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This is a guest essay by Dory Benami, an Israeli-American writer and author of the book “Bad Jew: How October 7 Changed Everything I Thought I Knew.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
In 1978, Arpad Elo, the physicist and chess master whose rating system still shapes competitive chess, published a historical ranking of major tournament players. Later compilations of his highest rated players suggest that roughly half of the top 51 were Jewish or of Jewish descent.
Half.
That number stopped me.
October 7th has changed how I look at a lot of things Jewish. I notice our history now in places I never paid attention to before. Chess turned out to be one of them.
The first officially recognized world champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, was Jewish. Born in Prague in 1836, he became champion in 1886.
The man who succeeded him was Jewish too. Emanuel Lasker held the title for an astonishing 27 years, from 1894 to 1921.
Keep going through the great names of 20th-century chess: Akiba Rubinstein, Siegbert Tarrasch, Aron Nimzowitsch, Richard Réti, Savielly Tartakower, Samuel Reshevsky, Miguel Najdorf, David Bronstein, Mikhail Botvinnik, Mikhail Tal.
These weren’t marginal figures. Botvinnik and Tal were world champions. Bronstein came within a drawn match of becoming one. Rubinstein is routinely ranked among the greatest players never to win the title.
And the pattern didn’t disappear with that generation. Garry Kasparov, whose father was Jewish, dominated chess through much of the 1980s and 1990s and is generally considered one of the greatest players who ever lived. Judit Polgár, raised in a Hungarian Jewish family, reached number eight in the world, still the highest ranking ever achieved by a woman.
Boris Gelfand, born to a Jewish family in the Soviet Union and later an Israeli citizen, played Viswanathan Anand for the world championship in 2012. Their classical match ended 6 to 6 before Gelfand lost in rapid tiebreaks. Ian Nepomniachtchi, who is Jewish, played for the world championship twice: against Magnus Carlsen in 2021 and Ding Liren in 2023. Even Bobby Fischer, who became notorious for his antisemitism, had a Jewish mother.
So, what was going on?
There is no single answer, and I don’t buy the idea that there’s some Jewish chess gene. History offers more interesting explanations.
Literacy sat at the center of Jewish life for centuries. So did study, memory, interpretation, and argument. Jewish learning wasn’t simply about knowing an answer. It meant questioning it, weighing competing interpretations, and defending your position.
The comparison to chess isn’t exactly difficult to see. If I make this move, what do you do? Then what do I do? What am I missing? What do you see that I don’t?
Studying Talmud doesn’t turn anyone into a grandmaster. But it’s not hard to imagine why a culture that placed such a high value on study and argument might embrace a game built around calculation, anticipation, and competing ideas.
Chess also kept showing up in the lives of Jews famous for things other than chess. Albert Einstein knew Emanuel Lasker well enough to write the foreword to a biography of him. Stanley Kubrick was a serious chess player who played for money in New York’s Washington Square Park before becoming one of the great filmmakers of the 20th century. Kubrick continued playing after he became successful and spoke about what chess taught him about patience and discipline.
There were practical reasons for the Jewish connection too. European Jews became concentrated in cities just as modern chess culture was developing there. Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, Odessa, and Moscow became centers of serious chess.
And chess was unusually accessible. You didn’t need land. You didn’t need a factory. You didn’t need an aristocratic name. You needed a board, an opponent, and the ability to play. For a people who spent centuries learning that property, professions, and even the right to remain in a country could disappear, knowledge had one enormous advantage. You could carry it with you.
Then came the Soviet Union. The Soviets treated chess almost like a national science. Talented children were identified early, coached, and moved through clubs and tournaments inside a system deliberately built to produce champions.
Soviet Jews thrived inside that machine. Mikhail Botvinnik became world champion. Mikhail Tal became world champion. David Bronstein nearly did. Generations of Jewish grandmasters followed.
Success also creates more success. Children see people like themselves winning. Parents begin taking the game seriously. Strong players become teachers. Clubs get better. More children enter the pipeline.
For a remarkable stretch of modern history, Jews didn’t merely participate in elite chess. They dominated it far beyond anything their numbers would predict. Then the chess world changed. Computers changed how people studied. The internet changed whom they could play. Smartphones eventually put a chess club in everyone’s pocket.
Then came COVID.
Chess.com had roughly 35 million registered members when its first PogChamps tournament began in June 2020. Lockdowns brought millions of people online. Grandmasters became streamers. Online tournaments exploded. Then “The Queen’s Gambit” debuted on Netflix that October and became a worldwide phenomenon.
By the end of 2022, Chess.com had passed 100 million registered members. It reached 250 million in February 2026. Think about what that does to the talent pool.
For most of chess history, a brilliant kid had to be born somewhere serious chess already existed. Now serious chess can find the kid. India may be the clearest modern example. Viswanathan Anand became India’s first grandmaster in 1988. He went on to become world champion and one of the greatest players of his generation. Then came the generation behind him.
Chess academies developed. Coaching improved. Parents took the game seriously. Millions of Indian children grew up knowing that someone from their country could become the best chess player in the world. India now has more than 90 grandmasters and an extraordinary generation of young players, including Gukesh Dommaraju, R. Praggnanandhaa, and Arjun Erigaisi.
India didn’t suddenly develop better chess genes. It developed a chess culture.
That makes the Jewish story more interesting, not less. Jews happened to possess an unusual combination of cultural habits, geography, and opportunity at precisely the moment modern competitive chess was developing. Then the Soviet system amplified it. Now the internet has opened much of that world to everyone.
The great Jewish chess players haven’t disappeared. The talent pool has simply become much, much bigger. And that brings me back to the number that started me down this rabbit hole: There is one Jewish person for every 500 people on this planet.
Of all the fields in which Jews have achieved wildly beyond our numbers, chess may be the most striking because the game itself is so unforgiving. There is no admissions committee, no critic deciding whose work matters, no inherited title that makes you a grandmaster. There is another person sitting across from you who wants to win.
For more than a century, an astonishing number of the people who did were Jews. I still can’t see four or five moves ahead. But I can look backward now and see what I missed: Jews were all over the board.
I’m not ready to rule out a Jewish chess gene. Jews have also won about 25% of Nobel Prizes. Could it be the culture? The education? Yes and yes. But if I’m a betting man, I’d say it’s the gefilte fish.
As a terrible Jewish chess player, I can attest to the fact that there is no Jewish chess gene. 😊