Speaking to an audience of German Jewish émigrés in the London Leo Baeck Institute in 1959, Gershom Scholem launched a fierce attack against the fathers of Jewish Studies, the discipline whose most famed representative he himself had by then become. His systematic criticism of nineteenth-century Wissenschaft des Judentums, delivered in German and entitled “Science of Judaism Then and Now”, was itself a milder version of an article published in Hebrew fifteen years earlier under the title “Mitokh Hirhurim ‘al Ḥokhmat Yisrael”. Asked why he changed his tone, Scholem would later say in an interview with Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Bollack: “Well, I regret deeply that I had to speak in this way in front of the Philistines of the Leo Baeck Institute in London… I behaved more or less like those who were able to write for Das Reich without being Nazis. My first Hebrew article was directed toward an audience which was able to think differently.”

The thrust of Scholem's criticism in both essays remained the same, whoever the audience was. His main complaint was that he regarded Wissenschaft des Judentums as a thoroughly apologetic enterprise. He did not, of course, deny the enormous academic achievements of the discipline, but at the same time he regarded the fulfillment of modern Jewish Studies possible only in a Jewish society: “Apologetics was the great stimulus in a battle waged against old and new anti-Semitism… The Science of Judaism was a force in this battle – often a decisive weapon – as we can recognize by looking back on it today.” Scholem goes on to mention that “what went on in the cellar was scrupulously avoided. These scholars considered only the intellectual relations of the salon: the Bible and Luther, Hermann Cohen and Kant, Steinthal and Wilhelm von Humboldt”. Jewish criminals, the underworld, had been left out as a topic of research, for apologetic reasons, just as Jewish mysticism had, Scholem's own area. This all can change in a Jewish state, as he remarked: