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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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J Street goes on the offensive against AIPAC-backed candidates
(JTA) — J Street, the liberal Jewish Middle East advocacy group, announced that it will spend $3 million to defeat a handful of Republican candidates backed by AIPAC, joining the plethora of progressive groups targeting the American Israel Public Affairs Committee this election year.
Such an attack campaign is an unusual initiative for J Street, which typically endorses candidates but does not target opponents on the basis of an AIPAC endorsement. Until now, according to J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami, the likelier scenario for his organization was finding its endorsed candidates on the defensive against AIPAC’s spending.
“It’s a new era for us,” Ben-Ami said in an interview. In 2022, J Street targeted an AIPAC backed candidate — but only after AIPAC barraged the J Street endorsed candidate with negative spending.
In a statement, J Street said that this will be the group’s largest super PAC investment in its history, referring to political action committees that can raise unlimited funds but are forbidden from coordinating with campaigns.
The $3 million will be spent on ads targeting Republican Rep. Mike Collins, who is running for U.S. Senate in Georgia against Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish, and a handful of incumbents: Ohio Rep. Max Miller, who is running for reelection amid allegations of domestic abuse, which he denies; Wisconsin Rep. Derrick Van Orden; Pennsylvania Rep. Ryan Mackenzie; and Iowa Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks.
Ben-Ami said J Street targeted those particular candidates in part because they each face competitive races as the Democrats look to take control of the House and Senate and they have ideological distance from J Street. Many of them were also connected to the movement to deny and overturn the 2020 election results, Ben-Ami said.
J Street’s campaign comes as AIPAC’s brand has become increasingly toxic among voters, and as a growing number of Democratic politicians cross its red line of supporting conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel. J Street’s position, meanwhile, has recently drifted toward supporting a phasing-out of military aid to Israel in 2028.
AIPAC blasted the campaign in a post on X. “Is this from J Street or Justice Democrats?” AIPAC wrote, referring to the progressive organization that has increasingly aligned with pro-Palestinian advocacy.
“A dark money super PAC spending millions to defeat pro-Israel candidates and lie about AIPAC,” the group wrote. “Not a word about helping elect pro-Israel candidates further exposes the difference between J Street and actual pro-Israel organizations.”
AIPAC has been a heavy spender since it launched its super PAC, United Democracy Project, ahead of the 2022 midterms, and is the top outside spender in this election cycle, according to Open Secrets. A number of anti-AIPAC, pro-Palestinian groups have emerged over the past year to counter the pro-Israel lobbying group’s spending.
Unlike those groups, J Street and AIPAC have some overlap in which candidates they back: Both groups endorsed moderate, pro-Israel Democrats such as Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Dan Goldman. J Street’s super PAC has also previously targeted individual candidates for their AIPAC endorsement, such as Rep. Haley Stevens in 2022, citing AIPAC’s donations from right-wing megadonors.
An AIPAC spokesperson wrote that it is “disappointing, but not surprising, that J Street continues to amplify lies about our community.”
“AIPAC members are focused on helping elect Democrats and Republicans who will strengthen the U.S.-Israel partnership, while J Street is focused on turning support for the Jewish state into a partisan political football,” said AIPAC’s spokesperson.
Ben-Ami said this year’s campaign is not about “the relationship between us and AIPAC,” but is rather about emboldening candidates who may otherwise worry that they will be up against AIPAC’s war chest.
“We are very conscious that there are many candidates who are afraid of what AIPAC might be able to do politically, and therefore adopt positions and say things about policy because they are afraid, and their fear and intimidation is holding them back,” Ben-Ami said.
Now, he said, J Street is putting “the shoe on the other foot.”
“If you are going to oppose American democracy and provide carte blanche to this Israeli government, then you need to be afraid,” he said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post J Street goes on the offensive against AIPAC-backed candidates appeared first on The Forward.
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Germany’s far-right AfD, riding state win, targets more gains in elections from east to west
(JTA) — Germany’s far-right, riding high after winning an eastern state, seeks to capitalize on its momentum in a series of upcoming elections — starting with municipal voting this weekend, followed by two closely watched state contests.
