 Many late classical and medieval philosophical texts contain esoteric elements. The desire to hide the real message of a text in its earlier forms springs from some form of gnosticism. Gnostic sects, needing to protect their knowledge from dissemination among non-initiates, hid their true message in ways that could only be deciphered by those who possessed the secret knowledge. Leo Strauss makes the additional argument that the motives for esotericism in Jewish and Islamic medieval thinkers are political. Revelation in Judaism and Islam deals fundamentally with law, with the correct social order, whereas in Christianity it is the revelation of a creed or set of dogmas, Strauss argues. Hence, to interpret revelation in Judaism and Islam is always a political act. Interpreting law is much further from the task of philosophy than interpreting dogma, placing philosophy on the periphery of Islamic and Jewish society as opposed to being an integral part of the official training of students as it was in the Christian West. The inherently marginal character of philosophy in these societies makes it politically dangerous to be a philosopher. Further, Strauss argues, for these thinkers human nature is essentially and inevitably divided between “the few” who are capable to doing and understanding philosophy, and “the many” who were not capable of digesting the truths of philosophy and who must be protected from philosophy. Exposure of the many to philosophy tends to undermine the authority of revelation and the religious and political authority given the power to explain and promulgate the revealed law. For Strauss, the difference between Jewish and Islamic thinkers, on the one hand, and Christian thinkers, on the other, is also exemplified in the different literary sources on which they relied. For Christian thinkers, the models are Aristotle and Cicero, for Jewish and Islamic thinkers, the models are the dialogues of Plato, especially the Republic and the Laws. Strauss’s thesis is that these writers hid in their exoteric teaching an esoteric teaching to be discerned by reading between the lines. In practice, this means taking small inconsistencies and other discrepancies in the text as indicative of a deeper or hidden view, looking for the author’s “real” views in the mouths of characters in a dialogue or allegory who are otherwise presented unfavorably, etc. Strauss’s views on how to interpret the literary form of medieval philosophical texts are controversial, but they have made the literary form and hermeneutics applied to these texts a question that must, especially for Islamic and Jewish writers, be confronted. For Maimonides, for example, an esoteric or ‘dualist’ reading would claim that Maimonides holds Aristotelian positions on the eternity of the world, the possibility of miracles and on other matters which would bring him into conflict with Judaism but must hide such views from political and religious authorities, signalling them only obliquely to the few in the Guide for the Perplexed but expressing non-Aristotelian views in his work commenting on Jewish law and scriptures. Daniel Frank (2003, 144–5) argues against this view that Maimonides “may best be understood philosophically as engaged in critical dialogue with Aristotle, almost invariably disagreeing with him, but indebted to Aristotle for his mode of discourse, argument forms, and philosophical vocabulary.” Moreover, Frank points out that the plausibility of extreme esotericism in Islamic and Jewish philosophical texts may be exaggerated by an unhistorical dichotomy between Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism (also discussed above, section 2. 4) (Frank 2003, 142–3). That is, because we see a conflict between and author’s Aristotelian and Neoplatonic views, we speculate that one view is their ‘real’ view, and the other, their ‘cover’ view, while thinkers in this context would have seen Aristotelian and Neoplatonic positions as quite compatible. (On Maimonides and esotericism, see also Ravitsky 2005).