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Did crypto-Jews invent the modern tarot deck?
Imagine you were a Jewish converso, secretly living in Italy or France after King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella had expelled your family from Spain. You could not affix a mezuzah to your door or light Shabbat candles. If you were caught avoiding treyf, or if you were a male converso and someone discovered you were circumcised, your life and that of your family were in immediate danger. In these circumstances, how could a secret Jew living in antisemitic medieval Europe learn about Judaism?
Enter tarot — the deck of playing cards used in fortune-telling and divination — and specifically, the Jean Noblet Tarot de Marseille deck. Each tarot card represents a specific archetype that the “reader” of the deck uses to try and understand their future, or answer a specific question.
According to Stav Appel, an amateur tarot historian and author of The Torah in the Tarot — a new guidebook and reissued deck of the Jean Noblet Tarot, the contemporary tarot deck may have been a medieval Jewish invention to preserve Jewish knowledge in the face of overwhelming antisemitic oppression. Each card is replete with hidden Jewish knowledge, Appel says, and the deck as a whole functioned as a crypto-Jewish educational tool.
The deck, Appel writes, can be “understood as a parade of crypto-Jews, each card bearing a false name and a false face to mask its true identity from a hostile world.”
An accidental tarot historian
Appel is not a historian by training. He lives in upstate New York, has an MBA from Yale and has spent his professional life as an organizational design consultant and data analyst. Some of his formative years were spent in Israel, where he studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but he is not a rabbi or any sort of formal Torah educator. Rather, Appel is the sort of humble, mundane Torah scholar that is increasingly rare in 21st-century Jewish life.
Orthodox synagogues are full of scholars more learned in Torah than he is, he said, but “when you study a little bit of Torah every day for 40 years, it accumulates.”
According to Appel, tarot “had no presence in his life whatsoever” until about 10 years ago, when his wife visited a bookstore that was closing and had a shelf full of tarot cards at bargain prices. On a whim, she bought a deck — a version of the Tarot de Marseille — and suggested to a bemused Appel that he use them to make up stories for their children.
When Appel and his kids started playing with the cards, he instantly noticed that they were filled with Bible stories: On one card, four divine animals that the prophet Ezekiel sees in his vision; on another, a collapsing grand building that looked like a depiction of the destruction of the Second Temple.
“The Judaic references were obvious,” he said, but he thought they were merely references to the Old Testament, and not indicative of a Jewish backstory to tarot. Nevertheless intrigued, he joined a Facebook group about tarot and began to research on his own. He wanted to know “who put all these Bible stories in a deck of playing cards?”
The Rider-Waite tarot deck (also known as the Rider-Waite-Smith deck) was released in 1909 and is one of the most popular tarot decks ever created, with thousands of variations. Though the Rider-Waite contains a hodge-podge of esoteric traditions, numerous cards bear Hebrew letters.
Appel learned that the Rider-Waite had been copied from a much, much older deck called the Tarot de Marseille, which dates back to at least the late 15th century. The older the version of the Tarot de Marseille deck Appel saw, the clearer the biblical references were. When he tracked down a replica of a 1650 deck, he recalled thinking, “Oh my God.”
“These aren’t Bible stories at all,” he thought. “These are Torah stories. This is Judaica.’”
The discovery
One card in the Jean Noblet deck was particularly stunning: The Magician.
In Rider-Waite and other tarot decks, the Magician is typically depicted holding aloft what looks like a wand. In the Noblet deck, however, it’s slightly different.
“What do you think he’s holding in his hand?” Appel asked me.
I leaned in to look, and realized it was obvious: “A circumcised penis” — the symbol of Abraham’s eternal covenant with God.
In his written guide for the reissued deck, Appel points out that on the table before the Magician is a complete antique circumcision kit, including a knife and its sheath for cutting the foreskin, and a shield to protect the penis.
Once your eyes are trained to see the Judaica, Appel’s right; it can be obvious. The top of the hat the Magician wears, for example, is the tip of a circumcised penis emerging from its cut foreskin. The helmet of the Emperor in another card is a disguised dreidel tipped onto its side. On the Chariot card, the Chariot itself resembles a bimah, and its wheels are Torah scrolls.
Often, though, finding the hidden Judaica can require a considerable level of Torah knowledge, a sophisticated eye for symbology and a dash of imagination. For example, each card has a secret Hebrew letter within it. In the Magician, the Hebrew letter aleph (א) is hidden in the figure’s curved arms.
