 Scholem's magisterial "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism" (1941) among his seminal works, though representing scholarship and interpretations that have subsequently been challenged and revised within the field, remains the only academic survey studying all main historical periods of Jewish mysticism

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has been a centre of this research, including Scholem and Isaiah Tishby, and more recently Joseph Dan, Yehuda Liebes, Rachel Elior, and Moshe Idel.Scholars across the eras of Jewish mysticism in America and Britain have included Alexander Altmann, Arthur Green, Lawrence Fine, Elliot Wolfson, Daniel Matt, Louis Jacobs and Ada Rapoport-Albert.Moshe Idel has opened up research on the Ecstatic Kabbalah alongside the theosophical, and has called for new multi-disciplinary approaches, beyond the philological and historical that have dominated until now, to include phenomenology, psychology, anthropology and comparative studies.