Philosophy of the style practised by Maimonides and Averroes went on to have great popularity in the Jewish world, but in the Islamic world not much work in the subject continued outside of Persia. The prosperous Jewish communities in Provence and the Languedoc took to philosophy with relish, resulting in two huge controversies in the early thirteenth century over the writings of Maimonides and in the early fourteenth century over the allegorical interpretation of the Bible. There is a well-known saying of Yedaya ha-Penini that if Joshua arose to forbid the Provençal Jews from studying the works of Maimonides, he would be ignored. They would sacrifice their lives and fortunes in defence of the philosophy of Maimonides. I think we can accept that there is some exaggeration here, but the general point is valid that there came to be a large translation project turning Jewish and Islamic philosophy into Hebrew and using it to make sense of Scripture. Whereas interest in philosophy in Spain had been very much the preserve of the élite in Jewish society, in Provence it seems to have been much more broadly distributed, and there was a lot of interest in even the more technical aspects of philosophy, such as logic. By far the most outstanding figure in this period is Gersonides, Levi ben Gerson, who lived from 1288 to 1344. Gersonides was a very considerable astronomer and mathematician, who also concerned himself with using philosophy to understand the Bible, and his large set of philosophical books, W ars of the Lord (altered by his opponents to Wars Against the Lord), deals with a number of the main issues in the philosophy of religion of the time.