Hans Kohn

• 1. Introduction

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  Hans Kohn was born on the 15th of September 1891, in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into a German-speaking Jewish family. He died on the 16th of March 1971. By then, American scholars associated his name with the study of nations, and with the loyalties that bind or divide them. Between those two dates sat a Russian prison camp and a resignation letter that broke with the Zionist movement. Decades at the front of American lecture halls followed. What carried a Prague-born student of philosophy into a Central Asian prison camp, and back out again? And why would a man who spent years working inside Zionist organizations end up becoming one of the movement's sharpest critics from within?

• 2. Captured In The Carpathians

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  In 1909, Kohn graduated from a German Gymnasium in Prague. He then studied philosophy, political science and law at the German half of Charles-Ferdinand University. In late 1914, he was called into the infantry of the Austro-Hungarian Army.

  Training finished, the army sent him to the Eastern Front in the Carpathian Mountains, where Austro-Hungarian troops faced the Imperial Russian Army directly. Russian forces captured him in 1915 and transported him to a prison camp in Central Asia, in what is now Turkmenistan.

  The Bolshevik revolution set off a civil war that reached even that remote camp. Pro-western Czechoslovak Legions pushed into Central Asia and set Kohn free. Rather than heading straight home, he traveled east with the Legions, in a trek Czechs called the Siberian Anabasis, until the group stopped at Irkutsk.

  Only once the political situation shifted could Kohn make his way back to Europe, arriving in 1920. Paris was his first stop, where in 1921 he married a woman named Jetty Wahl.

• 3. Breaking With The Movement

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  In London, Kohn worked for Zionist organizations and wrote newspaper articles, before moving to Palestine in 1925. From there, he traveled often to the United States, and his writings on geopolitics and nationalism grew into full-length books.

  By 1929, Kohn held a position at Keren HaYesod, a Zionist fundraising body. He chose to resign that year, titling his letter "Judaism is Not Zionism."

  Three months after Arab attacks on Jewish residents in Hebron that August, Kohn wrote a further letter. "I feel that I can no longer remain a leading official within the Zionist Organisation," he wrote. Zionists, he argued, had relied "exclusively upon Great Britain's military might" rather than seeking "the consent of the indigenous people" through negotiation.

  He accused fellow Zionists of pretending, for twelve years, that Arabs in Palestine did not exist, and of feeling relieved whenever that reality could be ignored.

  In 1934, Kohn and Jetty Wahl immigrated to America, where they raised their only son, Immanuel Kohn. Kohn led Brit Shalom, a group promoting a binational solution meant to let Jews and Arabs coexist in Mandatory Palestine.

  None of that activism kept Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, from hiring him afterward to teach modern history.

• 4. Nationalism As A Discipline

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  From 1948 to 1961, Kohn taught at City College of New York, alongside stints at the New School for Social Research and Harvard Summer School. Across those years, he published on nationalism, Pan-Slavism, German thought and Judaism, and became an early contributor to the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

  In 1944, his major work, The Idea of Nationalism, argued that nationalism had grown along two separate paths, one western and one eastern. In it, Kohn tried to trace how the growth of liberal thought inside western civilization had given rise to nationalism itself.

  Kohn wrote a biography of the philosopher Martin Buber. Other titles ranged from Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideology to The Mind of Germany and The Habsburg Empire, 1804-1918.

  His 1964 autobiography, Living in a World Revolution: My Encounters with History, folded in reflections on both his era and his own life.

  In 1967, Kohn published one more study: Prelude to Nation-States: The French and German Experiences, 1789-1815. The same question that had followed him for decades, how nations take shape, still ran through its pages.