I was playing around with the Online Etymology Dictionary tonight and was randomly typing in short words. In the entry for “jack” I found this:

The jack in a pack of playing cards (1674) is in Ger. Bauer “peasant.”

Huh… now what am I going to idly wonder about as my grandparents hand me my ass in Euchre? Wonder if the connection I’m assuming is real. Better check Wikipedia:

Euchre, the game responsible for introducing the Jack (Joker) into modern packs, invented around 1860 to act as a top trump or best Bower (from the German word Bauer, “farmer”, denoting also the Jack at cards[1])

That sounds promising, but it’s possibly lore since it assigns a bit of a heightened sense of worth on the subject of the article for introducing a major element into modern decks. So let’s check Playing Cards:

Before this time, the lowest court card in an English deck was officially termed the Knave, but its abbreviation (“Kn”) was too similar to the King (“K”) and thus this term did not translate well to indices. However, from the 1600s on the Knave had often been termed the Jack, a term borrowed from the game All Fours where the Knave of trumps has this name. All Fours was considered a game of the lower classes, so the use of the term Jack at one time was considered vulgar. The use of indices, however, encouraged a formal change from Knave to Jack in English decks

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Hmmm… That implies that the “role” of the Jack had been played by the Knave for a long time, and that it had been unofficially termed “Jack” since the 1600s. That’s not so promising. While the entire concept of what a deck of playing cards has always been fluid, this section seems to clearly show that the concept of three “court” ranks was already in place in the 1300s:

It is likely that the precursor of modern cards arrived in Europe from the Mamelukes of Egypt in the late 1300s, by which time they had already assumed a form very close to that in use today. In particular, the Mameluke deck contained 52 cards comprising four “suits”: polo sticks, coins, swords, and cups. Each suit contained ten “spot” cards (cards identified by the number of suit symbols or “pips” they show) and three “court” cards named malik (King), nā’ib malik (Viceroy or Deputy King), and thānī nā’ib (Second or Under-Deputy)

Well, it looks to me like Euchre introduced neither the concept of the Jack, nor the name “Jack” itself. The headscratcher for me is the reference for the original statement, which is “Oxford Dictionary of Card Games, David Parlett – pg.104”. I can’t find the text of that reference online, but the author seems like a serious scholar from what I turned up. It makes me wonder if there wasn’t a misunderstanding by the reader of what the writer meant.

Oh well, it was a nice story while it lasted…