Aaron Alexandre

Who was Aaron Alexandre?

Aaron Alexandre was a Jewish German–French–English chess player and writer.

Aaron Alexandre, a Bavarian trained as a rabbi, arrived in France in 1793. Encouraged by the French Republic's policy of religious toleration, he became a French citizen. At first, he worked as a German teacher and as mechanical inventor. Eventually, chess became his primary occupation. He tried to make a complete survey of the chess openings, publishing his findings as the Encyclopédie des échecs. With his book, he introduced the algebraic notation and the castling symbols O-O and O-O-O.

He continued with a survey of endgame analyses and a compilation of nearly two thousand chess problems, which he published in 1846 as Collection des plus beaux Problèmes d'Echecs, Paris, and simultaneously in English and German translations: Beauties of Chess, London, and Praktische Sammlung bester Schachspiel-Probleme, Leipzig.

Both books were accepted as standard reference collections, demonstrating Alexandre’s great technical knowledge. In chess as in his other activities, "he preferred erudition to performance". In 1838, he won a match against Howard Staunton in London.