buylotrogold

On another thread someone stated that Boris Spassky was Jewish. I had always thought he was Russian Orthodox. http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2004/01/searching_for_b.html 'The system was so suspicious and inefficient that Spassky had to seek permission to buy and have translated foreign chess journals in order to carry out the most basic preparation. He was in no way a model Soviet citizen but a traditional Russian patriot, the inheritor of Russian Orthodox religious culture .' http://www.jrep.com/Info/10thAnniversary/1992/Article-12.html 'Spassky was orphaned at a young age, when both of his parents were killed in the siege of Leningrad. The two have one other thing in common...Fischer's mother is Jewish and Spassky's mother is said to have been Jewish too.' So perhaps only Boris himself knows. Alan

along with explanations of how/why his mother wasn't really Jewish. Would it be because it was his father, not his mother, that was Jewish? Due to the so many angles of Jewishness: blood , religious, selfproclamations (which may change in time), persecutions, ... the question often is interesting and not simple, does not have to have a simple answer in terms of the percentile. To Nazies you were a Jew if you had 50% or more Jewish blood . Hugo Hteinhaus, the great Polsich mathematician made fun of it in his diary, writing that these idiots didn't see that their definition was (infinitely) iterative. He himself, Steinhaus, was of Jewish descend, had to appear under a different name and to hide from Germans, when they occupied Poland during WWII, but in his diaries he never mentions his ethnic descend.  His family had converted to (protestant?) christianism long before WWII. I see also the question of Schlechter's ethnicity, that his family was (deeply?) catholic. Pssibly they were converts too, I don't know (possibly that's why Schlechter ended up in Judaica

 <news:tjrTb.39429$ This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Spassky's mother was Jewish. Hm, it's his last name which is Jewish. So, the Spassky Tower in the Kremlin bears a Jewish name?  I wonder how Stalin felt about that.  I remember that he insisted that a man named Zhidov should be renamed Zhadov, else he might seem to be Jewish.  (Zhid might seem to be like Yid.) David Ames

Wlod: I _base_d my post primarily on Hans Ree's essay Vegetarians reprinted in The Human Comedy of Chess, the piece about Fischer's anti-Semitism, particularly as portrayed by Petra Dautov in Bobby Fischer, Wie Er Wirklich Ist. Ree wrote that  in The Inner Game, apparently the book published in the U.S. under the _title_ End Game, Dominic Lawson characterized Spassky as a fierce anti-Semite, who temporarily dragged Short into his distaste for Jews.  Lawson's book is very malicious; overall, he is not very generous toward chess p_layer_s.  I was wondering.  Don't they always write about Spassky that his mother was Jewish?  Is what Lawson wrote actually true?  I asked a Russia specialist, who told me it was.  He said: 'His mother looked very Jewish and her name was the Russian equivalent of Sarah Cohen, but Boris claims that is a coincidence.' Do you think that Russia expert was wrong?  I have it from someone else who knew Spassky personally that that this characterization of him is true. Best, Bob These are difficult even impossible) questions to settle when one doesn't know for sure. I can only say how I see it, mostly probabilistically. It's hard to imagine a Russian who would name his/her daughter in a way which would associate with Jewishness. It would be like condemning your child to a hardship. Russian names which end in ski or cki (= tski ) are in principle of Polish descend.  E.g. The greatest writer ever (in my opinion Dostoyevski was extremely anti-Polish, also anti_Jewish and anti-French.  Nevertheless his last name indicates that he had a Polish ancestor on his father side.  Ok, the ending ski and cki is Polish but more often than not it is carried by Jews. When Russia, Prussia and Austria took over Poland (or the Union of Poland and Lithuania) near the end of 18th century, Russia inherited Polish Jews as well. Russia (Russian Tsar or rather his clerks) would give Jews names. Often names ending in ski and cki , often funny names, sometimes, again for fun , very aristocratic names. Something similar took place on Polish lands also under Prussia (perhaps under Austria too but I am not sure). For instance, you could think that Boleslawski is a very Polish name but as you know, Boleslavski is a Jew. Also the last names consisting of Polish cities names, followed by the ski suffix (which turn them formally-gramatically into adjectives) such as Warszawski, Krakowski, Poznanski, etc.are as a rule Jewish. I don't know these days any nonJewish Russians who would have a name like Spasski (but then, what do I know). During the Soviet era, antisemitism in the Soviet Union officially didn't exist, was never acknowledged despite the severe persecutions