  Moreover, many Jewish authors in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-centuries increasingly resorted to Romance vernaculars in order to attract a Jewish audience (including conversos and ex-conversos), which no longer understood Hebrew. In sixteenth-century Italy, larger trends in rhetoric and the use of language increasingly led to the creation of the ideal of a pure Italian language. In this regard, Judah becomes an important transitional thinker in the encounter between Judaism and the Italian Renaissance. Whereas his father, Don Isaac, could still adapt humanistic themes to his Hebrew writings, which were still primarily in conversation with medieval  thought,[13]  increasingly in Judah’s generation the only way to engage in a full-scale examination of the universal tendencies associated with Humanism was to write in the vernacular.