Gershom Gerhard Scholem (1897-1982), one of the most significant Jewish thinkers and scholars of Jewish studies of the 20th century, the founder of the science of Kabbalah, was the first to dare to present Jewish mysticism to the critical view of academic science. The book "The Main Currents in Jewish Mysticism" is a fundamental work that has made a huge contribution to the study of Kabbalah, Hasidism, Sabbatianism and other areas of Jewish thought. This is the fruit of personal experiences and internal conflicts of a scientist, a brilliant analyst and skeptic who was looking for his own path of comprehending the Jewish spiritual heritage. This book, which for the first time presented, although not an exhaustive, but a holistic picture of the main directions in Jewish mysticism and largely determined the academic profile of the science of Kabbalah, is a work so significant that the consequences of its appearance before the general public were not limited to a purely scientific resonance. The publication of Scholem's book was an important event both for the world intellectual elite interested in a new understanding of the mystical heritage, and for Jewish society as a whole, because for the first time the most secret and sacred layer of tradition was presented to the discerning attention of the reading audience in a rationalized shell.