  In addition to hermeneutical arguments regarding historicism, anti-historicism, literary style and poetic license, arguments about the picture of Hasidism that emerged out of Buber’s research and writing are also based upon the philosophical world picture as it took shape in Buber’s philosophical universe. Against Buber’s corpus of Hasidica, the doyen of Kabbalah scholarship, Gershom Scholem, was one of the first to throw down the gauntlet. Scholem argued that Buber’s focus on the genre of folk-tales obscured the theoretical works within the corpus Hasidic literature, where the phenomenon of (gnostic) world denial was more pronounced than in the popular tales. Buber’s later collections of Hasidic tales in particular reflect a this-worldly ethos at odds with important tenets of Hasidic mysticism. Whereas Buber’s early, neo-romantic Hasidica assumed a more distant and even antagonistic relation to the world of time and space, critics, such as Scholem, Katz, and Schatz-Uffenheimer, focused their critique almost exclusively on the later body of work, in which a this-wordly cosmology was more sharply articulated, in line with Buber’s own renewed interest, starting in the mid to late 1920s, with quotidian forms of existence.