In 1980, the British philoso­pher Michael Dum­mett authored the essen­tial schol­ar­ly book on the his­to­ry of the Tarot: the per­pet­u­al­ly out-of-print The Game of Tarot: From Fer­rara to Salt Lake City. Dummett’s pri­ma­ry the­sis, pre­sent­ed with an ency­clo­pe­dic array of evi­dence, is that Tarot cards were used exclu­sive­ly for game play­ing and gam­bling for cen­turies before any­one ever thought to use them for for­tune telling. His sec­ondary the­sis, expressed with a sur­pris­ing degree of ven­om, was that the writ­ers of the occult Tarot — Eliphas Lévi, Aleis­ter Crow­ley, and oth­ers — were char­la­tans and frauds.

A review of The Game of Tarot by his­to­ri­an France Yates pub­lished in The New York Review of Books (Feb­ru­ary 19, 1981) dis­put­ed Dummett’s blan­ket rejec­tion of the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the ear­ly Tarot could have served as a ves­sel for secret knowl­edge. The cor­re­spon­dence of the twen­ty-two major arcana with the twen­ty-two Hebrew let­ters, she wrote, ​“intro­duces the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a Cabal­ist inter­pre­ta­tion.” Fur­ther­more, she offered that on La Papesse, the female Pope card that even­tu­al­ly became the High Priest­ess, the cur­tain behind the figure’s head could pos­si­bly be a Torah scroll ​“now unrolled or unveiled in Cabal­ist inter­pre­ta­tion.” Appre­ci­ate that Yates felt the need to repeat the words ​“Cabal­ist inter­pre­ta­tion,” lest the read­er err in wan­der­ing off in a dif­fer­ent inter­pre­tive direc­tion with Hebrew let­ters and a secret Torah scroll. 

My new pub­li­ca­tion, The Torah in the Tarot, comes out from Ayin Press in Octo­ber of this year. In it I argue that both Dum­mett and Yates — the Tarot his­to­ri­an and Tarot eso­teri­cist alike— failed to dis­cern the Tarot’s foun­da­tion­al secret. Fur­ther­more, I demon­strate that when we use a Juda­ic inter­pre­ta­tive lens, one spe­cif­ic his­tor­i­cal deck, the Jean Noblet of 1650 Paris, reveals itself to be an inge­nious­ly designed secret ves­sel for Hebrew let­ters, Torah sto­ries, Juda­ic rit­u­al objects, and Jew­ish holy days, a real­iza­tion that entire­ly upends our cur­rent under­stand­ing of Tarot his­to­ry. And, most impor­tant­ly, I show that the Jean Noblet Tarot is a sin­gu­lar mas­ter­piece of Jew­ish resilience that deserves to be wide­ly known and deeply studied.

For years, I have cor­re­spond­ed with Tarot schol­ars — rang­ing from ama­teur enthu­si­asts to accom­plished authors — about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a sig­nif­i­cant Jew­ish con­tri­bu­tion to the evo­lu­tion of the Tarot, based on rec­og­niz­able Jew­ish sym­bols in the Noblet and oth­er his­tor­i­cal decks. Not every­one has agreed with my the­sis; the most fre­quent counter argu­ment offered is that Judaism was too obscure — and by impli­ca­tion, too for­eign — to pos­si­bly have played any role in the Tarot’s devel­op­ment. Anoth­er objec­tion that I often hear is that the Jews of Europe had no need for a secret tool for pre­serv­ing the lan­guage, holy days, and rit­u­als of Judaism. Over­all, my inter­ac­tion with the Tarot com­mu­ni­ty has been an edu­ca­tion on how chal­leng­ing it is for the non-Jew­ish world to incor­po­rate Judaism into their nar­ra­tives of his­to­ry and how faint­ly the world remem­bers the cen­turies of anti­semitism that pre­ced­ed the Holocaust.

Karl Marx observed that his­to­ry repeats itself, once as tragedy and a sec­ond time as farce. True to Marx’s words, we find in the Tarot an instance of his­to­ry repeat­ing as farce. Just as many Chris­tians are shocked to learn that Jesus was Jew­ish, the occult com­mu­ni­ty strug­gles to acknowl­edge that many of its ven­er­at­ed sym­bols, such as the Tree of Life, were orig­i­nal­ly Jew­ish. Just as the Church of the Mid­dle Ages purged Judaism from the Old Tes­ta­ment, Eliphas Lévi purged Judaism from his syn­cret­ic Cabala. And just as the Church enshrined Latin as the sacred lan­guage of the Torah, so Arthur Waite — the design­er of the famous Rid­er-Waite-Smith Tarot of 1909 — appar­ent­ly, know­ing­ly repur­posed the Tarot’s Judaica for his own spir­i­tu­al project. 

Thank­ful­ly the Catholic Church of 2025 is not the Catholic Church of the Mid­dle Ages. Catholi­cism evolved and found ways to rec­on­cile the the­o­log­i­cal worlds of Judaism and Catholi­cism. And, so, I hope for his­to­ry to repeat itself once again for the Tarot com­mu­ni­ty; per­haps not as farce, but in minia­ture. I hope that Tarot the­o­rists, his­to­ri­ans, and enthu­si­asts can open them­selves to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a unique Jew­ish con­tri­bu­tion to the sym­bol­ic world of the Tarot, and that they greet this new real­iza­tion not as a nar­row­ing of the Tarot’s hori­zons, but rather as a dra­mat­ic expan­sion of its spir­i­tu­al depth. 

For the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty, The Torah in the Tarot presents a dif­fer­ent chal­lenge. The wise cyn­ics among us will under­stand­ably sus­pect that this sto­ry is too fan­tas­ti­cal to pos­si­bly be true; oth­ers will find it chal­leng­ing to see beyond the Tarot’s firm cul­tur­al anchor­ing as a device for for­tune-telling. But if we can set our skep­ti­cism aside for a moment and approach the Noblet Tarot with entire­ly fresh eyes, I sus­pect we will be col­lec­tive­ly astound­ed and enchant­ed by what has been qui­et­ly hid­ing in the cards for near­ly four hun­dred years.