Who taught him Aramaic? And how did he learn of the Talmudic solution?Nadler, who is richly knowledgeable about Jewish life in 17th-century Amsterdam, likes to imagine that Rembrandt walked 50 yards down the street and got help from a rabbi, Menasseh ben Israel It is feasible. Rembrandt was living in the Vlooienburg district, centre of Amsterdam’s art market, and also of the city’s Jewish world. He had friends in common with Messaneh, one of the most accomplished, cosmopolitan rabbis of his day. One rabbi suggests it is because the letters were arranged vertically, not horizontally This is how we find them in Rembrandt’s painting. He discerns Aramaic words predicting the downfall of Belshazzar’s kingdom.
No explanation is given in the biblical text of why the king and his retinue are unable to read the writing But in the Talmud a number of possibilities are proposed. With Fischer’s failure to defend his title in 1975, the crown reverted to the USSR – as they believed, its rightful home.’Bobby Fischer Goes to War’, by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, is published by Faber & Faber, £14.99.

Stephen Nadler is intrigued by the respectful attention paid to Jewish subjects by 17th-century Dutch artists. In Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast, in the National Gallery, who can forget the king’s terror as, rising from the banquet table, he sees a ghostly hand writing on the palace wall? Neither Belshazzar nor his wise men can read the inscription, so Daniel is called. But they also accepted that the solitary American genius had taught their system quite a lesson It was a lesson well learnt. For the USSR chess authorities, Spassky’s was a political failure – led astray by idealism, he had ignored his responsibilities to the state – as well as a defeat at the board. He was even allowed to marry a Frenchwoman and to move to Paris while still representing his country.Was it a Cold War battle? For Fischer and the Western press and public, unquestionably yes. But for Nixon, Kissinger, and the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, no. Much of the interest in chess that the Reykjavik match had generated disappeared with him.

Becoming a near-total recluse, he has now descended into a paranoia marked by violently anti-Semitic and anti- American rantings.Spassky, meanwhile, lived to fight another day at the summit of grandmaster chess: the message had gone out from party bosses that he was to be treated in a civilised manner. He recast Reykjavik as a battleground, but the match turned out to be the last real chess war he would wage (though two decades on, he met Boris Spassky for a replay in Yugoslavia). Were these, too, a KGB gambit, to explain away the champion’s poor performance?Fischer’s achieving the world crown, his only goal, destroyed his raison d’?e and his grip on reality. Had a KGB operative followed up their rumour by concealing such a device? Did someone, dreading the impact on the match, decide to bury it? Then, as the contest drew to a close, rumours swept Reykjavik that Spassky was intending to defect.