They don't seem to have cared, no. Even if they weren't familiar or interested with modern philology, it is a wonder they didn't know of such meanings from previous cabalists, such as Claude Duret for example, who in his Thresor de l'histoire des langues de cest vniuers, etc., 1619., gave these meanings of the letters (aleph, ox; gimel camel, etc).
Exactly. What I want to know is what it implies about French tarotism. Why was it like this, what explains it? The brief answer appears to be that Levi started it, and his followers ran with it, solely as Tarotists, while in the English context this tradition became known in the context of an order founded not on Tarotism, but on synthesizing esotericism in general.
The question could be posed in this way:
Why did the French public not know what French scholarship knew?
Why did the English public know what English scholarship knew?
Scholars of Hebrew and philologists in general would read English, French, German and Latin publications. They all knew. An English reader could go to just about any source after 1820 and get what those philologists knew about the meanings of the Hebrew letter names.
But French readers, up to at least the
Larousse in 1864, still found sources that didn't mention Aleph-Ox or Gimel-Camel (and by Wirth, still found sources that used obscure definitions like Qoph-Monkey and Tet-Mud). And Tarotism was born in this chaotic phase, in French. The French school ran with what they got from Levi, and expanded upon it, but they never revisited the standard philological conclusions as represented in the
Larousse. The Hebrew letter meanings had become irrelevant for French Tarotists.
The meanings of the Hebrew alphabet formed a symbolic core for the English esoteric Tarot, while for the French esoteric Tarot they were little more than footnotes, occasionally a springboard for speculation, if they were even mentioned at all.
