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The Freedom of the Chessboard
- Abstract
In 1941 the Deutsche Schachzeitung, the official German chess publication, printed a series of articles which dealt harshly with what was described as the “Jewish idea of defense,” which had, it was claimed, vitiated the chess world for half a century. Jewish chess players, it said, were lacking in courage and devoid of creative ability. Chess, the Schachzeitung argued, contained two main streams of development—the spiritual and the material; the aggressive and the defensive, the artistic and the grasping—the Aryan and the Jewish. World champion Alexander Alekhine, at the time an unwilling guest of the Germans, represented the former influence, while Dr. Emanuel Lasker, a former champion who died in 1940, epitomized by his style and actions the Jew.
The 1937 title match between Alekhine and Max Euwe, a Dutch schoolmaster and liberal, marked the final triumph of the Aryan principle. Proof of this lay in the fact that Alekhine’s second had been the Austrian Aryan, Erich Eliskases, while Dr. Euwe had been assisted in his preparations and analysis by an American Jew, Reuben Fine. The Schachzeitung discovered an active conspiracy by the “Jewish World” to keep a friend and supporter in the game’s top position. Yet Aryan supremacy had again been vindicated, albeit by the victory of a Russian-born Frenchman.
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