Name Hans Kohn | Role Historian | |
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Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada Books The Idea of Nationalism, Nationalism - its meaning and history, Reflections on modern history, Western civilization in the Ne, Pan‑slavism | ||
voices for liberation rabbi brant rosen reading hans kohn letter
Hans Kohn (Hebrew: הַנְס כֹּהן, or קוהן, September 15, 1891 – March 16, 1971) was a Jewish American philosopher and historian. Born in Prague during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he was captured as a prisoner of war during World War I and held in Russia for five years. In the following years he lived in Paris and London working for Zionist organizations and writing.
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He moved to Palestine in 1925, but visited the United States frequently, eventually immigrating in 1934 to teach modern history at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. From 1948 to 1961, he taught at City College of New York. He also taught at the New School for Social Research, Harvard Summer School.
He wrote numerous books and publications, primarily on the topics of nationalism, Pan-Slavism, German thought, and Judaism, and he was an early contributor to the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, where he died. He also published a biography of Martin Buber. His autobiography, published in 1964, includes reflections on the times he lived through as well as the facts of his personal life.
Kohn was a prominent leader of Brit Shalom, which promoted a binational state in Palestine.
Zionism
In 1929, Kohn wrote:
"The means determine the goal. If lies and violence are the means, the results cannot be good.... We have been in Palestine for twelve years [i.e. since the 1917 Balfour Declaration] without having even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous people.... I believe that it will be possible for us to hold Palestine and continue to grow for a long time. This will be done first with British aid and then later with the help of our own bayonets -- shamefully called Haganah [defense] -- clearly because we have no faith in our own policy. But by that time we will not be able to do without the bayonets. The means will have determined the goal. Jewish Palestine will no longer have anything of that Zion for which I once put myself on the line."
Kohn's letter is quoted in “Israeli Pacifist, The Life of Joseph Abileah,” by Anthony G. Bing, with a foreword by Yehudi Menuhin, p. 69. Bing calls it "Kohn’s letter of farewell to Zionism."