Aaron Alexandre ' onMouseout='HidePop("76695")' href="/topics/Hohenfeld">Hohenfeld

Hohenfeld

Hohenfeld is a village in the rural district of Kitzingen, in the Regierungsbezirk of Lower Franconia, Bavaria, Germany. It is part of the town of Kitzingen....

, Franconia

Franconia

Franconia is a region of Germany comprising the northern parts of the modern state of Bavaria, a small part of southern Thuringia, and a region in northeastern Baden-Württemberg called Tauberfranken...

 – 16 November 1850, London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

) was a Jewish German

Germans

The Germans are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages....

–French

French people

The French are a nation that share a common French culture and speak the French language as a mother tongue. Historically, the French population are descended from peoples of Celtic, Latin and Germanic origin, and are today a mixture of several ethnic groups...

–English

English people

The English are a nation and ethnic group native to England, who speak English. The English identity is of early mediaeval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn. England is now a country of the United Kingdom, and the majority of English people in England are British Citizens...

 chess

Chess

Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...

 player and writer.

Aaron Alexandre, a Bavarian trained as a rabbi

Rabbi

In Judaism, a rabbi is a teacher of Torah. This title derives from the Hebrew word רבי , meaning "My Master" , which is the way a student would address a master of Torah...

, arrived in France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 in 1793. Encouraged by the French Republic

French First Republic

The French First Republic was founded on 22 September 1792, by the newly established National Convention. The First Republic lasted until the declaration of the First French Empire in 1804 under Napoleon I...

'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 opening

Chess opening

A chess opening is the group of initial moves of a chess game. Recognized sequences of opening moves are referred to as openings as initiated by White or defenses, as created in reply by Black. There are many dozens of different openings, and hundreds of named variants. The Oxford Companion to...

s, publishing his findings as the Encyclopédie des échecs (Encyclopedia of Chess, Paris, 1837). 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 problem

Chess problem

A chess problem, also called a chess composition, is a puzzle set by somebody using chess pieces on a chess board, that presents the solver with a particular task to be achieved. For instance, a position might be given with the instruction that White is to move first, and checkmate Black in two...

s, 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

Howard Staunton

Howard Staunton was an English chess master who is generally regarded as having been the world's strongest player from 1843 to 1851, largely as a result of his 1843 victory over Saint-Amant. He promoted a chess set of clearly distinguishable pieces of standardised shape—the Staunton pattern—that...

in London.