writings was its "enormous suitability for canonization; I might almost say for quotation as a kind of Holy Writ." The notion of the three periods, with its interactions between rational and irrational elements in Judaism, led Scholem to put forward some controversial arguments. He thought that the 17th century messianic movement, known as Sabbateanism, was developed from the Lurianic Kabbalah. In order to neutralize Sabbateanism, Hasidism had emerged as a Hegelian synthesis. Many of those who joined the Hasidic movement, because they had seen in it an Orthodox congregation, considered it scandalous that their community should be associated with a heretical movement. In the same way, Scholem produced the hypothesis that the source of the 13th century Kabbalah was a Jewish gnosticism that preceded Christian gnosticism. The historiographical approach of Scholem also involved a linguistic theory. In contrast to Buber, Scholem believed in the power of the language to invoke supernatural phenomena. In contrast to Walter Benjamin, he put the Hebrew language in a privileged position with respect to other languages, as the only language capable of revealing the divine truth. His special regard for the spiritual potency of the Hebrew language was expressed in his 1926 letter to Franz Rosenzweig regarding his concerns over the "secularization" of Hebrew. Scholem considered the Kabbalists as interpreters of a pre-existent linguistic revelation. Friends, colleagues and canonical affinities Scholem's closest peers included, most famously, Walter Benjamin and Leo Strauss. Though his relationship with Franz Rosenzweig was of shorter duration, it was also a deeply influential one. Likewise, though Scholem was never directly introduced to Franz Kafka, he found out later in life that Kafka approved of his comments in a debate. Scholem and Benjamin's discussion Kafka, spanning decades, played no small role in the elevation Kafka's literary and epistolary writings to canonical status in both secular and mystical literature as writing that was prophetic or premonitory of the Holocaust while also having qualities of a kind of post-metaphysical kabbalah. It is a measure of the depth of Scholem's friendship with Benjamin that he wrote two memoirs at the end of his life: his own autobiography tends to be less read or frequently cited than his "Autobiography of a Friendship" recounting his lifelong relationship and work in partnership with Benjamin prior to the latter's death in flight from the Gestapo in 1940. In addition to his Kabbalah scholarship, a significant portion of