The Mind of the Orient

Hans Kohn was a Zionist thinker who became a sharp critic of the movement and pioneered the comparative scholarly study of nationalism in the United States. Born and educated in the German Jewish community of Prague, Kohn became active in the Zionist student Bar Kochba Association while at the German University of Prague studying law. He went on to play a role in the important “Prague circle” of German Jewish intellectuals interested in Zionism and post-assimilatory ideas of Jewish cultural revival. His interlocutors in that scene included the philosopher, and his colleague from Prague, Samuel Hugo Bergmann, the writer Max Brod (1884–1968), and Franz Kafka. After wartime service and four years as a prisoner of war in Siberia and Central Asia, he devoted himself to work for the Zionist movement in the 1920s while also emerging as a committed advocate of a binational solution to the Jewish-Palestinian conflict alongside the philosopher Martin Buber, the journalist Robert Weltsch, and Bergmann. After the 1929 riots in Palestine, he distanced himself from Zionism, left Palestine, and emerged as a pioneering scholar of nationalism in the United States. Both his idiosyncratic path in Zionism and his pioneering analyses of nationalism may have owed a fair amount to his youthful awareness of the worsening confrontation between Czech and German nationalists in pre-World War I Prague.