Anti-Semitism: from Nazi Germany to Glastonbury

Recent regrettable events at the music festival in Glastonbury, where pop duo “Bob Vylan“ led a sad minority of bigots in calling for Jewish extermination, have caused me to revisit the question of antisemitism in general and chess in particular. Vylan’s eponymous lead singer, (real name: Pascal Robinson-Foster) notoriously  parroted the genocidal brief ‘From the river to the sea’, a call unwisely broadcast live by the BBC (to near universal excoriation). In a piece for Times Radio, reprinted in full on X (formerly Twitter) Andrew Neil comprehensively summarised the lamentable plenary extent of the controversy:

“ ‘Death, death to the IDF’ shouted moronic rapper Pascal Robinson-Foster at the Glastonbury music festival … We’ll stick to his real name. 

As he strutted the stage shirtless in his white underwear mouthing his mantra — along with a generous dose of anti-semitism — the Glasto crowd dutifully repeated it, again and again. 

I’m not sure what was worse. Mr Robinson-Foster’s call for the death of Israeli defence forces or a mindless audience’s brain-dead repetition of it.

Since the IDF is all that stands between Israel’s survival and it being wiped out by its Islamist enemies, to call for the death of the IDF is tantamount to advocating a second Holocaust. No doubt they hadn’t quite thought that through… 

The BBC distributed Mr Robinson-Foster’s rant far and wide by streaming it live on its iPlayer. That has provoked a second row, with some demanding the BBC be charged for disseminating hate speech. 

The BBC will now have to explain why it decided to stream Mr R-F live rather than as pre-recorded and suitably edited for broadcast.  Or if live, why not on a delay? And given none of that was in place, when they heard what he was saying, why did nobody pull the plug?

Avon and Somerset police are investigating Mr Robinson-Foster for hate speech. Inevitably there are those saying that if people can be jailed for moronic tweets — as they have been — then he should be banged up too. 

I wouldn’t hold your breath. Yesterday we learned that the Kneecap Numpties will not be charged over a November 2023 video in which they said ‘the only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP’. Maybe the Twitter Sweeney would have been more resolute if they’d tweeted it.

Kneecap followed Mr Robinson-Foster at Glasto. We’ve come a long way from the summers of love in the 1960s which kicked off the modern mania for pop festivals. Now they seem more blighted by hatred than uplifted by love. 

I was going to say they sometimes seem to have more in common with a Nuremberg rally. But even the Nazis did not scream ‘death to the Jews, death to the Jews’ at their rallies, even if they thought it and that was their intention. 

At Glastonbury a generation which wallows in woke, never had to don a uniform to defend its country and whose idea of danger is to risk reading or seeing something that might trigger it, well that generation not only thought it. They said it out loud.”

After the notorious “Night of Broken Glass” (Kristallnacht), orchestrated by Hitler’s Nazi thugs against the Jewish population of the Third Reich, Jewish intellectuals realised that their future led only to the concentration camp. Lasker, Mieses and Spielmann fled, as did Stefan Zweig. The latter, though not a noted chess player, was the Austrian-Jewish author of Schachnovelle (variously translated as “The Royal Game” or “Chess: A Novel”) and Sternstunden der Menschheit (Decisive Moments in History), both of which I had first read at the age of 17. It felt particularly poignant to cite Zweig in the context of suppression of writers. He was one of many whose opinions and style had unexpectedly fallen foul of those controlling the levers of publication, and, potentially fatally, those of government and power in Nazi territories.

I now see such antisemitism arising again, with my personal hero Aron Nimzowitsch becoming very much the canary in the mine to detect anti Jewish opinion.

One game I have chosen this week comes from my own book on Nimzowitsch and shows in clear fashion how a seemingly ugly retreat (…Qh8) may in fact be the prelude to a victorious counterattack. Readers will observe from several of the comments in the debate that much prejudice still haunts this great Jewish chess writer and player.

For example, Nimzowitsch is accused of being unable to beat strong opposition. And this of a man who did, in fact, inflict defeat on the world champions Lasker, Alekhine and Euwe, as well as title challengers such as Siegbert Tarrasch, Frank Marshall, Carl Schlechter and Efim Bogolyubov. Perhaps one detects, even here, the lingering influence of those forces which destroyed much of Nimzowitsch’s culture and which burned the books or rewrote them with Ersatz authors.

Nimzowitsch was not the only author and chess grandmaster to suffer from anti-Jewish comment. Nimzowitsch personally escaped direct consequences by passing before the worst of Nazi depredations, but others lived on to experience persecution first hand. Indeed some European masters, such as Landau and Przpiorka, perished in Hitler’s camps.

Famous Jewish names abound in chess history, imbued with the rich cultural heritage of the Central European Jewish environment — names such as: Johannes Zukertort, Wilhelm Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker, Siegbert Tarrasch, Jacques Mieses, Akiba Rubinstein, Aron Nimzowitsch and Rudolf Spielmann.

