By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — Emanuel Lasker, the second world chess champion, was born in 1868 in Berlinhen, Prussia. His father was a cantor in a synagogue, and his grandfather was a rabbi. The future champion’s older brother Berthold taught him to play chess when Emanuel moved to Berlin to study mathematics. In 1901, on the recommendation of the eminent German mathematician David Hilbert, Lasker submitted a dissertation at the University of Erlangen, published the same year. He became a doctor of mathematics in 1902.
Professor Nathan Rosen, Einstein’s collaborator at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, told me a story he heard from the great physicist. In 1927, Einstein met Lasker, whom he called “a Renaissance man,” in Berlin. Rosen mentioned Lasker’s erroneous approach to the theory of relativity: after the publication of astronomical observations that confirmed the results of the general theory of relativity, Lasker put his signature on The Pamphlet of a hundred authors (1931), criticizing the theory of relativity. Possessing a powerful intellect Lasker did not accept the relativization of time, which he instantly saw as following from the most important position of the theory of relativity – the constancy of the speed of light in the void.
In the preface to Jacques Hannack’s biography of Lasker, Einstein touches on Lasker’s original but erroneous criticism of the theory of relativity. The chess player could not accept the revolution in views on space and time produced by the theory of relativity. The world champion was in many ways a stranger to Einstein, although the latter appreciated in the chess player “a rare independence of personality”, which “was combined with a lively interest in all major problems of mankind.” Lasker’s philosophy, outlined in his book Philosophy of the Imperfect, prevented him from perceiving the new theory. The competitive spirit which Lasker embraced throughout his life was also alien to Einstein, who wrote, “Personally, the struggle for power and the spirit of competition, even in the form of a highly intellectual game, have always been alien to me.” Einstein noted that Lasker’s personality “made a somewhat tragic impression on me.” He wrote: “The monstrous intellectual tension, without which one cannot become a chess player, was so closely intertwined in his mind with chess that the spirit of this game never left him, even when he was pondering philosophical or human problems.”
Einstein came to a questionable conclusion about his interlocutor: he believed that chess was not Lasker’s goal, but rather his profession. He drew a parallel between chess in the life of the second world champion and the grinding of lenses in the life of Spinoza. He argued that lenses for Spinoza and chess for Lasker were a means of livelihood. He believed that Spinoza was happier than Lasker, for lens grinding left more freedom of thought than chess. Einstein believed that Lasker’s main goal was scientific knowledge. It is difficult to say whether Einstein was mistaken about Lasker or was fantasizing. It is possible that the brilliant psychologist Emanuel Lasker imposed his own game on his interlocutor, that is, the image of himself that he wanted to cause him. Einstein wanted to see him as a scientist and thinker. In reality, Lasker was, above all, a professional player.
Starting in 1888, he played chess for money in Berlin cafes. He played, almost to the last day of his life. For 27 years (1894-1921) he was world champion, but even after losing this title he played chess for almost 20 years, achieving outstanding results and surpassing Capablanca, who took the chess crown away from him, in tournaments. Lasker loved to play in general, not only chess. He played bridge perfectly. He was a member of the German bridge team in the 1930s. Together with his distant relative Eduard Lasker, he was one of the popularizers of the game of Go, introduced from Japan to Europe in the early twentieth century. In 1929, Lasker published the book Strategy of the Card Game. He was undoubtedly a great player rather than a scholar and thinker.
In 1933, Lasker and his wife Martha, granddaughter of the famous composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, fled Nazi persecution of the Jews. The Nazis confiscated their property and took their home. The couple moved to England. Lasker was a man of left-wing views, and the Soviet Union, where he had already been to tournaments, attracted him more than capitalist England. At the invitation of the People’s Commissar of Justice, Nikolai Krylenko, a great chess enthusiast, he moved from England to the USSR in 1935. Since the Soviet Union did not recognize professional sports, Lasker was enrolled in the Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The couple received an apartment in the center of Moscow. Lasker represented the Soviet Union in competitions and was a correspondent for the newspaper Sovetsky Sport, covering the world chess championship match between Alekhine and Euwe in Holland.
The translator Lilianna Lungina in her 2010 book Podstrochnik describes Lasker’s life in Moscow. She recalls how Lasker became friends with her father, how “on Sundays, two or three times a month, we would go as a family to them (the Laskers. – A. G.) for dinner” and how he was worried about the war in Spain: “It was 1936. Lasker lived the war in Spain. I remember his entire room was stacked with racks of books, and an entire wall was occupied by a map of Spain. With red flags that he would roll over as the troops advanced.”
Lungina describes Lasker’s condition in 1937, when repression began: “One of the first high officials to be arrested was Krylenko. And Krylenko was then People’s Commissar, he loved chess and ran a chess society. This was the person to whom Lasker could turn, who would come to visit him, and sometimes he was also at these Sunday lunches. And I remember very well how Lasker was seized with fear.” Lungina continues, “And then other acquaintances of Lasker were arrested. And at some regular lunch he said to us: that’s it, we’ve asked for a visa, we’re going to America. We’re afraid to stay here.” The Laskers took round-trip tickets, left their Berlin furniture and all their belongings in their Moscow apartment, and left the USSR for good. What was Lasker afraid of?
During the bloody trials of 1937, chess players, people close to Krylenko, whom Lungina mentions, were arrested including chess master Nikolai Grigoriev, four-time Moscow champion, chess judge and journalist Valerian Yeremeev, and chess composer, journalist and translator Pyotr Mussuri (an employee of the newspaper 64), who had been in contact with Lasker. Before their arrest, Grigoriev and Yeremeev arrived in the Far East to participate in the region championship. There they met Marshal Blucher and told him about the repressions in Moscow. On their return from their Far East business trip they were arrested. Later the Marshal was arrested as well.