How did this remain hidden?
There had been speculation for years about the Jewish influence on tarot, particularly given that there are 22 Major Arcana cards (a tarot deck is divided into 22 named Major Arcana cards and 56 numbered Minor Arcana cards), and there are 22 letters in the Hebrew aleph bet. Yet over the centuries, Jewish mysticism had been widely distorted by Christian occultists. Tarot historians believed that any traces of Hebrew or biblical influence left on the tarot cards were evidence of this appropriation, and not of any inherent Jewish origins.
As Appel studied the Noblet deck and found more and more hidden Judaica, he reached out to tarot historians who told him he was speaking “utter nonsense.”
“Their emotional response was quite fascinating,” Appel reflected. “It’s a real challenge to these very accomplished tarot historians who have built a very different narrative that does not make space for Jews and Judaism.”
Jewish historians were more receptive, but dubious. If the tarot deck was a hidden educational tool of Torah study, why hadn’t this been discovered already by a rabbi or someone with, say, a Ph.D.?
Appel decided to self-publish a deck, and started an Instagram account, where he posted images of the cards and shared his theories on their Judaic origins. Many people began pointing out additional hidden Jewish objects and symbols that he had missed. “People really pushed me, and collectively, we went much deeper into the cards,” he said.
Crypto-teaching aid
With each new Judaic subtlety revealed, Appel and his online community marveled at the sophistication of the Judaic knowledge they contained, and the skillfulness with which it was hidden. “It’s a masterpiece of art and a major accomplishment of cryptography,” he said, describing the cards as an “incredibly efficient system” to teach about Jewish practice — the Jean Noblet deck contains a full curriculum of Judaic studies.
Appel emphasizes that he is not a formal historian and cannot be 100% certain of his hypotheses. Perhaps the cards were just Jewish fortune-telling cards, or an example of Jewish mystical art. But the density of Judaic content seemed to support his contention that the cards were used as a tool for Jewish education. “The only reason someone would be motivated to conceal so much information is they wanted it to be a memory device for a teacher,” Appel said. “It’s like a really fancy teaching aid.”
Appel has lectured at synagogues and community centers and given a presentation at the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies, where he says he was received warmly. One of the attendees, Corinne Brown, the chair of the conference, told me in an email that Appel’s arguments were “iron clad.” She compared his discovery to that of finding King Tut’s tomb, where “an entire culture had been assembled for an unknown afterlife.”
Academics at the conference told him there had been studies where crypto-Jews had reported the tradition of gathering over playing cards as a cover story to learn Torah. In a note included with the deck’s reissue, the society wrote that while they are not tarot historians, “we can confirm the development of clandestine means of Jewish continuity was a common practice in crypto-Jewish communities following the exile of Spanish Jewry in 1492.”
The origins of the word tarot potentially lend Appel’s ideas some credibility. The word tarot comes from an Italian dialect word tarocci, which means “the fool,” and was first documented in 1516 in Ferrara, Italy. It supplanted, somehow, the name trionfi (meaning “cards”), which was first used to describe 13th- and 14th-century Italian playing cards that had allegorical images.
Tarot historians do not have any answers as to how the word tarocci replaced trionfi, and why it happened specifically in the early 1500s and in cities like Ferrara and Avignon, France. Appel thinks the etymological shift was due to a wave of conversos fleeing Spain who began using the cards as a secret Jewish tool, as both Ferrara and Avignon were home to many crypto-Jews. There is currently no evidence to support this theory, but it is a compelling possible explanation.
What now?
Appel’s hope in reissuing the deck is that it will provoke more serious scholarship and research. He has also come to a new appreciation of tarot and the Jewish magical and esoteric rituals that went underground in the face of violent Christian persecution.
Given that divination is explicitly outlawed in the Torah, I was curious if Appel had received any rabbinic pushback to his claims that Jews may have invented the preeminent tool of fortune telling in an effort to preserve Jewish continuity. There was some, he acknowledged, but it was ironic given the rich history of Jewish mysticism, magic and esoteric practice. Jews were seen by their Christian neighbors as a source of magic in the Middle Ages, Appel told me, with “a robust culture of spell casting.”
“In the 20th century, we’ve done a really good job of cleaning up Judaism to make it look really neat and tidy, as if it was always this hyper-rationalist religion,” Appel said. “That’s a contemporary invention, and it’s just not the truth.”