The last six of these continued to play chess actively well into the 1930s, a time when the German language, not to mention German politics, was entering an intense period of flux. For example, foreign words, so called “Fremdwörter”, were phased out by the Nazis. Thus “Telefon” (telephone) was replaced by “Fernsprecher”, and the easily comprehensible “Kandidatenturnier”, or qualification tournament, gave way to the clumsy, if purely Teutonic, “Anwärtertreffen”.

As words began to translate into actions, German chess writer and official Max Blümich was entrusted with revising the celebrated chess primer, Kleines Lehrbuch des Schachs. This concise chess manual had been co-authored by the aforementioned Jacques Mieses: a brilliant, ingenious but erratic player, yet a most lucid and reliable author, whose writings had nurtured generations of pre-Nazi era German chess enthusiasts. Irritatingly for the Gauleiters of grammar, spelling and the written word in general, Mieses was Jewish.

Blümich’s solution was brutal. He simply eliminated the original author’s name from the book, and for good measure, in the editions of 1941 and 1943, Blümich went on to cancel the names of such Jewish chess Titans as Dr Siegbert Tarrasch, the famed Praeceptor Germaniae, and even Dr Emanuel Lasker himself, the World Chess Champion from 1894–1921.

Mieses himself was fortunate. For many years a resident of Leipzig, Mieses escaped to England, where he continued to create the ingenious tactical masterpieces which had made his name on the battlefields of European chess.

And what of his colleagues? Lasker too spotted the danger and also fled, first to Moscow, then to New York, where he survived for a while in genteel poverty, before dying at the age of 72. Nimzowitsch, having had the courage to forcibly eject a uniformed SS officer from the press room of the 1934 World Championship, died in the Hareskov Sanatorium, Copenhagen, 1935, most probably of cancer. Tarrasch died in Munich in 1934 before the Nazis came for him. Spielmann fled to Sweden to avoid the concentration camps, but perished, friendless, of starvation in a Stockholm garret. A tragic end for a valiant warrior of the mind who had numbered Capablanca, Alekhine and Euwe amongst his victims — between them, the three World Champions who held the World Title from 1921 to 1946.

Most poignant of all was the story of the mighty Akiba Rubinstein. Rubinstein had once trained to become an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, but succumbed instead to the lure of chess, emerging as victor of numerous elite tournaments and vanquisher also, in individual games, of Capablanca, Alekhine and Lasker himself, all in classic masterpieces of the art of chess. As the 1930s dawned, Rubinstein’s once magisterial mind began to cloud. He withdrew from chess to a care home, where he silently and patiently awaited the arrival of the Gestapo.

When the Myrmidons of the Third Reich did finally appear, they found that the genius of chess had descended into a hermetic carapace, a vacant victim of a syndrome first described by Alexander Pope: a man lost in the “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind”. Whether impelled by compassion, or confronted with the utter pointlessness of hauling off a prisoner whose mind was no longer capable of comprehending his fate, the Geheime Staatspolizei retreated, leaving their intended sacrifice in peace, a peace which endured until 1961, when Rubinstein passed away in tranquillity at the age of 80.

The moral of the story is clear. Cancel culture may start with single words, but then it spreads virally to literature, opinions, society in general and finally living targets. If tolerance cannot be maintained for opposing or simply inconvenient points of view, then reasoned debate and the life of the intellect become untenable. “Reason requires that a diverse range of ideas be expressed and debated openly, including ones that some people find unfamiliar or uncomfortable. To demonize a writer rather than address the writer’s arguments is a confession that one has no rational response to them.” This sentiment was from incisive minds of Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein, who were protesting against the American Humanist Association’s  cancellation of Richard Dawkins’ Humanist of the Year Award from 1996.

In the 1930s chess literature became an early weathervane, a speluncular canary in the mine, indicating the stirrings of the lethal intolerance to come —an intolerance which, from a frightening multiplicity of instances, we are now in grave peril of repeating. Black and White are not yet controversial terms in chess, but the direction of discourse on climate change, gender multiplicity, whose lives matter, museums, memorials, statues, universities and even the mentions of the “slave products” tea, cotton and sugar in the oeuvre of Jane Austen (a noted abolitionist who in fact raised the issue of slavery in her novel Mansfield Park) threaten to become ever more toxically authoritarian. Chess Grandmaster Jacques Mieses, the cancelled author of his own book, whose best game I also celebrate this week, would have doubtless recognised the warning signs.

In that game, Aron Nimzowitsch vs. Mieses from 1920, Nimzowitsch, the progenitor of hyper-sophisticated Hypermodernism, is blasted in brutally direct style by his refreshingly unsubtle opponent. In a second game, James Craddock vs. Mieses of 1939, Mieses carries off a homage to the Immortal Game, between Anderssen and Kieseritzky in 1851, with its double rook sacrifice to force checkmate.

