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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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The real Jewish story of Ceuta, Spain’s migrant-magnet neighbor to Morocco
For all of us who don’t know much about geography, international political crises are always welcome. Since the start of Trump 2.0, we have been discovering places we never knew existed, but now present existential threats. From straits — think Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab — to islands — whether Greenland or Heard and McDonald — we now have, along with higher gas and food prices, a better appreciation of our world.
Late last week, yet another obscure part of the globe was suddenly brought, this time without our president’s assistance, to the attention of western media: Ceuta. A city of approximately 83,000 inhabitants, Ceuta is ensconced on a peninsula which, though attached to the Moroccan coastline, is nevertheless under Spanish rule, even while it enjoys a significant amount of autonomy.
As we now know, Ceuta was also the magnet that, starting on July 30, drew about 72,000 young Moroccans who sought, mostly by swimming, to reach its beaches and, from there, perhaps reach Europe. That nearly 100 young men and women drowned in the effort — one that moreover proved naught for those who reached Ceuta as nearly all of them were obliged to return to Morocco — adds a heartrending chapter to the complex history of a city where tragedy has long mixed with comity.
Founded two millennia earlier by the Phoenicians, Ceuta was successively ruled by the Romans, Ottomans, Portuguese and Spaniards. In 1492, when the kingdom expelled its Jewish population, a few thousand crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to Ceuta, where they managed to avoid the bloody reach of the Inquisition. Yet they were not the first Jews to make their home on this tip of North Africa; as early as the 11th century, the Spanish-Jewish poet Abraham Ibn Ezra refers to the Jews of Ceuta in one of his poems. For the next few centuries, the small community lived in relative peace alongside its Christian and Muslim neighbors, a continuation, argues the historian Veronica Viviana Reyes, of the medieval “al-Andalus,” that brilliant and brief moment of cultural convergence between the three “peoples of the Book.”
Come the mid-20th century, the steadily dwindling Jewish community received reinforcements with the arrival of a few hundred Sephardic Jews who left their native Morocco in the wake of its independence from France. Earlier that century, several hundred Indians, mostly Sindhi, who were subjects under the British Raj also arrived in Ceuta, drawn by the city’s busy trading and commercial opportunities. Though the statistics are approximate — Spain does not require citizens to list their religion — about 58% of Ceuta’s population is Christian, 40% is Muslim, and the remaining couple of percentage points comprise its Jewish and Hindi communities. [ As a result, this ancient city attached by a thread of rock and soil to North Africa has accomplished a remarkable feat: the braiding of four distinct faith communities into what the locals call convivencia, or peaceful coexistence.
Yet, as last week’s event revealed, convivencia is a fragile thing. The influx of Moroccan youths on the beaches and streets of Ceuta, though over as quickly as it began, has become the gift that does not stop giving for the extreme-right media and politicians in countries bordering Spain. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s ethno-nationalist party the National Rally, demanded that the French government “reinforce its border controls.”
Not to be outdone, her second-in-command, Jordan Bardella, warned that these “invaders will soon be on our streets.” Going a step further, the extreme-right prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, called for Spain’s suspension from the Schengen Accord—the guarantee of free movement of citizens across the borders of European Union nations — and resurrected immigration controls for Spanish citizens, although Spain does not share a border with Italy. (This geographical fact did not deter Mette Fredricksen, the prime minister of distant Denmark, from voicing her support for Meloni.)
Inevitably, the old chestnut of a Jewish conspiracy has also been resurrected. Public figures, ranging from antisemitic fantasist Candace Owens, through the former director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, to the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, have posted or reposted wink-wink, nudge-nudge claims that Israel orchestrated the mad rush of Moroccans towards Ceuta. The reason cited for this nefarious feat is Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to embarrass the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, who has been one of the harshest European critics of the war in Gaza and a proponent of a more liberal immigration policy than his European peers. The Moroccan government’s irritation over Spain’s support of Algerian claims to the western Sahara makes this baseless claim seem more reasonable.
The political and rhetorical theatrics have little to do with reality. Europe is not being overrun by what Marion Maréchal, a politician to the right of her aunt Marine Le Pen, described as a “veritable invasion” by “hordes of young Moroccans.” Or, for that matter, what her Spanish homologue, Santiago Abascal, the leader of the extreme-right party Vox, insisted was “an act of war” against Spain and, by extension, Europe.
