  The antagonism between faith and reason is immediately palpable in the thought of Judah’s father, who constantly tried to uphold traditional Jewish belief against what he considered to be the onslaught of philosophical radicalism. Yet, in the thought of Judah this “conflict” between the hitherto venerable antagonists virtually disappears. The question we have to ask, then, is why?  The most likely reason is to be located in the notion of sophia perennis, which played an important role in the thought of Florentine humanists. According to this doctrine, there exists a unity to all knowledge irrespective of its source.  As a result, the rationalism of philosophy could quite easily be reconciled with that of revelation because both were regarded as articulating the same truth. Evidence of this may be seen in Judah’s frequent citation of biblical passages to support philosophical principles and vice versa. Furthermore, because Judah is primarily unconcerned with the antagonism between faith and reason, he becomes one of the first Jewish philosophers to ignore esotericism (viz., that philosophical truths must be kept from the unenlightened) as a philosophical principle. For him, traditional esoteric topics, such as metaphysics, now become part and parcel of the beautiful and dramatic unfolding of God’s beauty in the universe, and such topics are open to all (including women, as the character of Sophia demonstrates).