  It is not without irony that Scholem's most celebrated works were written in German or Hebrew yet his most popular and arguably most influential work Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism was written in English at a time when most scholarship in Judaica was still being written in German. By the end of the 1930's Scholem was already hard at work on Sabbateanism which would result in a major book (two volumes in Hebrew, one large volume in English) entitled Sabbatei Zevi: Mystical Messiah. A preliminary study on Sabbatean antinomianism “Redemption through Sin” was published in 1936 and then appeared in English in 1970. During that time, in the late 1930's, Scholem received an invitation from the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City to deliver a series of lectures on Jewish Mysticism. He accepted the invitation and wrote the lectures in English (a first for him). These lectures were subsequently published as Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism in 1941. This work was a watershed for the entire field of Kabbala studies and Jewish Studies more generally. For the first time he offered a synoptic yet detailed presentation of the entire history of Kabbala beginning with the German Rhineland pietists (Hasidei Ashkenaz) from the 12th century until Hasidism in the 18th and 19th centuries. In this work Scholem presents his theory of the authorship and construction of the Zohar, one of the first programmatic studies of the enigmatic kabbalist Abraham Abulafia, and offers the first glimpses of his own historiography. Moreover, the last page of Major Trends presents a few parenthetical observations about the “possibility for Jewish mysticism today” that would occupy a number of essays later in his career. His historiographical musings in Major Trends are important because it is here we are presented with Scholem's dialectical approach to history and his claim, for example, that Lurianic Kabbala with its intense focus on creation as rupture and catastrophe was a response to the Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492. This suggests that kabbalistic circles were using metaphysics to reify historical reality, which led Scholem to coin the term “historiosophy” to describe his understanding of history and metaphysics. It also offers another first glimpse of his work on Sabbateanism which Scholem claimed was a heretical but not necessary deviant form of Jewish mysticism. By that I mean that even fairly early in his career Scholem held that Kabbala is a theology that requires a normative law (tradition) — largely as a foil — but is always in dialectical tension with that law. The fact that antinomianism rose to the surface in the Sabbatean movement, breaking the normative tradition through its combination of messianism and mysticism, should not be seen as an aberration as much as a tragic inevitability. This Sabbatean heresy, argued Scholem, did not end with the failure of the movement but influenced, and even set the conditions for, Jewish modernity. His speculations about possible influences between Sabbatean and Reform Judaism in Hungary were duly criticized by Jacob Katz for lack of historical evidence. However, the more theoretical and structural point about Kabbala more generally and Sabbateanism in particular as being in tension with normative Jewish law (halakha) and the ways that Sabbateanism may have (indirectly) informed early Reform which rejected halakha outright is a topic worthy of further thought even though it may be historically unprovable. While direct links between Sabbateans and Reformers have not been definitively unearthed, the geographical proximity of Sabbateans and early Reformers in Hungary and the extent to which Sabbateans functioned in clandestine ways is curious.