I close with a heart rending letter the exiled Spielmann wrote to a supportive friend, while seeking refuge in Sweden. The friend reacted positively, but on his friend’s passing, Spielmann ran out of road.

“What’s sad is that I was not only expelled from Austria, my homeland, but also lost the opportunity to move freely. Almost all countries that have a chess life in them have closed their borders to emigrants and refugees. I can’t enter any of them now with my worthless Austrian passport.

“For six months now, I have been sharing suffering with people who have lost their home through no fault of their own and are wandering without receiving absolutely any financial assistance. The only thing that keeps me in this world is the hope that I will eventually find some kind of chess-related job. Would you be able to find something like this for me in Stockholm or somewhere else in Sweden? Not necessarily a permanent job. I could spend some time in Sweden to restore my spirit and my chess abilities and to gain strength for future activities. Perhaps later I will be able to emigrate to England or America. I beg you not to leave me in trouble. I will agree to any conditions, just to be busy with something. The main thing for me is to get out of Hell in the centre of Europe. Anti-Semitism is becoming increasingly noticeable in Prague, which deprives me of any means of livelihood. Our 30-year acquaintance gives me the opportunity to hope that I will get an answer from you, so that I can learn what fate awaits me…”

Spielmann did indeed manage to flee to Sweden with the help of his friend. He hoped to reach England or the USA and eked out money for the overseas passage, by playing exhibition matches, writing chess columns and an autobiography.

However, pro-Nazi members of the Swedish Chess Federation disliked Spielmann because he was Jewish. His longed for book,  Memories of a Chess Master , was repeatedly delayed. Despairing of its publication, the impoverished Spielmann became withdrawn and depressed.

In August 1942, he locked himself in his Stockholm garret and did not emerge for a week. On August 20, neighbours summoned police to check on him. They entered and found Spielmann dead. The official cause of death was ischemic heart disease, but it is generally accepted that he had followed established chessboard practice in a hopeless position and resigned, by intentionally starving himself to death.

The Swedish epitaph on his tombstone reads: “Rastlösflykting, hårt slagen av ödet” (“A fugitive without rest, struck hard by fate”).

Nathan Mannheimer vs. Aron Nimzowitsch

Frankfurt, 1930, rd. 4

1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. Nc3 Bb4 4. exd5 exd5 5. Nf3

White handles the opening in stereotyped fashion and soon contracts an incurable light-square weakness, with Black’s knights masquerading as physicians.

5… Ne7 6. Bd3 Nbc6 7. h3 Bf5 8. Bxf5 Nxf5 9. O-O Bxc3 10. bxc3 O-O 11. Qd3 Nd6 12. Ng5 g6 13. Bf4 Qf6 14. Bd2?

It was essential to remove one of Black’s knights.

14… h6 15. Nf3 Kh7 16. Nh2

16… Qh8

Not just a case of Nimzowitsch’s sense of humour gaining the upper hand. White threatened Ng4 and if 16…Qg7 17 Ng4 h5 18 Bh6+-.

17. Qe3 Qg7

Now this move is safe.

18. Qf3 Ne4 19. Bc1 f5 20. Qd3 Na5 21. f4 Qd7 22. Nf3 Qc6 23. Ne5 Qe6 24. Rb1 b6 25. Kh2 Nc4 26. Be3 g5 27. g3 Rf6 28. Rbe1 Rg8 29. Bc1 b5 30. Nf3 g4 31. hxg4 Rxg4 32. Ng1 Rfg6 33. Rf3 Qg8 34. Ne2 h5 35. Kg2 h4 36. Rh1 Rh6 37. Rh3 Qg6 38. Be3 Qa6

White is helpless against Black’s plan of annexing the a-pawn.

39. Bf2 Qxa2 40. Be1 a5

The finish is not lacking in humorous touches.

41. Kf1 Qb1 42. Ng1 a4 43 .Ke2 a3 44. Rf1 a2 White resigns 0-1

Observe that Black’s 38th move threatened …Nb2 ’checkmating’ White’s queen.

Aron Nimzowitsch vs. Jacques Mieses, Gothenburg, 1920, rd. 2

James Marston Craddock vs. Jacques Mieses, Civil Service vs. National Liberal Club, London, 1939

Jose Raul Capablanca vs. Rudolf Spielmann, Bad Kissingen, 1928, rd. 6

Ray’s 206th book, “  Chess in the Year of the King  ”, written in collaboration with Adam Black, and his 207th, “  Napoleon and Goethe: The Touchstone of Genius  ” (which discusses their relationship with chess) can be ordered from both Amazon and Blackwells. His 208th, the world record for chess books, written jointly with chess playing artist Barry Martin,  Chess through the Looking Glass ,  is now also available from Amazon. 

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