Did medieval Jews hide a ‘secret synagogue’ in tarot cards? Boston exhibit turns over clues |
BOSTON — Researcher Stav Appel shows a tarot card via the Zoom screen. Its French-language title is Le Pendu, “the hanged man,” and that’s exactly what the card depicts — a man’s body hanging by one leg upside-down. Pretty straightforward, right?
But Appel is digging deeper to find a hidden Jewish context in these cards used in fortune-telling ever since the Middle Ages. Consider Le Pendu. To Appel, the body is contorted into a shape that suggests the Hebrew letter lamed. And who might the hanged man actually be? Appel posits that he is Haman, the arch villain of the Purim story. Haman was hung from a tree on the 14th day of Adar, the 12th month of the Hebrew calendar. Wearing a 14-buttoned outfit, Le Pendu also hangs from a tree, and it is card number 12 in the deck. Haman was executed with his 10 sons — matching the total of cut-off branches on the tree. And the dead man’s tongue is sticking out, evoking a custom of eating pickled tongue on Purim.
It is widely accepted that the 22 Major Arcana cards in a tarot deck reflect the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, but Appel sees a larger Jewish story here. He contends that in medieval France, Jews seeking to preserve their religion in the shadow of hostile ecclesiastical policies did so through tarot cards. They embedded messages about their scripture, alphabet, liturgy and holidays into the cards, knowing that this risked punishment by the Catholic Church.
Now Appel is bringing it all into the open, through “Torah in the Tarot,” an exhibition at the Vilna Shul Jewish arts and cultural center in Boston. The display has recently been extended through the month of June, with open gallery viewings on May 20 and June 26.
“It’s like the Da Vinci Code of Judaism; sitting in plain sight but yet entirely unrecognized,” Appel said in a press release.
Or, as he told The Times of Israel over Zoom, “Everything you can find in the cards is a very comprehensive introduction to Judaism.” He likened the cards to “a secret synagogue, an encrypted Torah. It’s fascinating.”
For him, the fascination began almost a decade ago, when his wife brought home a deck of tarot cards from a bookstore near their home in New York state. She thought it would be a fun Shabbat entertainment for their kids, but then Appel started looking at the cards himself. He focused on the Major Arcana cards, each of which has a specific name — i.e., The Devil, The Sun, The World.
Appel is a data scientist whose diverse career path includes previous positions working for........