165 book review George Y. Kohler, Kabbalah Research in the Wissenschaft des Judentums (1820–1880): The Foundation of an Academic Discipline, Europäisch-jüdische Studien Beiträge, Band 47 (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019), IS BN: 978-3-11-062037-5, 99,95 € / $114.99 / £91.00, viii + 272 pp. While venerated as the founding fathers of academic Jewish studies, the schol- ars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums have been criticized for various types of ideological bias, apologetics, and essentialism. George Y. Kohler’s study takes on one of the lines of critique of the Wissenschaft des Judentums laid out by its twentieth-century successors, that the Wissenschaft school shunned the research of Kabbalah and did so for ideological reasons. Eager to achieve the acceptance of the Wissenschaft des Judentums in academe, these scholars supposedly dismissed Kabbalah out of fears that engagement in something as esoteric or irrational would prove embarrassing in the eyes of their gentile peers and negatively influence their project. In this book, Kohler examines the scholarly output of the Wissenschaft circle to debunk this claim, and show that, if anything, the opposite is true: the Wissenschaft circle was deeply in- vested in the Kabbalah and deserves full credit for founding its research as an academic discipline. However, the book’s goal is not only the revindication of the Wissenschaft scholars; an examination of their approach to Kabbalah, as Kohler argues, allows for a better understanding of the Wissenschaft des Judentums and its scholarly agenda. The book focuses on the first generation of the Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars, spanning from the 1820s to 1880s, the seminal years for the movement. Over the course of its nineteen chapters, arranged chronologically, the book re- assesses the Kabbalah scholarship of better-known scholars such as Abraham Geiger or Heinrich Graetz, but also sheds light on more obscure figures, such as Moritz Freystadt or Ludwig Phillipson. In addition to scholarly books by those authors, it also examines translations, reviews, and correspondence penned by the Wissenschaft scholars. In the final chapter, the book surveys the treatment of Kabbalah in various textbooks written in the spirit of the Wissenschaft in the 1870s and 1880s. All of this aims to demonstrate that the research of Kabbalah was very much part and parcel of the Wissenschaft des Judentums’ discourse, as Kohler duly reminds the reader in the conclusion of almost each and every chapter. Kabbalah research was neither neglected by the Wissenschaft des Judentums, nor was an interest of individual authors within the movement. It was an important part of the intellectual exchange, persuasively documented in the book, which took place among the scholarly elite of the Wissenschaft and was communicated to the broader audience in schools and cultural societ- ies run in the spirit of the Wissenschaft. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/1872471X-11411153