King Solomon may not have played chess against his advisor Benayah Ben Yehoyadah as the Midrash states, but the Jews have a long, close relationship with the game, excelling as masters, theoreticians and world champions. The Academy of Chess founded in Tel Aviv some years ago should be seen not only as the result of chess blooming in Israel due to Russian immigration, but also because of a special Jewish inclination.
Today's Israel is loyal to that tradition, ranking fifth in the world and second only to Iceland in the amount of grand masters per capita. More than one hundred schools and community centers offer chess courses in the country.
It remains unclear as to when Jews first played chess. Rashi interprets the Gemara (Ketuvot 61b) as refering to chess when it mentions nardeshir. The word ashkuki used by Rashi is still a valid Hebrew name for the game and it relates to today's French designation échecs.
However, several ninteenth century scholars (Franz Delitzsch, Moritz Stenschneider) refute this. The latter claims that the first Jewish chess player was the son of
Rabbi Saul from Taberistan, Ali, in the ninth century.
During the twelfth century, Jewish interest in chess was enhanced by explicit references by Maimonides and Judah Halevy; Abraham Ibn Ezra wrote the oldest extant chess rules which he called Haruzim. Sepher Hachasidim recommends it during the thirteenth century, and in 1575 the rabbis of Cremona declared "all games bad... except for chess."
The friendship between Moses Mendelssohn and Gotthold Lessing, which influenced Jewish Emancipation and Enlightenment, blossomed over a
chess board. In 1837 a French Jew, Aron Alexandre, wrote the first Encyclopedia of Chess, and two years afterwards one of the Haskalah educators, Jacob Einchenbaum, who was also a mathematician, wrote Ha-kerav ("the battle") a Hebrew poem on the game almost five hundred lines in length.
Among recent world champions, Fischer, Korchnoi, Spassky and Gasparov
maintained a disproportional Jewish presence. Emanuel Lasker is widely considered the most complete chess player of all times. The son of a cantor and grandson of a rabbi, he combined three supposedly scientific careers: chessmaster, philosopher and mathematician. His first biography was prologued by Albert Einstein.
Jews preponderate in blind chess. Gyula Breyer attained the world record of simultaneous blind games when he played twenty-five during Berlin's Tournament in 1920. Mikhail Najdorf played forty five in 1947 and George Koltanowski superseded all records in 1960 when he played blindly fifty six games, winning fifty of them after almost ten hours of play in a prodigy of human mind.
Najdorf shares with Koltanowski another fate: both were saved from the Holocaust because they chanced to be in a World Tournament in Buenos Aires when the war broke out (and therefore did not return to Europe).
The two main contemporary schools of chess were conceived of by Jews, the Modern school by Wilhelm Steinitz which advocates the accumulation of small advantages, and the Hypermodern by Richard Réti which avoids releasing tension in the centre of the board. Julio Ganzo’s book Chessology shows four stages of the consolidation of modern chess: the psychological by
Lasker, the scientific by Tarrasch, the positional by Capablanca and the energetic by
Breyer. Three of the four were Jews. The Chess Review of U.S. was founded by Israel Horowitz and the strategy of countergambits by Ernst
Falkbeer.
Gerald Abrahams gives four possible explanations for Jewish
chessophilia:
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Jews traditionally strive to produce the pure
intellectual
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they love study and learning
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they are perseverant
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they are talented at languages (due to migrations and cosmopolitism) including the language of chess.
Even Judeophobia infected chess. During WWII Alexander Alekhine, world champion for two decades, authored a series of articles parallel to Wagner's infamous essay Jewry in Music (1850). The composer denied the creativity of Jewish artists; the chess master "exposed" how the Jewish chess game is characterized by opportunism and material win at all cost.