Mussuri was shot very quickly. The arrested chess players were tortured to get testimony against Krylenko. Grigoriev was beaten to such a state that he could not answer questions. Krylenko was accused of spying for Germany. Involvement of German citizen Lasker in the case could have been useful for the investigating authorities, but the chess player left the USSR. Unexpectedly Grigoriev was released from prison. Apparently, from the released Grigoriev, who had many chess players in his custody, or from Eremeev, who had survived Stalin’s camps, it became known about the investigation’s attempts to include Lasker in the case. Why did Grigoriev find himself at large? Perhaps Krylenko warned the authorities during interrogations that if they touched Lasker, an unheard-of international scandal would break out. The NKVD (the Soviet secret police agency) either delayed or did not dare to make up a case about chess spies.
Having escaped Soviet repression, Lasker still did not understand the essence of the regime in the country in which he lived for two years. He believed that the USSR was the society of the future, because it did not have the competition that had bored him for so many years. In 1940 he published the utopian work Community of the Future, where he described a society without competition. He abandoned the ideas he had outlined in his earlier pamphlet Struggle. Lasker had the leftist syndrome characteristic of most Western European Jews then and now.
Although Lasker’s father was a cantor and his grandfather a rabbi, the chess player himself was far removed from Judaism and Jewish ideas. However, in 1911 he published an article in a Viennese chess newspaper about the reasons for the Jews’ fascination with the game of chess. In the article Jews in Chess (2009), Dr. Savely Dudakov, a chess master at the University of Jerusalem, commented on this article as follows: “On the occasion of one of the strongest tournaments of the beginning of the century – the Carlsbad International Tournament of 1911, where among 26 participants there were 12 Jews, or almost 50% – in the chess department of Pester Lloyd, edited by Lasker, there appeared an article belonging to the editor himself, devoted to the question of the reasons for the large number of Jews among chess players. Lasker’s explanation is sociological in nature. The author believes that as a result of difficult historical conditions, Jews have a strong development of imagination and will – components necessary for a chess player. In addition, Jews are poor, many professions are inaccessible to them, and hence the attraction to extraordinary professions associated with the stage, writing and even playing chess. The latter can hardly be attributed to professions that give a certain income, but they give an opportunity to stand out from the crowd, and “poverty is borne more easily when you have the consciousness that you are an extraordinary person.”
The subject of Jews in Chess was attractive to the Russian grandmaster Alexander Alekhine, the undefeated world champion. Alekhine gave his interpretation of the Jews’ attraction to chess and their contribution to the development of the game in a publication that appeared 30 years after Lasker’s article and two months after the latter’s death. Alekhine attributed malicious Jewish ideas to Lasker in a series of articles entitled “Aryan and Jewish Chess,” published in German in Germany and Nazi-occupied France and Holland in the newspapers Pariser Zeitung and Die Deutsche Zeitung in den Niederlanden on March 18-23, 1941.
This publication was a repetition of composer Richard Wagner’s famous Judophobic article Jewry in Music (1850). Alekhine wrote: “Can we hope that with the death of Lasker – the death of the second and, in all probability, the last Jewish world chess champion – Aryan chess, which has gone down the wrong path because of the Jewish defensive idea, will once again find its way to world chess? Let me not be too optimistic in this matter, for Lasker has put down roots and left a few followers who will be able to do much more damage to world chess thought. Lasker’s great fault as a leading chess player has many sides, […] he never thought for a single minute about transmitting to the chess world even one creative thought of his own. […] The chess maestro Lasker was alien to the very idea of attack as a joyful, creative idea, and in this respect Lasker was the natural successor of Steinitz (the first world chess champion, also a Jew. – A. G.), the greatest buffoon chess history has ever known.”
Alekhine, who put forward the idea of Aryan and Jewish Chess, was thinking in the spirit of Nazi ideologists who invented, for example, Aryan, “correct”, experimental and Jewish, “erroneous”, theoretical physics. In this vein, he criticizes one of Lasker’s followers, Grandmaster Aaron Nimzowitsch, using racist terminology: “The Riga Jew Aaron Nimzowitsch belongs more to the Capablanca era than to the Lasker era. His instinctive anti-Aryan chess concept was strangely – subconsciously and against his will – influenced by the Slavic-Russian offensive idea (Chigorin!). I say subconsciously, for it is difficult even to imagine how he hated us Russians, us Slavs!”
Alekhine writes even more clearly about the “destructive” role of Lasker and “Jewish chess thought” in the history of chess: “The unity of the destructive, purely Jewish chess thought (Steinitz – Lasker – Rubinstein – Nimtsovich – Reti), which for half a century prevented the logical development of our chess art, is becoming clearer and clearer.” Lasker’s posthumous accusation of creating “wrong” “Jewish chess” was one of the motives behind the prelude to the extermination of the Jews already being played in Europe at the time. At the Munich European Chess Tournament in September 1941, in which Alekhine participated as a representative of Vichy France, his table was decorated with a swastika flag. Alekhine was wrong: Lasker was not “the last Jewish world chess champion;” other Jews won the chess crown after him.
Lasker, who died on January 11, 1941, did not live to see the full catastrophe of the Jewish people, whose fate he had little interest in. He was immersed in the Game and did not realize that a bloody accusation against the Jews could be formed around it.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education.