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Hans Kohn: The idea of secularized nationalism

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 NATIONS AND J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N AS
NATIONALISM
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FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY

A N D N AT I O N A L I S M EN
Nations and Nationalism •• (••), 2017, 1–21.
DOI: 10.1111/nana.12313

Hans Kohn: the idea of secularized

nationalism
ZOHAR MAOR
Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

ABSTRACT. More than seventy years after its publication, Hans Kohn’s 1944 The
Idea of Nationalism is still regarded as a ground-breaking contribution to the study of
nationalism. This essay is aimed to highlight a significant theme in this work which
has largely gone unnoticed, namely, the pivotal role of religion and secularism in
Kohn’s account of nationalism, and especially, in his persistent struggle for a ‘perfect’
nationalism. Kohn’s conception – and personal experience – of the relationship of
nationalism and religion will be examined through several stages of his turbulent life.
First, as a young Zionist in Prague, when he parlayed Martin Buber’s Zionist creed into
an ethnic concept of nationalism. Then, in Kohn’s journalistic writing in the 1920s and
in his first theoretical works on nationalism in the years 1929–1942. Finally, Kohn’s
more mature and crystallized account of nationalism in his 1944 book will be revisited
from the perspective of the nationalism–religion relationship.

KEYWORDS: Hans Kohn, Martin Buber, Religion, Secularization, Zionism

More than seventy years after its publication, Hans Kohn’s 1944 The Idea of
Nationalism is still regarded as a ground-breaking contribution to the study
of nationalism. Beyond the influential ‘Kohn’s Dichotomy’, his distinction be-
tween Eastern and Western forms of nationalism, contemporary scholarship
refers to Kohn as a forerunner of the modernist and constructivist approach
to nationalism (Smith 2009, viii). In his recent study, Azar Gat even states that
‘All modernist writings can be regarded as footnotes to Hans Kohn’s seminal
work’ (Gat 2013, 7). On the other hand, Kohn also anticipated theories of pri-
mordial nationalism (like those of Anthony D. Smith and Adrian Hastings) in
locating the ancient roots of nationalism and pinpointing the key role that bib-
lical national images play in modern nationalism (Smith 1986; Hastings 1997).
Intellectual historians have been intrigued by the thrilling life Kohn led
before embarking on his academic career and becoming a leading scholar of
nationalism. Born in Prague in 1891, Kohn witnessed the national turbulence
in the Habsburg Empire, ‘the great laboratory and observation field for
[national] conflicts’ (Kohn 1944: viii). ‘The very air of Prague made me a
student of history and of nationalism’, he stated (Kohn 1964: 11). He became
a zealous Zionist, a member (and later chairman) of the student fraternity Bar
Kochba and a devotee of Martin Buber, adopting Buber’s unique blend of

© The author(s) 2017. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2017
2 Zohar Maor

