On the Etymology of Tarot

​

When speaking about the secret Judaica of the Noblet Tarot, I’m often asked about the origin and meaning of the word Tarot. Trying to uncover the Tarot’s earliest origins is akin to trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle that is missing nearly all of its pieces. Although gambling—and especially card games—was extraordinarily popular in Renaissance Europe, very few decks have survived the passage of time. Fewer than ten Tarot decks, or fragments of decks, from before the year 1600 remain today, and commonalities among these remnants suggest the existence of earlier artistic prototypes that are now lost. Thus the cards, on their own, offer limited insight into the original meaning of the word Tarot.

 

From Michael Dummett’s The Game of Tarot (1980):

 

“Although the Tarot pack originated in the fifteenth century, it did not originally bear that name. The word ‘Tarot’ has become more or less naturalized as an English word; it is, in fact, the French adaptation of the Italian name of these cards—tarocchi or, in the singular, tarocco.  In early sources the French word is sometimes spelled tarau (plural taraux), tarault, or simply taro…. Where the word tarocchi comes from, nobody knows: no plausible etymology for it has ever been suggested, and this deficiency was already being commented on by an Italian poet, Lollio, in 1550. It is not, however, the original name of the cards: the first use of the word tarocchi known to me dates from 1516, once again from an account-book of the Ferrara court. Throughout the fifteenth century, the word used was always trionfi, or, in Latin, triumpi—‘triumphs’: this name was still in use in 1500.”  [1]

 

To summarize the challenge: Italian playing cards with triumphal imagery were originally called trionfi—a word whose etymology poses no mystery, being simply the plural of trionfo, meaning triumph or victory parade. The oldest preserved example of the word trionfi in writing dates back to 1440 Florence. In the 1500s, however, trionfi was gradually replaced by a cluster of similar-sounding terms that eventually merged into the word Tarot we use today. The puzzle is the shared etymology of these early variants—tarochi, tarocho, tarocchi, taraux, tarau, taro [2]—which, for reasons still unknown, displaced the older and perfectly intelligible trionfi. The diversity of spellings suggests repeated attempts to transliterate an unfamiliar word of foreign origin.

 

As of today, the two oldest known instances of variations of Tarot being used as a term of reference for playing cards are both from the year 1505. The first, tarochi, was found in the Italian city of Ferrara. The second, tauraux, was found in the French city of Avignon. Given that these two words have differing suffixes, and that they appear contemporaneously, a clue to the original meaning of Tarot most likely resides within their similar-sounding prefixes.

 

In 2022 the Tarot historian Andrei Vitali, in the book Bologna & The Tarot, offered a new theory that tarocchi was inspired by a previously unknown word from an Italian dialect spoken in Piedmont, taroch, which meant “fool.” So, the theory goes, once upon a time tarocchi meant “fool cards,” which makes sense because the first card is The Fool. Vitali’s theory is plausible, but it has challenges, the first being the rarity of the word taroch. Secondly, he admits to having no explanation of how this word produced the French and Provençal variants taraux, tarau, and taro. Furthermore, we are left with no explanation of why or how taroch supplanted trionfi specifically in the early 1500s, beginning, apparently, in the cities of Ferrara and Avignon.

 

Finding the etymological origin of a new word that so successfully replaced an old one should not be so difficult. And Vitali worked extremely hard in searching for a possible root for the word Tarot. His analysis plumbs the depths of Italian, Spanish, French, German, Latin, Arabic, Turkish, Celtic, and numerous regional dialects. One language, however, that was read and spoken in both Ferrara and Avignon—and that somehow eluded Vitali’s attention—is Hebrew.