This frenzied response deliberately ignores the fact that not a single Moroccan migrant entered Spain — a strait, after all, runs between Spain and Ceuta — and have nearly all been returned by Spanish soldiers and police to Morocco. Tellingly, residents of Ceuta have also used the word “invasion,” but with greater nuance. As a journalist for Le Monde reported, none of the locals she interviewed described the Moroccans as enemies. Though frightened by the sudden and massive influx, they also understood the migrants were not seeking “to rob them,” but instead to find a better future. Besides, as one Ceutan, Rachel Gomes, observed, she has Muslim in-laws. “This does not make for problems. Four cultures exist here — Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian — that live together remarkably well.” If only a similar convivencia reigned among the members of the European Union.
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Ad for Republican Colorado governor candidate depicts Jewish opponent with horns
An attack ad on the Jewish Democratic candidate for governor of Colorado has depicted him with red horns, drawing condemnation from the state Democratic party — and the apparent approval of the Republican nominee.
Invoking an ancient antisemitic canard that Jews have horns, the ad, created in support of Republican nominee Victor Marx and circulating on various social media platforms, called the Democratic nominee and Colorado’s current Attorney General Phil Weiser “the next threat to Colorado.”
The Colorado Democratic Party said on Facebook that the graphic was “antisemitic and disgusting” and called on Marx to disavow it.
Instead, Marx engaged with a post on X accompanied by the image, calling on Republicans to stop attacking each other, “unite, stay focused, and win.”
Throughout his campaign, controversy has followed Marx, a minister and author who some have categorized as a Christian fundamentalist. Others have called him a fabulist. On the campaign trail, Marx has claimed to be the first American into Gaza during the war with Israel, boasted about performing exorcisms by phone and said his stepfather forced him to kill a man at the age of 7.
A fellow Republican party member also formally accused him of accepting unlimited campaign contributions through his online merchandise store.
The Marx campaign did not respond to an inquiry by the Forward.
Weiser, who attends a Conservative synagogue in Denver, defeated U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet for the Democratic nomination in July. He also did not respond to an inquiry.
Polls show Weiser with a sizable lead over Marx. The Colorado governor’s seat has been held by a Democrat since 2008, and term-limited incumbent Gov. Jared Polis is also Jewish.
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A retired judge needed four Torahs rescued from Indiana. So he called his rabbi. And his dentist.
Early on a Sunday morning in July a dentist pointed his black Toyota Sequoia south out of the Chicago suburbs, a rented box trailer swaying behind the hitch. In Champaign, Illinois, a rabbi who had spent the night at his mother’s house pulled onto the highway heading east. Their rendezvous: a century-old synagogue in Terre Haute, Indiana. Their mission: get the Torahs out.
Before the day was over, the operation would involve four Torah scrolls, a pair of towering brass menorahs, more than 100 boxes of books, one electric piano and — because even sacred missions deserve a victory lap — a round of golf.
The orders came from Arizona, where a 79-year-old retired judge, recovering from surgery, was running the operation by phone.
That would be Jerry Orbach, who splits his time between Scottsdale and Chicago and has made a second career of rescuing the remnants of shuls from across America. The walls of his Illinois shul, Northbrook Community Synagogue — where he serves as executive vice president — glow with stained glass he has salvaged from seven shuttered congregations across the Midwest.
So when Michael Brown, executive director of the Indiana Jewish Historical Society, called to say that the United Hebrew Congregation in Terre Haute had sold its building — and needed homes for nearly everything inside — Orbach knew exactly what to do, even if he couldn’t do it himself.
“We can’t get rid of Torahs,” he said. “We have to preserve them.”
He couldn’t make the trip. But he had a crew.
The crew
The whole operation was an in-house affair: all four men belong to Northbrook Community Synagogue. Orbach’s regulars are Dr. Michael Farr, 49, a dentist, and Farr’s best friend Jordan Ripstein, the shul’s gabbai and a violin maker who studied theoretical physics in college. The two have history. They once drove through the night to Kingston, New York, to rescue stained glass from a closing synagogue, smoking cigars and talking about life and music the whole way.
Last September, they hauled back 14 crates from the shuttered Beth Achim synagogue in Southfield, Michigan — towering 13-foot stained glass panels that now wait in the Northbrook basement for their next home.
But Ripstein was out of town. So Orbach turned to his bullpen and pulled out a rabbi.
Aaron Braun, 43, has led Northbrook Community Synagogue since it was founded in 2012 as a merger of three congregations — which makes him, in a sense, a professional preserver of shuls that might otherwise have disappeared. He is also long accustomed to his congregant’s obsession. “Everybody goes along with my meshugas,” Orbach said, using the Yiddish word for craziness. “I’m an old man, so they indulge me.”