Nietzschean völkisch ideology, cult of religious renewal and demand for

moralistic nationalism.
Kohn served as an officer in the Great War, was captured by the Russians
and held in Siberia until 1919, witnessing the Russian Revolution and the
ensuing civil war. He penned his first analysis of nationalism in Siberian
captivity. Kohn later worked for the Jewish National Fund and in immigrated
to Palestine, where he was among the leading activists of Brit Shalom
(Covenant of Peace), working towards Jewish–Arab cooperation and
bi-nationalism.1 Starting in 1919 and over the ensuing decade, he initiated
what would become a lifelong interest in nationalism as a historical and moral
phenomenon. While his books dealt with Zionist themes (his most outstanding
project in that period was a first comprehensive biography of his mentor
Buber), he published extensively in the Hebrew and Jewish–German press on
political developments around the world and on the burgeoning Arab and
Asian nationalisms. The outbreak of the Arab riots in 1929 dashed his hopes
that Zionism could live up to his (and Brit Shalom’s) strict moral demands.
He left his position in the Zionist establishment and began publishing compre-
hensive studies of Eastern – and especially Arab – nationalism, criticizing
Western colonialism and what he deemed its hazardous influence on Judaism.
His growing disillusionment with Zionism (along with, presumably, his failure
to secure an academic position at the Hebrew University) drove him to
emigrate from Palestine in 1933 and set out for a new dreamland – the
United States.
Adi Gordon (2010, 2013) and Andre Liebich (2006) have stressed the dis-
continuities in Kohn’s intellectual life. His early career as a Central/Eastern
European nationalist, hostile to liberalism and sympathetic to the Central
European paradigm of ‘the crisis of modernity’, made him sensitive to the
dichotomy of Eastern–Western nationalism. But his judgment of the two
models was completely reversed after his immigration to America, where he
renounced his hitherto adored ethnic-cultural ‘Eastern’ model in favour of
the ‘Western’ liberal model of nationalism, which until then he had despised.
Noam Pianko (2010a, 2010b), on the other hand, underlines the continuity
in Kohn’s conceptualization of nationalism, centred on his ongoing struggle
against disengaging nationalism from morality. He underscores the moral
and anti-particularist dimensions of Kohn’s early, ‘Eastern’ idea of national-
ism, at the price of playing down his early Nietzschean and völkisch motives.
Pianko, however, rightly avers that to read Kohn through the prism of his rigid
dichotomy of ethnic vs. liberal approaches is to overlook his complexity and
the moral pros and cons of both approaches.
Kohn’s early familiarity with Eastern and Western modes of nationalism
was indeed crucial for his later ability to theorize and assess them. Further-
more, his youthful engagement in nationalism as a moral, rather than strictly
political, phenomenon was undoubtedly instrumental in shaping the moral
sensitivities manifest in The Idea of Nationalism. Nevertheless, I find another
theme from Kohn’s early life to be pivotal in his later work: namely, the

© The author(s) 2017. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2017
Hans Kohn 3

argument that nationalism is rooted in religious values, institutions and ideas,

on the one hand; and that the process of secularization is essential for the
formation of the varieties of modern nationalism, on the other. Buber’s
critique of Western secularization, while championing another brand of
secularization which discerns between ‘authentic’ and ‘degenerated’ layers of
religion, deeply informed Kohn’s worldview. Thus, the compound and
multifaceted relationship between nationalism and religion stands at the core
of his Idea of Nationalism. Liebich, Pianko and Romy Langeheine (2014, in
her intellectual biography of Kohn) highlight Kohn’s persistent struggle for a
‘perfect’ or ‘ethical’ nationalism, but overlook the crucial role of religion in
its (shifting) conceptualization and justification. This paper aims to fill that
gap. It is important to note that Kohn, deeply informed by Buber, used the
terms ‘religion’ and ‘secularization’ ambiguously. The former refers to
institutionalized religions but also to religiosity, that is, religious feelings,
ethical dictums imbued with divine authority, and free adaption of religious
sources. The latter designates both the modern process of the weakening of
religion and its loss of public sway, and the use of relevant components of
religion by secular agents like the state, national movements and artists.
I will examine Kohn’s conception – and personal experience – of the rela-
tionship between nationalism and religion, starting with his early Buberian
thoughts on religion, secularization and nationalism. At that stage, Kohn
was still an ‘Eastern’ nationalist, and his treatment of nationalism was norma-
tive rather than descriptive. I will then examine the relationship between
religion and nationalism in Kohn’s journalistic writing in the 1920s and in
his first theoretical works on nationalism in the years 1929–1939. (Arguably,
Kohn turned to the study of nationalism after a personal break with it, when
he concluded that moral refinement and national struggle were mutually
exclusive.) I will demonstrate the profound influence that Kohn’s nascent
disillusionment with Zionism, and his horror at the rise of Fascism and
Nazism, had on his analysis. Finally, I will revisit Kohn’s more mature and
crystallized account of nationalism in his 1944 book from the perspective of
the nationalism-religion relationship.