 

In 1492, the same year that Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews of Spain, Duke Ercole I d’Este of Ferrara declared his city open and welcoming to Jewish refugees. Ercole issued letters of safe conduct that not only permitted Jews to settle in Ferrara but also explicitly protected them from the reach of the Spanish Inquisition.[3] As a result, Ferrara was one of the rare locations in the Catholic world where a converso could revert to Judaic observance without fear of prosecution from the Holy Office of the Inquisition for the crime of “Judaizing.” In the early 1500s Ferrara became not only a place of refuge for wealthy Jewish families that had the means to flee Spain and Portugal, but also a center for Crypto-Jewish activism.[4] Even more relevant, the Duke extended an exclusive license to several Jewish families in Ferrara to operate gambling houses [5], and he himself was known to play cards frequently with “a Jew named Abbram.” [6]

​

Avignon’s Jewish community was unique in medieval Europe: under papal rather than royal authority, it was spared the French crown’s expulsions of 1306 and 1394, as well as the exile of the Jews of greater Provence in 1501. Protected as “the Pope’s Jews,” they were allowed to remain in Avignon and the nearby Comtat Venaissin, maintaining communal life, synagogues, and religious learning without interruption.[7] This rare continuity made Avignon one of the very few places in Europe where Jewish presence was never broken during centuries of widespread expulsions. Like those of Ferrara, Avignon’s Jews were financially well off. Many worked as moneylenders with exclusive papal permission, through which they had the means to pay exorbitant fees to the Pope to maintain their protected status.[8] Like Ferrara, Avignon was a unique refuge for Jews fleeing Catholic persecution in the early 1500s.

 

Given all of the above, a new etymological theory for the word Tarot emerges with little effort. Around 1492, when Northern Italy was absorbing Jews and New Christians fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, someone came upon the idea of creating a deck of Torah cards, perhaps for serious education, perhaps for fun. Whether this new deck of cards overtly or covertly depicted Torah stories is an open question. What is essential is that its name was a play on the word Torah, often spelled Tora in Italian, French, and Spanish of that time. It was this new work of art that gave birth to the words tarochi in Ferrara and taraux in Avignon. And it was also this new work of art that was instrumental in standardizing the deck’s count of unique picture cards to twenty-two, one for each letter of the Hebrew Aleph-Bet. As uninformed copyists reproduced the original Torah cards with intentional and unintentional alterations, their Judaic content was quickly lost—leaving us with today’s mystery. The plausibility and explanatory power of this theory is far greater than any other I have encountered.

 

A thoughtful critic will ask: if this theory is so obvious, how did it escape the notice of Dummett and Vitali? Why did they—both highly accomplished scholars with credentials and language skills far beyond my own—never consider such a possibility? The simple explanation is that a Hebrew–Tarot connection was already proposed centuries ago by the foundational author of the Occult Tarot, Éliphas Lévi. Lévi’s writings are so devoid of any believable historical framework, and so repugnant to the serious historian, that since his time any Tarot observation invoking Hebrew is immediately deemed ahistorical nonsense. The result is that Lévi’s magical, imaginary syncretic Cabalists rendered Europe’s actual, very real Jews entirely invisible.

 

Of course, I have a decisive advantage over Dummett and Vitali, in that a new discovery—the Judaica of the Noblet Tarot—places the similarity between the words Torah and Tarot in a starkly new light. The connection between the two words is no longer just a curious resemblance, given that we have before us an actual deck of Torah cards. Those who want to argue that the two words are not related will need to provide an alternative theory for the etymology of Tarot that possesses superior explanatory power. In the meantime, the most plausible explanation, given what we know today, is that the word Tarot was originally a play on the word Torah.

​​

​​

Stav Appel

September 2025

New York

​

​

Sources:

​1- The Game of Tarot, Michael Dummett, page 80

2- Bologna & The Tarot, Vitali, page 17

3- The Woman Who Defied Kings, The Life and Times of Dona Gracia Nasi, Andree Aelion Brooks, page 146

4- History of the Marranos, Cecil Roth, page 208

5- The Renaissance Speaks Hebrew, Silvano Greco, page 53

6- The Renaissance Speaks Hebrew, Silvano Greco, page 53

7- History of the Marranos, Cecil Roth, page 392

8- See The Jews of the South of France by Armand Lunel

​

​

​​