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...