He believed that both trends were a deviant departure from traditional Judaism, which he understood to espouse a literal perspective of both the biblical narrative, and the aggadata of the Sages.
[4] His opposition to all theological speculation earned him, in the opinion of Gershom Scholem, the title of one of the two truly reactionary Jewish writers of the Middle Ages, the other being Joseph Ashkenazi.
[5] Taku is often cited as contradicting Maimonides’ Third Principle of Faith for insisting that God can be corporeally manifest and that to maintain otherwise is heretical.
He does not do so because of his belief in the literal veracity of these descriptions; he only insists that they represent the maximum that can be conveyed concerning God's essence and appearance, and that any further inquiry cannot lead to valid conclusions.
It serves as both an attack on the theologians of his day who espoused non-literal understandings of aggada, and as a means to attempt to demonstrate the validity of corporealism by citing proof texts from the Bible and the Talmud.