Braun didn’t need convincing. “The chance to give Torahs a new home and see them brought back to life and used is one of the holiest endeavors we can pursue,” he said.
The extraction
The congregation they came to help is the oldest in Indiana still in continuous operation. This year, the United Hebrew Congregation celebrated 175 years in Terre Haute — a city whose Jewish community peaked at more than 1,000 people in the late 1940s, when Jewish families owned some 45 local businesses, including three of the four downtown department stores.
Today, the city’s Jewish population is estimated at just under 100. The Reform congregation, down to 45 member families, sold its building in mid-July. “We had to sell in order to continue operating,” said Scott Skillman, its immediate past president. The new owners have said they plan to use the building, known for its cavernous sanctuary and sweeping stained glass windows, as a wedding venue.
It is a familiar story across the state. Wendy Soltz, a Ball State University historian who led the Indiana Synagogue Mapping Project, has documented 66 purpose-built synagogues in Indiana dating back to 1865. Twenty-four have already been demolished.
The Terre Haute building held what the congregation couldn’t take to its smaller new locale. Nearly all of it was in the basement, down seven steps from a side door: four steps, a 90-degree turn, then three more. Farr worked a two-wheel dolly up and down that turn for more than two hours, stacking some 150 boxes of books in the trailer alongside two podiums and a pair of cast-brass menorahs, each more than six feet tall and about 150 pounds.
“We were a pretty sweaty mess,” Braun said.
When the crew opened the ark they found the four scrolls bare. In the tumult of moving out, the mantles had come off; someone had fashioned ropes of felt around them instead. “Not even gartelekh,” Braun said, referring to the sashes that traditionally bind a Torah.
The scrolls, the crew decided, would not ride in the trailer with the boxes. Braun laid them down across the back seat of his SUV and covered them with tallitot, the prayer shawls tucked around them so they couldn’t shift — “even, God forbid, in an accident,” he said. A Torah is the rare object Jews treat like a person: You stand when it passes. You kiss it as it goes by. If one is dropped, the whole congregation fasts. Braun drove north with four of them sleeping in his back seat.
Braun, examining what he could, was impressed by their condition: the calligraphy of at least three of the four looked to be in fairly good shape. The fourth scroll is a mystery: written in a slanted, old-fashioned hand, its lines ragged. “It’s not even full justified,” he said. “It’s wild.”
The getaway
The trailer was full. The Torahs were secure. And one more passenger had joined the convoy: a Yamaha Clavinova electric piano the Terre Haute congregation no longer needed, destined for Braun’s mother’s house in Champaign.
Which is how the getaway came to include a detour. The two men dropped off the piano, then headed to the golf course where Braun grew up playing and got in 18 holes.
“Dr. Farr played some of the best golf I’ve ever seen him play,” the rabbi said.
Farr, a beginner, doesn’t dispute it. “I had a good round. I definitely played better than I normally play,” he said. “Probably by virtue of the fact that we saved four Torahs that day.”
At some point a crop duster buzzed low over their cars — “a not unusual reality of downstate Illinois,” Braun said. Nobody flinched. It had been that kind of day.
Farr rolled back into the Northbrook parking lot around 10 p.m., where the synagogue’s president, Ben Resnick, was waiting in the dark to help unload. The boxes went into the social hall, stacked against the wall. The next morning, Farr was back at his dental practice — “the yank and pull,” as he calls it.
The social hall, though, is only a way station. The items aren’t necessarily staying at Northbrook; the congregation is a holding ground while Orbach hunts for their next home. He plans to call Nik Jakobs, the Jewish farmer building a synagogue in a two-acre cornfield in rural Illinois, about two hours west, to see if he wants any of the pieces for his sanctuary. He also will contact the Jewish Community Legacy Project, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that helps find homes for sacred objects from downsizing and closing congregations.
The sorting has already begun. Brown hopes any documents or photographs in the boxes will go to the Indiana Jewish Historical Society’s archives. A scribe is coming to examine the four scrolls and determine what repairs they need before they can be read from again.
Brown, who set the whole thing in motion with a phone call, sees it as “one of the few small happy threads from a sad story of Jewish decline in the crossroads of America.” He calls Orbach “an unsung Midwestern Jewish hero.”
Back in Terre Haute, the congregation is still holding services every Friday night, in space rented from a Unitarian church — a sanctuary with no crosses and, as it happens, a few Stars of David. “It’s not a closing,” Skillman said. “It’s just a shrinking of our footprint.”
And in Northbrook, four Torahs rest in the social hall. Orbach turns 80 in September. His crew is waiting for the next call.
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