  Second, in the early decades of the 20th century the philosophies of Hermann Cohen and Martin Buber — the former a neo-Kantian rationalist, the latter a romantic existentialist—were immensely popular. Scholem rejected both grand schemes in favor of careful historical analysis of the regnant literary sources of Judaism. In addition, in response to Adolph von Harnack's influential The Essence of Christianity (Harnack argued, among other things, that Christianity was rooted in Gnosticism and thus needn't be dependent on any Jewish sources damaging the very idea of a German Jewish culture) theologians such as Leo Baeck argued for an ‘essence’ of Judaism to counter Harnack's position that Judaism was irrelevant and illegitimate for Christianity. Buber and Scholem both rejected the notion of an essence of Judaism yet both differed on the alternative. Buber focused on the notion of Erlebnis, or intuitive experience, as the anchor of a human's relationship to God via revelation (or relation). That is, for Buber, experience was a meta-lingual phenomenon and thus language was inferior to pure experience. For Buber, then, there is no essence of Judaism but there may be an essence of religious experience that transcends language and thus particularity. Scholem rejected this and argued that Judaism can only be renewed through the historical consciousness of Erfahrung or concrete historical experience. This kind of experience is mediated through language, specifically, the language of the textual tradition. Influenced by Walter Benjamin's early theory of language, Scholem argued that language was of “divine origin” (however this is understood) and thus the experience of revelation was itself linguistic. For Scholem, therefore, there is no essential religious experience as all human experience is mediated through language and thus particular to a cultural and linguistic context. He also held there was no essence of Judaism if by that we mean some core sets of values that can be exhibited in all forms of Jewish literature. 