How a 1933 Book About Jews in Magic Was Rescued From Oblivion

Richard Hatch was searching the card catalog of the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, hunting for intriguing titles under the subject heading “Magic.” It was 1979, and Hatch was a young graduate student in physics, but he’d long nurtured an amateur’s passion for the conjuring arts and, on this day at least, he preferred to read about sleight of hand than quantum mechanics.

His rummaging stopped when he spotted a title called “Die Juden in der Zauberkunst.” Hatch had spent four years of his youth in Germany so he translated it instantly: “Jews in Magic.” The card said the book was written by someone named Guenther Dammann and published in Berlin in 1933.

He paused. A book about Jews in magic, from Germany, in the very year that the Nazis assumed power and started burning “un-German” books in bonfires across the country. It seemed obvious. This was an antisemitic tract, identifying Jews to make it easier for the government to persecute them and the public to shun them.

Awful, Hatch thought. He then looked for a magic book he actually wanted to read.

Hatch would go on to earn two graduate degrees in physics but left the field in 1983 after realizing that his ardor for magic had completely overwhelmed his interest in science. He became a full-time “deceptionist,” as he calls it. While he honed his craft and looked for gigs, he translated a 1942 German book about the famed Austrian magician J.N. Hofzinser. That brought him to the attention of a collector of Judaica and magic books who urged him to translate a fascinating rarity he’d acquired: “Die Juden in der Zauberkunst.”

“That’s when I realized that the book was about the great contributions that Jews have made to magic,” Hatch said in an interview.