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This isn’t Mark Ruffalo’s first antisemitism controversy
Mark Ruffalo is in the spotlight after facing accusations of antisemitism for his criticism of the Ellison family — but this isn’t the first time the actor has been caught in controversy on this topic.
Last Friday, the actor connected the merger of David Ellison’s Paramount with Warner Bros. Discovery to Israel’s war with Hamas. He called Larry Ellison an “oligarch” due to his financial backing of his son David’s merger using wealth earned from his time at Oracle, which created technology used by the Israeli military. His statements immediately drew criticism, with Paramount leaders accusing Ruffalo of invoking antisemitic tropes.
Ruffalo, a four-time Academy Awards nominee best known for playing the Hulk in Marvel movies, has long been an outspoken advocate for progressive causes — including the Palestinian one.
In 2014, Ruffalo made his first public statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, posting criticisms of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge military operation against Hamas.
He criticized Israel for striking Gaza’s el-Wafa hospital, writing that, “Sorry, I thought blowing up Hospitals [sic] was something that all human beings could agree was off limits.”
Ruffalo also questioned the claim that Hamas used civilians as “human shields.”
“Do you honestly think these people, these fellow human beings, would use their own children as shields?” he wrote. “Use your heart.”
Around the same time, Ruffalo also disputed whether Hamas had actually kidnapped three Israeli teenagers, one of the incidents that sparked the 2014 hostilities — an incident that the terrorist group later admitted to.
Ruffalo received criticism for his posts, but stood by his perspective. “Empathizing w/ Gaza does NOT make me anti-Semitic, nor pro-Hamas or anti-Israel,” he wrote in 2014. “It makes me human.”
As clashes between Israel and Hamas sprouted up again in 2021, Ruffalo once again took to Twitter to denounce Israel, likening the situation to South Africa and calling “for sanctions to free Palestinians.”
Soon after, Ruffalo wrote another tweet apologizing for his rhetoric.
“I have reflected & wanted to apologize for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide,’” he wrote. “It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful & is being used to justify antisemitism here & abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.”
Following the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack in 2023 and Israel’s military response, Ruffalo returned to pro-Palestinian activism. Less than two weeks after the attack, on Oct. 20, Ruffalo — along with more than 50 others creatives through the organization Artists for Ceasefire — sent a letter to President Joe Biden demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. At the following Academy awards, Ruffalo wore a pin from the organization.
In Sept. 2025, Ruffalo, and along with more than 5,500 others in the film industry, signed a letter pledging to boycott “Israeli film institutions” that they believed were “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.”
Ruffalo has publicly aligned himself with the Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) movement, calling to “boycott, divest, sanction and prosecute” Israel, on a podcast with Mehdi Hasan. During the same interview, he said that he has stopped talking to former friends who don’t agree with his perspective on the issue.
“I can’t talk to them anymore,” he said. “They’re either trying to convince me that the Palestinian people are all terrorists and they all deserve to die, or in the same breath will tell me that they’re actually human shields, and they deserve to die because they’re human shields.”
Now, after making statements connecting the Paramount-Discovery merger to Israeli military technology, Ruffalo has been accused of antisemitism by numerous Jewish organizations including the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Weisenthal Center.
The actor has now taken to social media to denounce the accusations of antisemitism, calling the accusation “appalling and fundamentally dishonest,” and saying that criticizing “the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticising Jewish people.”
He added, “Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life.”
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American synagogues are spending more than ever on security. How much is enough?
At Temple Israel in Bloomfield, Michigan, which was attacked in March by a gunman, getting ready for the High Holidays this year means more than preparing for crowds of worshippers.
The synagogue is spending millions of dollars on security upgrades, including a new gatehouse, artificial intelligence technology and physical and ballistic hardening of its building.
“There are major changes coming,” Rabbi Josh Bennett of Temple Israel said in an interview. “I think that extends then to many of the other places of worship in town, and then, by extension, the entire Jewish community around the country.”
But as congregations install barriers, hire guards and tighten access to their buildings, Jewish leaders are struggling to balance budgets and keep their synagogues welcoming.
Bennett fears fortressing the Jewish community through ever-expanding security upgrades is “unsustainable at all levels,” from the emotional to the financial.
The Secure Community Network, a Jewish security organization that provides threat intelligence and safety training to Jewish institutions across the country, told the Forward that the American Jewish community now spends between $765 million and $1 billion annually on security and safety.
