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A Hebrew chess treatise published in Lemberg (Lwow) in 1809 may be regarded as a prelude to the era of intense interest in chess among Eastern European Jewish communities - centred in Lithuania, Latvia and the territories on the borders of the Russian and Austrian Empires - which was to continue until the advent

Steinschneider (p. 192) comments on the fact that 'at various times, especially in the last few centuries, high-ranking people often played chess with Jews, who used this as an innocent means of ingratiating themselves.’ In this connection, he relates an anecdote of f\/lendelssohn's sovereign, Frederick the Great: "Frederick frequently played chess with a Jew, in the presence of other people too, and lost repeatedly. “I shall win the next game, I hope!”, the king called out in annoyance to his opponent. As is known, he was not of a gentle disposition. The opponent was so clumsy or so vain that he did not take the hint. He kept on making the king lose and was angrily asked to leave, never again to enjoy high honour."

Steinschneider explains: "I was informed of this anecdote by Dr F.Lebrecht, my colleague at the Veitel Heine Ephraim Academy for the Science of Judaism. Whether it applies to Frederick or to someone else, it automatically calls to mind the same behaviour on the part of the Caliphs Welid and M a’mun towards their chess opponents who, however, out of politeness, let their exalted opponents win and thus allowed their vanity to remain intact." (For the last-mentioned episodes, see Forbes, pp. 169, 179.)

However, Steinschneider also mentions Dieudonne Thiebault, F rédéric-le-G rand, 4th edition (Paris, 1827), vol. 2, p. 304, where Frederick is reported as saying that he did not play any sort of game and did not know chess at all.

G raetz, in G eschichte d er Juden, vol. 11, p. 617, quotes a report by a Dr Formstecher about Wolf Breidenbach (born in the village of the same name near Cassel in 1751; died in Offenbafch in 1829), the best chessplayer in Frankfurt am Main. As Breidenbach was purchasing Philidor’s Analyze des Echecs (first published 1749), he made the acquaintance of a titled géntleman. Through the recommendation of this gentleman he rose so high that he was later able to secure the abolition of the Jewish Poll Tax.

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of the Holocaust.

The treatise was written (or translated) and printed by the famous bibliographer Zevi Uri Rubinstein. The title (T h e o re tica l and Practical Chess Lessons’) appears in Hebrew (as above), and German: Theoretische und practische Lehren zum Schachspiel.

The primary text is in Hebrew; in somewhat smaller type, in the bottom half of the page, there is a transcription in ‘Judeo- German’, that is German in Hebrew script. The work was published in the same volume"^® as an abridged reprint of a textbook on m athem atics and astronomy by Elijah ben Abraham M izrachi, entitled M alecheth Hamispar (first printed in Constantinople in 1534).

The chess book has an opening section which partly consists of m oral reflections and historical speculations of the kind familiar to us from The Delight of Kings and other sources:

Chess is one of the oldest games in existence. In fact it is so old that nobody really knows who invented it and where it first appeared. Those who write about its history and origins disagree; first they endorse one person’s claim to having invented it, then someone denies this claim and asserts a different one. . . . Now this wisdom has spread to all parts of the world, and each person has assimilated it into his own language and it is constantly praised. . . . In order not to behave foolishly in one's leisure time, or to be involved in empty things without purpose, from which one's spirits would not rejoice, it was thought that this pastime would succeed in satisfying the intellectual soul of those who experience its charm and practise its devices and ideas.

With all the practical wisdom available such as mathematical skills and properties et alia which have been brought from all languages and translated into the Hebrew language, this kind of wisdom (or anything like it) has not been seen or heard of, from when chess appeared to this very day, . . .

If it is surprising that Rubinstein should be oblivious of the precedents of his work, we shall nonetheless see that he explains the technicalities of chess in more detail than previous Hebrew writers. He states his purpose as follows:

See Zedner, Catalogue of the Hebrew Books in the Library of the British Museum, No. 2 2 5 (p. 663).

An alternative edition (also 1809) of Rubinstein's treatise was bound together with the book B echinat Olam with a Yiddish translation by Eliezer Pavir [1805]; C h o c h m a t Shlom o [1805]; Sefer Ha-Yashar attributed to rabbenu Tam [1798].

Thus I translated how the game is best played and tactics that will be very