3 min read
ByDavid Edmonds, David Edmonds
At birth he was given the name Garry. Garry Weinstein. But that's not the name by which you'll know him.
"It was not an attempt to hide anything", he claims. Garry Kasparov - arguably the greatest chess player in history - was born in Azerbaijan in 1963. His father, Kim Moiseyevich Weinstein, died when Garry was 7. That was why, insists Garry, he took a Russified version of his mother's (Armenian) name. It was purely "a family decision". Nothing to do with the fact that Jewishness was a barrier to advancement in the USSR and that antisemitism flowed through the system like sewage down the Volga.
There has long been an ambiguous relationship between Jewish chess players and their ethnicity. Since the birth of the world chess championship in the late 19th century, there have been 16 champions. Kasparov was the 13th.
The first, Wilhelm Steinitz, was a Jew who defeated the Polish-Jewish master Johannes Zukertort, to win the title. Steinitz was born in 1836 in the Jewish ghetto in Prague. His father had wanted him to become a rabbi. Emmanuel Lasker, the German, son of a chazan was the second.
The fourth was the non-Jewish, Russian-born, Alexander Alekhine, who was in France when it fell to the Nazis. In 1941, he penned a series of contemptible articles entitled Aryan and Jewish Chess. He considered the question of whether Jews, ''as a race, have a gift for chess'', concluding that, although they did, none "was a real chess artist".
After the Second World War, the Soviet Union emerged as the dominant force in international chess. The post-war champion (Number 6) was an electrical engineer, Mikhail Botvinnik. An unlikable, sycophantic figure, always genuflecting to the authorities, he once sent a gushing telegram to Stalin. He was keen to downplay his ethnic roots. "By blood I am Jewish, by culture Russian, by education Soviet."
Alekhine's barb that there were no Jewish chess ''artists'' had been refuted by numerous brilliant Jewish players. But it became even more preposterous after the arrival of world champion number eight, Mikhail Tal. In his autobiography, Tal doesn't mention his Jewishness, though he was happy to disclose his Latvian origins. It's difficult to convey to non-chess-players his daring tactical adventures, his swashbuckling style, the sheer inventiveness and joie-de-vivre of his game.
A sporting equivalent might be snooker's Hurricane Higgins. Certainly both men were equally reckless with their livers.
The match even non-chess players have heard of - "The Match of the Century" – took place in 1972, characterised as a Cold War showdown. At the time, it was reported that American Bobby Fischer and the (10th World Champion) Soviet Boris Spassky were half-Jewish. We now know that to be untrue. The FBI had followed Fischer's Jewish communist mother for 25 years, and documents I asked to have released showed that, in fact, Fischer's real father was not Gerhardt Fischer (as he himself believed), but a Jewish Hungarian physicist called Paul Nemenyi. So Fischer was Jewish on both sides. As for Spassky he is not Jewish at all, but a typical old-fashioned Russian nationalist, with a not atypical dose of antisemitism in his veins: "an honourable antisemite" he called himself.
After Fischer (Champion 11) seized the crown, the American became a recluse, descending deeper into madness and ranting against "kikes" and ''Jew bastards''.
Kasparov was the sixth and last of the Jewish champions - to date. That Jews have been astonishingly over-represented in elite chess is indisputable. The question is, why?
One facile theory is that chess was the perfect game for the shtetl: the board and pieces could be gathered up quickly when villagers fled from marauding Cossacks. A more provocative hypothesis is that Jews have an innate talent for the game – but that's a conjecture fraught with dangerous ramifications. Cultural explanations have great plausibility: the link between chess and the Mitteleuropa coffee house, the Jewish focus on education and the mind, the claim there are parallels between chess and talmudic study (Steinitz is reported to have been an outstanding Talmudist).
Most of the Jewish world chess champions lived in societies in which antisemitism was pervasive - and where it was harder for Jews to achieve status. And certainly one attraction of chess was, and is, its objectivity. Work can be judged unfairly. A scientific breakthrough can be sneered at. A musical composition panned. A literary work disparaged. But chess, well, there's no gainsaying victory. There's no luck, no subjectivity. Superiority at chess can be demonstrated. Prejudice has no power.
That all had formidable appeal for Jews in the 20th century - but much less so now that career discrimination has largely disappeared and competition for advancement between individuals is fought on equal terms. Perhaps that's one reason why, since Kasparov's retirement from the game, there's been no sign of a Jewish World Champion, Number 7.
David Edmonds is the producer of BBC Radio 4's 'Across The Board', presented by Dominic Lawson. It starts on May 4.