His Aryan Chess and Jewish Chess opened with a question: "Can we hope that after Lasker's death -the second and probably the last world champion of Jewish descent- Aryan chess will finally find its path, after having been led astray by the influence of Jewish defensive thinking?" Aryan chess was by nature
aggressive - defense was valid only after a mistake. In Jewish chess, in contrast, pure defense is a legitimate way of winning. For example Aaron Nimzowitch's theory of "overprotection" (to unburden the centre without advancing the central pawns until positioning the major pieces) was defined by Alekhine as "purely Jewish... it is fear to struggle, doubts about one's own spiritual force, a sad picture of intellectual self-destruction." He describes the first half of the century as a "period of decadence when the Viennese school, founded by the Jew Max Weiss and propagated by the
Schlechter-Kaufmann-Fahndrich trio, dominated the world chess scene. Its secret relied not in victory but in not losing."
In the first International Tournament in London in June 1851 the German Adolf Anderssen defeated the Jewish Lionel Kieseritzky, both mathematicians, in a match of insuperable beauty which was named The Immortal. For Alekhine that victory marked the triumph of Aryan over Jewish chess.
CHESS AND PHILOSOPHY
Chess has been all but ignored as a subject worthy of philosophical analysis. Yet philosophical thought is applicable to chess as we can see by considering how the works of two Jewish philosophers, Henri Bergson and Salomon Maimon, are relevant to chess.
For Bergson durée was existencial time, contrasting with mathematical time "already gone by," which is present in the post- mortem analysis of the chess game. Maimon could be used to define what is the essence of chess truths.
Kant considered Maimon to be the thinker who best understood his doctrine. The two types of Kantian truths, a-priori and a-posteriori, those which precede or are subsequent to the sensual experience, do not leave space for the truth of chess. This seems to be the a-priori type like
mathematical truths, since we can achieve it through reasoning and without any experience. However, we discover at the same time that the truth of the chess pieces are valid only when the match is known in its totality. It is possible to play chess only with the imagination and without opening your eyes to reach conclusions about its truths. That is why many blind people excel in chess. Yet one cannot discern the nature of this truth during the game, only retrospectively, from the already finished game. Chess truths are valid when they can be identified in the block of data preceding and subsequent to them. Only in that concluded universe may a move be defined as brilliant, mediocre or deficient.
Chess requires a type of thinking similar to that required for Talmud study. Aron Nimzovitch, Samuel Reshevsky and Akiva Rubinstein were great world masters educated in Yeshivot. Talmudic thought is parallel to chess training in seven ways: the indispensability of study, memory, visual comprehension, the centrality and rigidity of law, the importance of debate, the need for bold intelligence, and an antiauthoritarian and original way of raising alternatives. The Talmudic option for the learner is to be either a Sinai (erudite) or an Oker Harim (sharp). Rashi explains it when applied to Rabbies Yosi the sage and Rabba the sharp.
Two Jews who personify these chess styles are the dogmatic Siegbert Tarrasch versus the flexible Emanuel Lasker. The former based his game on knowledge, the latter wisdom. Theirs was a powerful battle of ideas, clashing
in the famous 1908 London game, which was followed with extraordinary interest.
Lasker's victories over the scientific Tarrasch are examples of psychological relativity in chess. Tarrasch had termed the inexplicable blunders of great masters as Amaurosis Schacchistica, "chess dazzle." For Lasker these mistakes were considered a natural and inevitable part of the game. Thus he defined the difference between them: "Doctor Tarrasch is a thinker, a friend of deep and complex theory... he admires a move for its depth, I admire it for its efficacy." For Lasker fidelity to a general law was less important than the search for unique characteristics of each position that exempt it from that general law. That is why his school was called "anarchic."
Both studied weaknesses. But while Tarrasch concentrated on the technical exploitation of the adversary, Lasker was interested in the unforseeable paths available to defend one's self. This requires an open and serene mind, self-control and self-confidence, and ability to accommodate to the constantly changing board. Lasker and Tarrasch shared a Jewish destiny. The Nazis burnt their books and deprived them of glory, country and property.
Fred Reinfeld in his Appreciation of Lasker stressed his perception of the similarities between chess and life. As Borges says in his poem Chess: "The player, too, is captive of caprice/...on another ground/crisscrossed with black nights and white days./God moves the player, he, in turn, the piece."
Chess is blooming in Israel as in a natural home. The moment is therefore ripe for deepening, documenting and developing the Jewish chess aspects. A broad curriculum for the Chess Academy for instance, could include together with
mathematics and philosophy, the page of Gemara.