Buber’s inspiration: nationality and religiosity

Kohn’s religious sensitivity did not emanate from his upbringing. As he indi-
cates in his autobiography, he grew up in an almost completely secularized
and non-traditional home (Kohn 1964: 37–9). Jewish Prague in general, as
Wilma Iggers has asserted, was characterized by religious indifference (Iggers
1991, 20–2). It was Martin Buber who swept the young Kohn into a deep in-
volvement with religiosity. Theirs was a profoundly non-, even anti-traditional
Jewish religiosity, and it stood at the core of Kohn’s first prototype of ‘perfect
nationalism’, modelled after what he would later term ‘Eastern’ nationalism.

© The author(s) 2017. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2017
4 Zohar Maor

Visiting Prague in 1909 and 1910, Buber presented Zionism in a völkisch

key to an impassioned audience.2 Its substance was the trans-historical people
and its goal was its regeneration. At the same time, Buber deviated from some
of the common traits of völkisch ideologists in his assertion that nationalism’s
foundations, meaning and implications relate mainly to the individual, and in
his aspiration to recover not only a lost naturality but also a lost spirituality.
The most outstanding characteristic of his Zionism was its religious colour.
Buber taught Kohn (and others) about the two faces of secularism, which both
negates religion and co-opts it, transporting it into the ‘secular’ realms.3 He
supported the second aspect with the same enthusiasm with which he discarded
the first.
Nationalism, for Buber, was not a political struggle for a nation state but
rather an individual identification with the people, man’s true nurturing
stratum. His Zionism was extremely de-politicized, in contrast to mainstream
Herzlian Zionism and even Ahad Ha’am’s ‘spiritual Zionism’.
The essence of Jewish nationalism, to him, was an existential struggle for
eternity. In his first address in Prague, Buber portrayed the desirable feelings
of a true Zionist: ‘The people are now for him a community of men who were,
are and will be – a community of the dead, the living and the yet unborn – who
together constitute a unity. It is this unity that, to him, is the ground of his I’
(Buber 1967 [1923], 16). In his next address in Prague, Buber stressed that
the struggle for inner and outer unity was the Jewish historical challenge, the
foundation of Jewish religion and Judaism’s unique contribution to humanity.
Buber emphasized that the unification of the individual with his people was not
the final objective of the struggle for unity, but rather ‘unity…between
nations… unity between mankind and every living thing… unity between
God and the world’ (Buber 1967 [1923], 25, 27). Among all peoples, the Jew
suffers to the greatest extent from inner conflict and schisms. That deficiency,
however, catalyses an acute aspiration for unity which shapes his monotheism
and his universal vocation as the great synthesizer. Buber argued that his
Zionism aspires to a redemption that begins with the coalescing of the individ-
ual’s fragmented self, goes on to settle the disputes within the nation and
culminates in the reestablishment of divine unity.
Yet, Buber did not champion the accepted religious tradition (‘official
Judaism’), but rather ‘underground Judaism’ – Jesus, the Essenes, the
Cabbalists and the Hasidim (Buber 1967 [1923]: 28, 30). In his third address
in Prague, he elaborated on the difference between the traditional Jewish
concept of religion and his ‘renewed’ religion by contrasting the ‘immanent’,
Spinozist character of his God with His ‘transcendent’ character in ‘formal
Judaism’. In that address, he added another catchword as a title for another
Zionist goal – ‘renewal’, which is the reactivation of the three great religious
ideals of Judaism: unity (as discussed above); total, free and authentic (i.e.
sanctified) life; and the craving and struggle for a perfected world.
In his 1913 address ‘Jewish Religiosity’, Buber distinguished between
‘religiosity’ – a longing for the absolute and an endeavour to realize it in

