As his Ecstatic Confessions would testify, Buber was concerned from the very beginning with the phenomenon of mysticism in general. His enterprise in the field of hasidism was an integral part of a philosophical-experiential orientation which gravitated towards the orient, following thefin de siecle fashion of his time. Scholem's frame of mind was quite different, since the starting point of his considerations was the continuum of Jewish mysticism and its particular dynamics as a specific type of mysticism, and the historical and philological questions that derived from this.

Buber's approach is phenomenological; he is interested primarily in the religious characteristics of a certain type of mysticism, and only secondarily in its historical genesis.’ His discussions centre on the spiritual parameters of hasidic mysticism and touch on historical points only tangentially. By contrast, Scholem's interest in hasidism is primarily historical, since he regards it as the last phase of a long Jewish mystical tradition whose complete history he strove to map out. Thus, the relationship between hasidic ideas and earlier mystical thought-in his view almost exclusively the Lurianic and Sabbatean schools-is crucial to Scholem's understanding of hasidism.

Scholem's approach differed from Buber's even in regard to the phenomenological understanding of hasidism. Scholem was more concerned with theological issues, such as the importance of the ideal of devekut and the place of pantheism, while Buber was concerned with experiental issues in his early mystical phase, turning later to the dialogical approach.

These divergent approaches directed the two scholars to two different types of hasidic sources: for Scholem, focusing on hasidic theology, the pertinent body of texts was the speculative, homiletic writings of the masters of hasidism. Buber, on the other hand, who was interested in the living expressions of hasidic phenomena, in the realization of the hasidic experience in daily life and popular literature, focused on the legends surrounding the lives of the hasidic masters, and it was this type of literature that became the basis for his interpretation of hasidism.