Moses Taku

Moses ben Hasdai Taku was a 13th-century Tosafist and the era's fiercest anti-rationalist polemicist, his name taken from Tachov (Tachau) in Bohemia. In his Ketav Tamim he attacked both the philosophical rationalism of Maimonides and Saadia Gaon and the esoteric theology of the German Pietists, defending the plain, literal sense of Scripture — including its anthropomorphic descriptions of God — as a matter of faith. Gershom Scholem called him one of the only truly 'reactionary' Jewish writers of the Middle Ages, and his work survives as a rare dissenting voice against the medieval turn to philosophy.