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Hans Kohn 5

human life – and the more formal and ritual ‘religion’, and argued that
‘Renewal of Judaism means in reality renewal of Jewish religiosity’ (Buber
1967 [1923]: 79). In his 1912 address ‘The Spirit of the Orient and Judaism’,
Buber identified the abovementioned characteristics of Judaism with ‘the
Orient’ according to the Fin de siècle oriental romanticism.4 He highlighted
the Jews’ mission to redeem the sick West as the standard bearers of the
sublime Eastern culture.
In 22 September 1911, the twenty-year-old Kohn wrote to Buber, ‘You
know, sir, what your addresses meant to us in Bar Kochba. But I think I
may say that they meant more for me than to any of the others, for in many
respects they constituted a turning point in all my views’ (Buber 1991: 130).
Over the next three years, he would relentlessly write and lecture about Buber
and his ideas, championing his tenets of a cultural-(de-traditionalized)
religious, anti-liberal and anti-‘Western’ Zionism (Kohn 1913a, 1913b, 1964:
64–7). Kohn also followed Buber in rendering Zionism in a cultural rather
than a political key and in channelling Zionism towards individual religious
regeneration. Zionism must engender mystical-religious renewal, suffusing
the withered Western world with new vitality and a fullness of life. Religion
will be transformed, from a transcendent enslavement of man to divine decrees
into an immanent deification of man as a creator of values (Kohn 1912b,
1912c, 1914).
Kohn, however, differed from Buber in the accent he placed on the univer-
sal makeup of his ideal Zionism. In the abovementioned letter, he claimed that
Buber’s ideals were universal in nature and thus inapt for the establishment of
clear national boundaries. He added, ‘The unity I have in mind is something
the individual experiences only in a state of ecstasy, the mystic experience
which is as remote from his folk as it is from this whole world of samsara’
(Buber 1991: 130). In a lecture at a Bar Kochba meeting, Kohn averred that
the Jewish aspiration for unity is indeed greater than other peoples’, but that
the content of that unity is universal, as expressed by mystics from all nations
and generations (Kohn 1912a: 6–7). Thus, Kohn derived from Buber’s creed a
universalist concept of nationalism, inter alia, by downplaying Buber’s ethnic
vocabulary (Kohn 1911a, Kohn 1913a: viii). In a letter to his friend Robert
Weltsch, he confessed:

I believe that in every man the seed of the mystic is concealed. …It dwells in our soul,
the most universal element, which is simultaneously the most personal element in us; in
our soul are the means for uplifting our personality to infinity. …The complete human-
ity = the complete Judaism = the complete personality (Kohn 1911b: 2; see also Kohn
1930a: 51).

This mysticism, which enables the unity of individual, nation and humanity,
is the core of Kohn’s Jewish religiosity, the essence of Zionism.
His experiences in the Great War and his long years of captivity in Siberia
did not alter his idea of nationalism; as he wrote to Buber on 21 November
1917, they sharpened his conviction that the great historical events are part

