What was really the deal with Bobby Fischer?

Great Debates
1

I’ve always wondered about Bobby Fischer’s motivations for his bizarre anti-Semitic rants. Towards the end of his life he sort of became world famous for preaching hatred - real, vicious, Nazi-like hatred, not a slur here and a snide remark there - against the Jews. Of course, all of this was all the weirder because Fischer himself is a Jew - as if you couldn’t tell by looking at his Jewey face already - his mother, being 100% Jewish by birth, makes Fischer officially a Jew by birth whether he wants to be one or not. It doesn’t end there - supposedly Fischer’s biological father might also have been a Jew, too, although this is unproven. But that’s not even really important; what matters is that Fischer, no matter how much he praised Hitler and called for the elimination of the Jews, had Jew blood pumping through his heart - a great deal of Jew blood.

Fischer started out his crusade against the Jews as a young man, starting in 1961. It started out as seemingly mild criticism: “Yeah, there are too many Jews in chess. They seem to have taken away the class of the game. They don’t seem to dress so nicely, you know. That’s what I don’t like.” That was one of his first public statements against the Jews. He would go on to say such things as “the United States is a farce controlled by dirty, hook-nosed, circumcised Jew bastards,” and “The Jews have been hardened against Christ, against decency for thousands of years… They’re gonna have to be annihilated, Eugene.” One of his more bizarre comments: "I’m very concerned because I think the Jews want to drive the elephants to extinction because the trunk of an elephant reminds them of an uncircumcised penis. I’m absolutely serious about that… Jews are sick, they’re mental cases. "

It’s all too easy to explain this away as “craziness.” Just like people dismiss Hitler as having been insane, it’s easy to say that Fischer was just a lunatic, but that’s a sort of cop-out honestly. He was still completely lucid, able to play chess brilliantly; to his dying day, he never exhibited any real signs of true mental illness. He was merely filled with pure hatred for the Jews.

The question is, where did this come from? What was the source of this incredible and seemingly irrational hatred? It would be one thing if Fischer was raised in an anti-Semitic environment, but the exact opposite is true: he was raised by a Jewish mother, surrounded by Jews in Brooklyn, and throughout his whole career he studied and played chess with many Jews. It’s not like his Jew-hatred could be excused by ignorance or something; he wasn’t some kind of savage idiot. He was a smart, well-dressed, articulate man, and yet he had this all-consuming hatred of his own people.

Does anyone have any clue as to what really went on in Fischer’s head?

2

Schizophrenia. This was also a guy who had his fillings removed so the CIA couldn’t transmit mind-control signals through them.

3

I thought it was the Russians? But yeah, being able to play chess is not incompatible with being crazy. Hell, you look at some of the wierdos who are draw to the game, you might think it was a requirement.

4

It’s clear that he was a brilliant chess player with a disorder that fell somewhere on the paranoid schizophrenic spectrum. His disorder is the reason for his rantings and ravings about Jews (and the myriad of other problems he had dealing with people). Why Anti-Semitism? Well, it’s a classic. It says your crazy, but not crazy like “the lizard people are conspiring against me” crazy.

5

Fischer wasn’t the only crazy chess champion – he may not even have been the craziest.

Paul Morphy had a persecution complex, believed his family was poisoning his food and became a recluse.

Wilhelm Steinitz challenged God to chess matches (and claimed to win them), believed he could move the pieces through mental telepathy and was put in mental institutions on two different continents.

Emmanuel Lasker believed that one of his opponents was trying to hypnotize him.

Compared to some of them, Fischer was just cranky.

6

“Schachnovelle” by Stefan Zweig explores this notion rather well.

7

Bobby Fischer had all kinds of weird behavior aside from antisemitism. I can only guess the OP is under the impression that Fischer was perfectly normal aside from being an antisemite because the OP is extremely sensitive to antisemitism.

Belief in conspiracy theories of various kinds is a hallmark of people suffering mental illness. It always tends to be either some sort of potentially “mysterious” group, some powerful entity, or even just a group that a general undercurrent of people believe to be nefarious.

