Today, I’m expecting to receive a deck I’m unusually excited about: Stav Appel’s Torah in Tarot, a polished reproduction of the Jean Noblet Tarot, a seventeenth-century French tarot deck first published in Paris around 1650.
In his book, Appel makes a fascinating case that this deck was a deliberate attempt to preserve and disguise Jewish tradition, including Hebrew letters, biblical stories, and religious practices, within the familiar structure of Italian playing cards.
He places the deck in a world in which Jews who had converted to Christianity, or whose families had converted, could face serious consequences if they continued to practice Judaism. His suggestion is that some crypto-Jews may have appeared to be playing trionfi while using the cards to remember and teach Jewish traditions, rather as Jewish folklore tells of children pretending to gamble with dreidels while secretly studying Torah.
That may sound far-fetched. One YouTube reviewer did a casual flip-through and dismissed the idea as fantasy. But I think I know the difference between projecting an idea onto an image and suddenly recognizing something that was there all along.
And once you see some of these things, they are very hard to unsee.
I used to turn up my nose at Marseille-style decks because I found the art crude and unappealing. Then Appel pointed out that the peculiar wheels on The Chariot resemble Torah scroll handles, and that the objects on The Magician’s table can be read as elements of a medieval mohel’s kit. Even the word “tarot,” whose origins remain uncertain, may contain a deliberate play on “Torah.”
Before rolling your eyes at yet another theory about the secret origins of tarot, take a moment to look at the cards themselves. The Fool is shaped remarkably like the Hebrew letter Tav. An Ayin appears in La Maison Dieu, The Tower, along with what Appel identifies as the tablets of the Ten Commandments. He reads the number of rays of sunlight as pointing toward the date Tisha b’Av. The marks on The Magician’s dice suggest the eighth day, when circumcision is performed. And most striking to me, once it was pointed out, is what looks very much like a mikveh in The Judgment card. At some point, the accumulation becomes difficult to dismiss as coincidence.
During periods of persecution, Jews who converted under pressure could be watched for signs that they were continuing Jewish practices. Hebrew books, ritual objects, and familiar customs could become dangerous. Yet people found ways to remember. Centuries later, some families still preserve customs whose original meaning has been forgotten, such as turning a picture of Jesus to face the wall before lighting candles on Friday evening or performing some small household ritual without knowing why. Such survivals of hidden Jewish identity have been documented in different parts of the Jewish diaspora.
So the possibility that crypto-Jews might have used a deck of cards to preserve fragments of Jewish knowledge does not seem entirely strange to me. It would belong to a much broader pattern of cultural camouflage: ordinary objects and ordinary customs quietly carrying something that could no longer be displayed openly, including traces of mezuzot concealed or carved into doorframes.
Why, then, has no one noticed the Torah in tarot before Stav Appel?
Perhaps because tarot has accumulated so many elaborate origin stories that people have learned to be suspicious of them. Egypt, mystery schools, ancient initiations, Kabbalah... almost every esoteric tradition seems, at some point, to have been declared the secret source of tarot. As much as I wanted to find Judaism in the cards, even I rolled my eyes at claims connecting tarot with authentic Kabbalah.
That is part of what makes Appel’s argument so interesting to me. He is not beginning with the proposition that tarot must secretly be Jewish and then assigning Jewish meanings to ordinary images. He begins with one particular deck and asks us to look closely at details already present in it: a letter, a ritual object, a biblical image, a gesture, a number. Individually, any one of them might be coincidence. Taken together, they make a much more interesting case.
Appel has persuaded me that the Jean Noblet Tarot deserves to be looked at with Jewish eyes. Torah in Tarot gives me a guide for doing that, and a way of recognizing symbols and stories I might otherwise have passed over completely. For someone already obsessed with tarot, that is an irresistible prospect.
