JEWS RANKED AMONG THE 64 STRONGEST CHESS PLAYERS OF ALL TIME ACCORDING TO THE 1989 STUDY "WARRIORS OF THE MIND"
(44% of strongest players)Listed below are chess players of Jewish descent who were ranked among the sixty-four strongest players of all time in the detailed analytical study Warriors of the Mind: A Quest for the Supreme Genius of the Chess Board, which was co-authored by Grandmaster Raymond Keene and mathematician and International Master Nathan Divinsky (Hardinge Simpole, Brighton, UK, 1989, p. 323). Earlier attempts to scientifically rank the several dozen greatest chess players of all time, performed by Adriaan de Groot in 1951 and by Arpad Elo in 1978, show very similar Jewish percentages; see, e.g., the discussion in Jewish Chess Masters on Stamps, by Felix Berkovich (McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 2000, p. 123). The Keene-Divinsky ranking of each of the players listed below is indicated in square brackets.
- Garry Kasparov 1 [1]
- Robert (Bobby) Fischer 2 [3]
- Mikhail Botvinnik [4]
- Emanuel Lasker [6]
- Viktor Korchnoi 3 [7]
- Lev Polugaevsky [12]
- Efim Geller [13]
- Mikhail Tal [14]
- Leonid Stein [15]
- David Bronstein [17]
- Isaak Boleslavsky [20]
- Samuel Reshevsky [22]
- Yuri Averbakh [25]
- Semyon Furman [26]
- Alexander Belyavsky [27]
- Mark Taimanov [30]
- Salomon Flohr [33]
- Miguel Najdorf [35]
- László Szabó [36]
- Reuben Fine [38]
- Akiba Rubinstein [44]
- Wilhelm Steinitz [47]
- Ossip Bernstein [49]
- Aron Nimzowitsch [50]
- Siegbert Tarrasch [53]
- Rudolph Charousek [58]
- David Janowski [61]
- Johannes Zukertort [64]
NOTES
1. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.
2. According to FBI files unsealed in 2002 and other independent archival materials, Bobby Fischer's biological father was not the German physicist Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, as previously supposed, but rather the Hungarian-Jewish engineer and fluid dynamicist Paul Nemenyi, making both of his parents Jewish. See "Life is not a Board Game," by Peter Nicholas and Clea Benson, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 8 February, 2003. Additional information can be found in Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time, by David Edmonds and John Eidinow (HarperCollins, New York, 2004, pp. 313-321). This reference, incidentally, states (p. 39) that Boris Spassky told its authors that there is "no truth" to the widely reported claim that his mother was Jewish.
3. "Of mainly Jewish descent"; see The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, edited by Gershon David Hundert (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2008, Vol. 1, p. 316).
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