A rough analogue to the Jews is the Freemasons, who mentally ill people have been concerned about for centuries. Now, the Freemasons actually were scattered throughout the highest levels of politics, but these days they are almost entirely made up of very old men and they have very little success with getting young people interested in Freemasonry. That doesn’t mean modern day schizophrenics don’t believe all kinds of conspiracy theories about the Freemasons.

The Catholic Church has been a popular target for over a thousand years, and the CIA is of course one of the most popular ones at present.

I think a lot of it starts out of plausibility. I mean, in the Middle Ages the Catholic Church was trying to control society, and individual Catholic leaders often had their hands involved in all kinds of corruption. The CIA has been involved in some nasty, illegal shit throughout history.

How the Jews get lumped in with organizations like the CIA/Catholic Church is explained by a long history of living “apart” from the rest of society. It’s certainly not the case today, but for most of European history Jews were an isolated subgroup and being an isolated subgroup has always lead to the majority (in their ignorance) buying in to all kinds of conspiracy theories and hatemongering. When there is already a wide body of belief that Jews are involved in various world-controlling conspiracies by perfectly sane racists, it is no wonder than a crazy person might buy into them.

8

Fischer was hardly well adjusted. He was a recluse and generally paranoid that everyone was out to get him. I really couldn’t say about schizophrenia as some have suggested. Why Jews? Probably because he was around a lot of Jewish people during his most formative years and reacted as though deeply offended by his odd behavior and Anti-Semitic pronouncements.

9

Others have covered the ‘he’s just crazy’ angle already so I’m going to go with this bit. I don’t recall where I first heard this argument (about baptism in my case but it’s the same argument), but it made quite an impact on me. “Your mother is jewish therefore you’re jewish” is a rule of Judaism, yes? If you don’t consider yourself jewish why would you feel yourself bound in any way to jewish rules? So it’s entirely consistant to be born of a jewish mother and not be jewish.

10

There have been a number of good threads in the past about Fischer. My favourite was after his death, titled R.I.P Bobby Fischer, which contained some really good information and (IMO) some particularly fascinating stuff from glee and Liberal, both of whom clearly know their stuff.

11

He was fine until the US shunned him for playing in Yugoslavia.
I think that just frustrated him, and he was probably trying to focus that when a couple of Jewish diplomats got in the cross hairs.

12

When I was growing up, Fisher had a regular chess column in the magazine * Boys’ Life*. Unless it was ghosted by someone else, he came across as a pretty intelligent and level-headed individual.

His pyrotechnics during the games against Spassky seemed purposeful, not crazy. It was only years later that he seemed to blossom into a full-bloom loon.

Is it possible that his weirdness came upon him gradually, and he was pretty much “normal” in those early years? I didn’t hear anyone decrying his craziness until he went into seclusion.

13

Don’t wish to hijack but the Catholics have been a target for people because of the Inquisition,the Borgia Pope,The Pope in ww2 turning a blind eye to the massacre of the Jews,Gypsies and the mentally ill and the present day world wide evidence of child abuse by members of the church and efforts to cover it up.

So the C church does not fall into the category of irrational hatred in the same way as the stories about Jews sacrificing christian babies and plotting to take over the world etc.

I personally hold no strong views on Catholics myself,there are good people and there are bad people is my opinion.

KGB officers in the West during the Cold war actively disseminated anti C.I.A. stories along the lines of the C.I.A. were the creators of AIDS,murdered Jack Kennedy and so on as part of their destabilisation process.

Sometimes the stories sank without trace but many became gospel to the credulous.
(Not that failure bothered the Russians,if one story didn’t catch on then they kept manufacturing new ones until one did)

14

WTF?!?

15

I always thought he looked Russian. http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/01_03/BobbyFischerAP_468x459.jpg

16

… So if you’re born of a German mother, you don’t have to be German? And if your mom’s black, I’m pretty sure you’re black, too. Same with jewish. It’s a culture and a religion.

17

Also an ethnicity.

18

What can I say, Fischer has a Jewey face. Especially towards the end of his life, he really cranked the Jew-o-meter up to 11. Here, for instance, if he was wearing something other than that denim shirt, he looks straight outta Boro Park.

19

More like Grizzly Adams’s twin. (Although I don’t recall Grizzly Adams being an anti-semitic dick.)

20

Maybe if Grizzly Adams and Judd Hirsch had a love child…