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6 Zohar Maor

of a messianic drama in which the Jewish people plays a key role. The world,
he maintained, was ripe for a religious outlook on life (Buber 1972: 510–2, see
also Kohn 1917). His first composition on nationalism, a 1919 lecture in
Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, was imbued with an idealist, religious outlook. He
contended that the German defeat in the War resulted from egoism; that is,
from preferring one’s own good over others’, the temporal over the eternal,
the real over the ideal (Kohn 1919: 3). True nationalism is the continuity of
generations that conveys man to eternity and thus should not be viewed from
a narrow political perspective. It is built on the unity of spiritual and corporeal,
as in authentic religion (Kohn 1919: 7, 9, 18–19). Kohn emphasized the
cosmopolitan and non-statist character of the nationalism he advocated and
considered the engagement of nation and state, and the fading of ethical
considerations, as the root of the Great War and the devastation it wreaked
(21–3; see Langeheine 2014: 95–103).
That religious and messianic concept of nationalism found voice in Kohn’s
first publication on nationalism, his ‘Nationalismus’, which appeared in the
1921–2 volume of Buber’s Der Jude and was dedicated to him. In the essay,
Kohn introduced the genealogy of nationalism as a process of bifurcated
secularization – a struggle against and a transformation of religion – and
stressed the (non-traditional) religious character of the ‘perfect’ nationalism
he envisioned, as opposed to the dangerous (and prevailing) statist national-
ism, which he condemned.
Kohn argued that each era has its ‘ordering principle’ (Kohn 1980 [Kohn
1922]: 21, Kohn 1929a: 7–8); in the case of modernity, religion is substituted
by nationalism. The Enlightenment, and especially French scepticism,
undermined religion, and the collapse of the feudal decentralized order allowed
for a hitherto blocked national unity. Thus, ‘the faith of the nineteenth century
was its nationalism, more precisely, its state nationalism’. The ideology of
nationalism is thus a product of secularization. In a draft on Buber, Kohn
lamented this historical process, imbuing nationalism with the hazardous aura
of totality (Kohn 1925a).
Kohn linked nationalism to religion not only in his genealogy of the former
but also in viewing nationalism as a ‘faith’, rather than merely a social func-
tion. Kohn relied on Georg Simmel’s assertion that life goals are determined
by ‘materials of the spirit’, by different faiths (20–1). But only ‘true’ national-
ism is a material of the spirit. Kohn defined it by paraphrasing the distinction
made by Buber (and Simmel, Buber’s teacher of sociology) between (inner,
authentic) religiosity and (outer, institutionalized) religion. ‘True’, ‘good’
nationalism (‘anchored in the eternal depths of the human soul’) is based on
a concept of nation as ‘inwardly experienced’, ‘a group of people held together
through a common descent and common or similar historical destinies’. To
make the ethnic character of this definition even clearer, Kohn borrowed
Gustav Landauer term ‘blood community’. To him state nationalism,
conversely, was a product of the secularization of the dictum ‘cuius regio eius
religio’, likewise transforming a natural and spiritual reality into an artificial

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Hans Kohn 7

framework ‘attached to territories and constructed on conditions of power and

authoritarian violence’. Like religion, ‘true’ nationalism is spiritual and thus
corrupted when associated with the mechanisms of state power (22–23, see
Kohn 1925b).
The tragic history of nationalism is its degeneration, from its Enlightenment
heyday, when it still enjoyed a religious, universal, messianic and individualis-
tic character (as exemplified by Fichte), to the nineteenth century, when it be-
came a divisive and belligerent factor. ‘Connection with the state once meant
the fall of the religion, and the same was now true of the nation’ (24, See also
Kohn 1927d, Kohn 1930a: 165–6), he stated. The Great War, seemingly a
sweeping victory for the nation state (marked by national awakening in
Asia, the last remaining bastion of religious devotion), turned out to have been
its swan song. The technological and cultural progress of humanity had ren-
dered nationalism an outdated ‘ordering principle’; the lives of individuals
and peoples were becoming more and more interrelated, so that the ruling
principle of independent sovereignty was doomed to irrelevance. Kohn proph-
esied that national wars would soon become unthinkable, just like medieval
religious wars (see also Kohn 1929b). That did not, however, mean the replace-
ment of nationalism with a new ‘ordering principle’ in the foreseeable future. It
appears that Kohn envisioned the disappearance of state nationalism but
found promising signs for a regeneration of his ‘authentic’, ‘perfect’ national-
ism: communal,5 non-statist, individualistic and humanistic. His two forerun-
ners of national renovation were Nietzsche and Buber. Kohn paraphrased the
latter’s distinction between ‘official’ and ‘underground’ religion to point to the
prospects of ‘underground’ nationalism: ‘Nationalism reaches to the stars here.
It redeems the world. And redemption of the world is possible only by way of
self-sacrifice… the Jewish notion of the servant of God’ (28).6 Presumably,
religious self-sacrifice is needed so as to overcome the prevalent enchantments
of a nationalism of power. Again, nationalism is reinfused with religious
fervour; religion is both its point of departure and its messianic end.
Kohn’s ‘Nationalismus’ reflected accurately his youthful adoption of and
reaction to Buber, interwoven with arbitrary historical and sociological
reflections. Kohn’s ‘perfect’ or ‘ethical’ nationalism, at that stage, was (non-
traditional) religious, communal, individual-oriented and universal. Kohn
used the two meanings of secularization: he emphasized that nationalism
replaces religion, but at the same time maintained that it must carry on
religion’s mission in a secular setting. Nationalism’s task it to salvage the
world; as Fichte put it, ‘to weld the everlasting to earthly work, to plant and
nurture the permanent in the ephemeral, connected with the eternal’ (24).
Similar motifs can be traced in Kohn’s treatment of nationalism and reli-
gion in the Jewish context.7 In his booklet on the political idea of Judaism,
Kohn underlined the religious origin of Jewish national consciousness, while
secularizing religion through nationalization. ‘The root of Jewish religion lies
in the history of the Jewish people… Judaism is not a religion. It is a living
ethnicity (Volkstum) whose national character, over the course of history, gave

