philology:
Philology is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is a combination of literary criticism, history, and linguistics.[1] Philology is more commonly defined as the study of literary texts as well as oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist. [Wikipedia]
Noted in “The Eternal Exile,” which is a review of two biographies of Gershom Scholem by Nathan Goldman, The Hedgehog Review:
The resemblance of the Kabbalah as portrayed in Scholem’s work to its actual historical content is a complex subject beyond the purview of both Prochnik and Engel, neither of whom are scholars of Jewish mysticism. But both writers subscribe to the increasingly popular reading of Scholem’s scholarship as a creative project. Engel writes that he sees Scholem “not as an explorer but as a poet.” This is not to say that Scholem was fundamentally a fabricator—though Prochnik notes instances in which he clearly was—but that he shaped what he found; his philology was guided by a philosophy. His scholarly interest in recovering the history of Jewish mysticism was inseparable from his political desire to rejuvenate the Jewish people in the present. Scholem wrote about the Kabbalah as a distinctively Jewish resource for cultural renewal. His spiritual yearning brought him to Palestine, where he became a librarian in the Hebrew department of the National Library and, through his writing and political activity, worked to realize his vision of Zionism.