CEO Michael G. Masters said that figure is dramatically higher than it was several years ago, when it was the exception, rather than the rule, for a Jewish institution to have a security plan, let alone layers of cameras, guards, and coordination with law enforcement.
The spending reflects what Mitchell Silber, CEO of the Community Security Initiative, a New York-focused Jewish counterterrorism and security organization, described as “the most complicated threat picture that the Jewish community in the United States has ever faced.”
According to the FBI, Jews were the victims of nearly two-thirds of religion-based hate crimes in the United States in 2025. And these days, Silber’s analysts are tracking threats from white supremacists and neo-Nazis, Islamist extremists and actors inspired by or connected to Iran and Hezbollah, and left-wing violence connected to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“That’s taking a tremendous toll just financially on our Jewish institutions,” Silber said.
The growing costs have pushed Temple Israel to lobby Congress in support of the bipartisan Jewish American Security Act, which would increase federal funding available to protect Jewish institutions. Last week, members of Congress, including the bill’s co-sponsor, Rep. John James of Michigan, visited the Temple to see the security updates.
When congregants help screen for danger
But as congregations pour money into keeping potential attackers out, another question looms: At what point does protecting a synagogue begin to change the experience for those coming in?
“The more you build, there’s, I think, an inverse proportion to how safe people will actually feel when they’re coming in,” said Bennett, whose congregants have been emotionally rattled since the March attack, during which a gunman rammed a truck loaded with gasoline and fireworks into the synagogue. “Nobody wants to walk into a building where you walk by loaded semi-automatic machine guns.”
A person arriving at a synagogue for the first time could have harmful intentions. They could also be new to town, exploring Judaism, or simply looking for a place to spend Shabbat. Distinguishing between those is an important challenge.
Unlike an outside guard, a longtime congregant may know who normally attends services, which unfamiliar face is expected for a wedding or bar mitzvah, and when someone’s behavior genuinely seems out of place. That’s why organizations like SCN and the Community Security Service train community members to serve as additional protection at their own institutions.
In 2026 alone, SCN has conducted close to 1,000 in-person safety trainings, reaching roughly 25,000 people. For the High Holidays, they are offering Zoom Webinars for Jewish institutions across the country, as synagogue-goers who ordinarily recognize most people walking through their doors may suddenly welcome hundreds of unfamiliar worshippers.
Preparation was put to the test at Central Synagogue in Manhattan last Friday, when a man stormed the temple, punched a congregant, and headbutted and spat on a security guard while directing a racial slur at him.
Silber described the response as a “tactical success.”
“Their security team had drilled. Their clergy and staff had drilled. And when the moment came, within less than 60 seconds, they had this individual moved outside of the sanctuary.”
At Temple Israel, the congregation has been fundraising specifically for security. After the March attack, Bennett said, some congregants would like to see “a moat and a full army around our buildings.”
He understands the impulse. But he worries there may be no end to what a synagogue can spend in pursuit of safety.
“How do you do this with the knowledge that it’s financially unsustainable?” Bennett said. “This is not the way we should be spending dollars.”
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The far right is more dangerous to Jews than the far left. A historian explains why.
When Jewish leaders speak out these days, it’s often to blast the anti-Israel actions of one Democratic Socialists of America politician or another. Given all the attention — and the millions of dollars raised within the Jewish community to help defeat these candidates — you’d think the greatest existential threat to American Jews was coming from the left.
But a new book by historian Steven Ross is here to tell you: You’d be mistaken.
“What you’ve seen seeping in on the far left is more anti-Israel and some antisemitism,” Ross told me in a phone interview. “But here’s the thing: the left has never called for death to people, the right has.”
Right-wing extremist groups have spent 80 years calling for the death and deportation of Jews and minorities — and sometimes acting upon those calls. The far left, whatever its failures on antisemitism, has not. And unlike in previous years, the far right today has found the two things it lacked: a single leader to unite behind, and a technology to reach millions.
In The Secret War Against Hate: American Resistance to Antisemitism and White Supremacy, Ross, a professor of history at University of Southern California, tracks the continuous, noxious activity of hate groups in the United States from the end of World War II to the present day — and the brave and secretive men and women who sought to thwart them.
The book reads like a great suspense novel, except, unfortunately, it’s nonfiction. And its conclusion — spoiler alert — is that the threat is only growing more dangerous.
