Jewish World Chess Championship Runners-Up

JINFO.ORG

The listing of world chess championship runners-up of Jewish descent given below is based on the list of so-called "undisputed world chess championships," a category whose definition reflects the fact that the world chess championship was in dispute in the years 1993-2006. In 1993, the then world champion Garry Kasparov and his challenger Nigel Short broke with the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE), which had sponsored the world chess championship matches since 1948, and organized the Professional Chess Association (PCA) to sponsor their 1993 championship match. As a result, between 1993 and 2006 there were both FIDE and PCA champions. The list below excludes the disputed period 1993-2006.

NOTES
1. 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.
2. "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).
3. Jewish father, non-Jewish mother.