The first test for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party comes Sunday in municipal elections in the western state of Lower Saxony. A week later, the AfD has its sights on state elections in the capital, Berlin, and the Baltic coast state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
The AfD beat out other parties in Saxony-Anhalt on Sept. 6 with 43.8% of the vote and 39 of 83 state parliament seats, falling just short of a majority and marking Germany’s greatest far-right victory in a state election since World War II.
“From previous elections, we know that the AfD is currently able to mobilize almost totally its own constituency and potential voters, while its democratic competitors have much more problems,” said Gideon Botsch, the head of the Emil Julius Gumbel Research Unit on Antisemitism and Right-Wing Extremism at Potsdam University.
While polls do not predict the next state election results will match the historic win in Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD currently leads other parties in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania with about 35% of the vote. And in Berlin, long a stronghold of Germany’s political left, the AfD is jockeying with the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the left-wing Linke for first place, with all three polling around 20%.
The AfD, a nationalist, anti-immigrant party whose leaders have proposed rejecting Germany’s “guilt complex” over the Holocaust, has regularly topped nationwide opinion polls for the past year. In surveys asking Germans which party they would choose if federal elections were held “this Sunday,” the AfD often receives the highest results, Botsch told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The AfD has built a dedicated and growing base, said Botsch. Its popularity signals frustration with the mainstream parties in power, particularly the CDU, Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s party, amid a sluggish economy. The AfD is especially popular in eastern Germany, where voters are poorer and hit hard by high energy prices exacerbated by the wars in Iran and Ukraine.
The AfD is likely to perform more weakly in the west, where Lower Saxony will hold a municipal election on Sunday. The party has stronger influence in the east, and Germany’s municipal elections tend to hinge more on well-known figures from established parties, said Roger Stöcker, a political scientist at Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg. Still, even if the AfD doesn’t transform governments, Stöcker said that making inroads to further entrench itself in Lower Saxony would be “a strategically significant success.”
“It’s conceivable that the AfD wins a town hall or a county administration here and there or strengthens its presence in local councils, expanding its local base,” said Stöcker.
The three upcoming elections are being closely watched for signs of the AfD’s wider-scale momentum, said Daniel Schuster, who heads the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s European office.
“Taken together, these elections can help show whether Saxony-Anhalt was an exceptionally strong eastern result or part of a broader national expansion of the AfD’s electoral base,” said Schuster.
Remko Leemhuis, the director of the American Jewish Committee Berlin Lawrence and Lee Ramer Institute for German-Jewish Relations, added that residents will feel the effects of the AfD’s success even if it falls short of its victory in Saxony-Anhalt. A “very strong AfD result,” short of managing to enter government coalitions, would still “raise serious concerns” for Jewish residents about the party’s influence, said Leemhuis.
Residents in Saxony-Anhalt are waiting to see the ramifications of the AfD’s election victory. Without an outright majority, the party needs partners to join a coalition. Its nationalist agenda in the region includes teaching children less about Hitler, banning Pride flags in public buildings and requiring artists and cultural organizations to sign a declaration that they will not “disparage Germany and its culture” if they seek state funding.
State governments also control domestic policing and parts of the judiciary. The AfD could use its power in these areas to “put pressure on minorities it dislikes,” including immigrants, Muslims and Jews who are identified with Holocaust remembrance, said Stöcker. At the same time, the AfD could direct policing and intelligence away from right-wing extremism in Saxony-Anhalt, which recorded the second-highest number of right-wing extremist crimes per capita of Germany’s 16 states last year, Leemhuis said.
The AfD’s victory in Saxony-Anhalt marked a “watershed moment” in German politics, according to Roland Abold, the managing director of Infratest Dimap, a German election research institute. Abold said that the result heaped pressure on Merz and the federal government, as “calls for a change in political direction and a reassessment of cooperation with the AfD are likely to intensify.”
The CDU for now is standing behind Merz, the most unpopular chancellor in modern German history after 16 months in power. But if the CDU faces further heavy defeats in the upcoming elections, questions about Merz as the party’s leader could escalate, said Stöcker.
