Abstract

According to Thomas S. Kuhn what changes with the transition to maturity of discipline is not the presence of a paradigm but rather its nature. The purpose of this study is to analyse a nature of paradigm in the study of Jewish mysticism. In the present article I attempt to show, that the discipline shares many characteristic features of the schools of pre-paradigm period caused by the absence of a pre-established theory. Despite the fact we are able to observe that the community of scientists shares the sorts of elements which we might labell a paradigm. It is the cultural universality of religion as a pre-theoretical intuition that unites the whole community. This theological assumption governs not only the study of religion but the study of Jewish mysticism as well. It helps to unify the scientific community, interpret all the collected facts, and predict the same or similar phenomenon in new areas of research. For that purpose, most of members of the community use simple tools (e.g. an union with God) in order to identify a phenomenon of mysticism.