Uncannily, in his research, Ross found that Jewish leaders predicted as much — in 1945.
Even before the Allies declared victory in Europe, leaders of the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Nazi League, who had launched undercover operations to infiltrate and disrupt hate groups, had come to a disturbing conclusion. They could defeat any hate group, even the Ku Klux Klan, unless the disparate groups could one day “communicate on an instantaneous basis,” and unless the far right figured out a way to make it into one of the two mainstream political parties.
“Here we are,” Ross said. “Everything has come true.” Social media has enabled hate groups to communicate and organize at scale, and President Donald Trump’s pardon of the Jan. 6 rioters — direct ideological descendants of the postwar far right, Ross says — was but one example of the Republican flirtation with extremist and violent groups.
Descendants of the ‘Betrayed Generation’
In the early 1940s, Jewish leaders also predicted that when the war ended, antisemitism and racism would increase — despite Americans having just fought a savage battle against prejudice and fascism.
The Greatest Generation also birthed what Ross calls “the Betrayed Generation,” men and women who returned to a changed America in which liberals, Blacks and Jews were mobilizing and upwardly mobile.
“The Founding Fathers, they insisted, had created a nation based on white Christian rule and they would not allow traitors or people of color to change that,” Ross writes.
Groups like the American Nazi Party, the Columbians and the National States Rights Party warned that Jews were behind “race suicide,” plotting to replace white people with non-white immigrants. They accused Jews of being secret Communists and undermining the cause of “America First.”
“I will solve the Jewish problem once and for all,” James Madole, founder of the fascist National Renaissance Party, told a boisterous rally in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood in February 1953. “I will finish the job that Hitler started.”
During this period, there were an estimated 3,114 right-wing organizations and periodicals that reached a combined membership of over 10 million Americans, says Ross.
The groups carried out a series of bombings against synagogues and Black churches that were, Ross writes, “unrelenting, unpredictable, and unnerving.”
How to fight back
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which should have been tracking these groups, was far more concerned with persecuting potential communists. So the ADL, AJC and the ANL fielded undercover agents to infiltrate and disrupt these groups, often at the risk of their lives.
One of them, a 19-year-old Columbia University student named William Goring, rose to the head of the National Renaissance Party’s leadership. In a memo to his handlers, Goring described the far-right members he encountered as “the failures, the lonely,” who feel “abandoned by their government and gain a strong internal feeling of camaraderie” from the far-right parties.
“To ease their lack of self-respect they make up excuses and find scapegoats. Some fix upon the Jews, others on the Blacks,” Goring wrote.
By the 1970s, this spy network as well as internal strife had weakened these hate groups, their memberships dwindling to hundreds.
Jewish groups “thought they had won the battle against hate,” wrote Ross, and turned their attention to the causes of civil rights and Israel.
But the ideology and organizations festered and regrouped, manifesting in the anti-government militia movement, the white supremacist march in Charlottesville and the Jan. 6 riots. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of militia and anti-government groups rose to 1,400.
Media personalities with millions of followers, like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, push warnings against shadowy Jewish influence and the “great replacement theory,” the new term for “race suicide.”
The bombings that wracked Jewish communities in the postwar period have declined, Ross acknowledged. What’s replaced them is a constant stream of hate pushed into people’s social media feeds. Social media has made it harder to infiltrate and disrupt hate networks, while making it easier to constantly find new recruits.
“You don’t have to bodily harm someone,” he said. “Creating a life where they’re afraid, whether it’s Muslim, Jew, immigrant — that’s terrorism, that’s domestic terrorism.”
Meanwhile, Trump and others in his administration openly engage with Holocaust deniers and antisemites. In Florida’s Republican primary races earlier this month, two candidates, Dan Bilzerian and Jake Lang, spouted raw antisemitism. Bilzerian, who lost to a Jewish congressman, had asked his 30 million online followers if Hitler “was a good person.”
Ross, whose father survived the Warsaw Ghetto and Dachau and whose mother survived Auschwitz, said he believes the answer is better education, but that’s “long term.”
I asked him what the short-term solution is.
“Take two people to the polls,” he said. “Get two people in their young 20s who aren’t used to voting, and get them out to the polls. That will change things right now.”
Bilzerian lost badly, but he’s not going away, and neither is the ability to infect minds and harvest hate. The question isn’t whether the far right is more dangerous — Ross has answered that. It’s whether we’re paying attention.
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