  There exists a large debate in the secondary literature concerning the place and role of Jews in Renaissance culture. One group envisages a synthesis between Jewish culture on the one hand, and the ideals of the Renaissance on the  other.[2]   Jews, according to this interpretation, could quite easily remain Jewish while still sharing in the values and culture of non-Jewish society. Another group, however, maintains that such a synthesis is historically untenable because Jews remained a small, persecuted minority left to the whims of various local  governments.[3]   These two approaches leave us with radically different conceptions of Renaissance Jewish philosophers. According to the first approach, a Jewish intellectual could quite easily partake of the ideals and categories of Renaissance Humanism and Neoplatonism. According to the second approach, however, such a synthesis could never occur, and, as a result, most Renaissance Jewish thinkers were more indebted to the legacy of Maimonides than the various trajectories of Renaissance thought. A more productive approach, however, exists between these two: The Italian Renaissance provided certain elite Jews with new literary genres, intellectual categories, and educational ideals with which to mine the depths of their tradition.