It is known that Alekhine had planned to visit Palestine in his world tour of 1931/2, as noted for example here, to give only a post from this blog. Now, Terje Kristiansen notifies me that Sergey Voronkov had notified him that the complete details why Alekhine cancelled his visit to Palestine (and some other places) were given by Alekhine himself upon his return to Paris, as noted in the Poslednie Novosti of 4 July 1933:
It was terribly hot in the Dutch Indies. I stayed there for three weeks and gave 12 exhibitions. Long journeys on stuffy, dirty trains. And it was this, not the playing, that tired me. Worse, I learned something I'd never experienced before. I completely lost sleep. Java and Sumatra had left me in such a state that the doctor who examined me demanded that I interrupt my tour and, above all, rest. “I did just that, and although I stopped in Colombo, Bombay, Egypt, it was as a tourist, without playing anywhere…”
This, and the fact that Alekhine cancelled not just his Palestine stop but others as well, is some evidence that Alekhine was not an ideological antisemite, at least not during that time.
Indeed, Johannes Fischer suggests - based on the extensive work of Christian Rohrer - that one of Alekhine's major motivations to cooperate with the Nazis is to retain his position at the top of the chess world. In particular, Rohrer notes that Alekhine was also a member of the Freemasons, in fact a member of the same Paris lodge as Ossip Bernstein. It goes without saying that both the Jews (like Bernstein) and the Freemasons were deeply hated by the Nazis.
When the evidence is so conflicting, one should do well to follow Edward Winter's advice, quoted in "Was Alekhine a Nazi?" that "a good historian knows when to be a waverer." Still, on balance I (tentatively) agree with Rohrer.
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