The AfD already has its eyes on his job. Alice Weidel, the national AfD’s co-chair, announced on Monday that she wants the party to win “at least 40% of the vote” in Germany’s next federal election in 2029.
Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD candidate in Saxony-Anhalt who hopes to become the state premier, said in the same press conference that his goal was “very clear.”
“As perhaps the next Minister-President of Saxony-Anhalt, I need a Federal Chancellor Alice Weidel here in Berlin, so that we can write here history side by side,” said Siegmund.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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I was born after 9/11. I still carry the memories of that day.
Earlier this week, I was talking with my mother over the phone about her experience on 9/11. She walked me through the familiar parts — how she was in our Upper West Side apartment when she learned about the attacks from a relative, how she went to the garage to get the car so they could drive to a friend’s house upstate once she realized the attacks were acts of terror. There were still hijacked planes in the air, and she worried New York City might be targeted again. Then, she said, “This part is going to make me cry.”
I hadn’t remembered what came next, but suddenly it came back to me. “Oh no, me too,” I said.
While she waited for my father to come back uptown from his office in the Financial District, she stopped inside a fire station across from the garage. Inside was a lone firefighter, who’d stayed behind to man the station while the rest of his company was inside the towers. He was watching the news on television, and my mom stood next to him, watching too, when the towers fell.
“We just lost so many men,” he said.
I wasn’t there when it happened; I wasn’t even alive. But I’d heard this story before, I’d walked dozens of times past that same fire station, which now has a plaque commemorating the seven firefighters who died on 9/11. Hearing the story again on the phone, I found myself walking down the streets of Washington D.C., bawling.
I’m 23, born a year-and-a-half after 9/11. Most Americans my age learned about the attacks in school, as history. I’m part of the 16% who learned through family or friends.
The discovery happened by accident, when I was in kindergarten. My mom and I were in a children’s store on the Upper West Side, when we started flipping through a picture book about the history of New York City. Most of the book was unremarkable, but the end was unexpected: a scene of the smoldering twin towers.
I forget what exactly happened next, but here’s what I do remember: My mom was upset that the shop hadn’t provided a warning about the book’s end, and I was confused about why she was upset. I was five, too young to understand the image and never one to let a question go unanswered; I must have pestered her until she offered up an explanation.
She hadn’t been prepared to tell me about terrorism. She’d been evading the topic for some time, telling half-truths to avoid it. When I’d ask her why we had to take our shoes off in line at the airport, she’d just say it was to make sure no one had anything dangerous, leaving out the part about how a man had tried to get on a flight with bombs hidden in his shoes.
“9/11 is a huge thing for a parent to have to tell a kid about,” my mom told me this week. “You were a happy kid, and I didn’t want you to get scared or traumatized.”
The events, and impacts, of that day slowly unfolded for me as the years passed. I learned that my father had watched from Battery Park as the South Tower fell; he ran westward as plumes of smoke billowed toward him. I learned that my parents had friends who’d died in the towers, one of whom was the father of a boy I grew up with. I remember going to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum when it opened in 2014, feeling sick as I watched footage of people jumping out of the towers.
The New York Times recently interviewed dozens of Gen Z Americans about 9/11. I was struck by how disconnected many felt from the event. “It’s hard to feel sad about something that you don’t remember,” said Annika Heegaard, a 25-year-old now living in New York.
But for me, 9/11 doesn’t feel quite so far away. By now I’ve lived through other mass casualty events, like the Parkland shooting and the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. But 9/11 is the only tragedy that my family members had such a direct connection to. “It was devastating,” my mom said.
I think the reason I can remember the exact moment I found out about 9/11 is because it changed my view of the world. I remember being almost unable to comprehend that anyone would do what the hijackers did. I wasn’t, as my mom feared, traumatized by learning about the attacks; I didn’t fear for my safety each day. But the knowledge was in some ways a loss of innocence — a discovery that people could do awful things and that the world wasn’t as safe a place as I had assumed.
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