Moses Maimonides wrote the Guide of the Perplexed for a student caught between two convictions he refused to treat as opposites, that the created world is exactly as Aristotelian philosophy describes it and that the Torah is the word of God. His method was negative theology carried to its logical end: since any positive attribute predicated of God implies composition, and God is absolutely one, the only true statements about God describe what God is not. Scriptural language that appears to contradict this, God's hand, God's anger, God walking in the garden, is read as accommodation to ordinary understanding rather than literal report.
This was not merely an abstract exercise. Maimonides held rabbinic office as a physician and communal leader in Fustat, and he intended the Guide as a practical resolution for readers who had studied philosophy and found themselves unable to reconcile it with a plain reading of scripture. The resolution satisfied some and alarmed others. Within a generation of his death, the Maimonidean controversies split Jewish communities in southern France and Spain: rationalist successors defended the study of philosophy as a religious obligation, while traditionalist critics, including some who sought and won a ban on the Guide from Christian authorities, argued that philosophical inquiry corroded the plain sense of the law it was meant to serve.
The controversy never fully closed, but the tradition it produced did not stay confined to Jewish thought. Thomas Aquinas cited Maimonides by name as Rabbi Moses, and later Jewish rationalists from Gersonides to Spinoza wrote in a vocabulary the Guide had made available to them, whether they accepted its conclusions or not.