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8 Zohar Maor

rise to a religion, a specific political-ethical attitude to the world (Kohn 1924:

20, 21–2). Thus, the synagogue “is not a place of worship… but a seminary
(Lehrhaus), a place of spiritual education, the leading house of public educa-
tion (Volksbildung)”’ (Kohn 1924: 21). Religion has a national function, and,
accordingly, nationalism has a religious mission. In the wake of Buber’s
1918 address ‘The Holy Way’ (Buber 1967 [1923]: 108–148),8 and his shift
from mysticism to ethics, Kohn portrayed Jewish nationalism as dedicated to
establishing God’s kingdom in this world through total devotion to a collective
ethical life. Jewish nationalism is utopian and messianic in nature, aspiring to
break the existing national boundaries in favour of a unified humanity,
echoing God’s own unity.
In conclusion, Kohn presented a secularized religion (distinguishing be-
tween ‘bad’ transcendent religion and ‘good’ worldly, nationalized religiosity)
and re-sacralized nationalism, formed by the process of modern secularization
(distinguishing between ‘bad’ statist nationalism and ‘good’ communal and
ethical nationalism). While he highlighted the uniqueness of Jewish national-
ism, Kohn’s ideal nationalism in general resembled Judaism’s basic tenets;
only the accented prophetic-religious contours were missing.

Nationalism as seen from Zion

In 1925, Kohn immigrated to Palestine in order to establish the utopian Jewish

commonwealth he yearned for, and which he hoped would propagate his
model of mended nationalism throughout a world shattered by the Great
War. During that period, he further developed his ideas on the intricate rela-
tionship between nationalism and religion.
As an activist in Brit Shalom,9 Kohn sought to soothe Jewish–Arab hostil-
ity by establishing a common political community devoid of the prevailing
power mechanisms, ‘a state… which is no longer “a state”, sovereignty
(Herrschaft) which is no longer “sovereignty”, but an-archia’ (Kohn 1922:
22). This, he thought, might neutralize the conflict between the two peoples
and disengage the nation from the state, thus sparing it the degeneration of
European nationalism (see Maor 2013).10 Moreover, such non-statist national-
ism corresponded to the Jewish traditional – and religious – national concept,
as Kohn underlined in his obituary for Ahad Ha’am: ‘The national idea that
he exhorted was hundreds of years old and not the product of the European
model of the last decades; for him [nationalism] was not a desire for power
or a specific relation to a territory or to another national possession, but rather
an ultimate essence, an enrichment and elevation of the spirit’ (Kohn 1927a;
see also Kohn 1927c). In another essay from the same year, Kohn portrayed
Jewish assimilation and nationalism as two opposite strategies, both of which
betray the unique religious makeup of the Jewish people – the essence of
Judaism – under the pressure of the modern steamroller of state nationalism.

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Hans Kohn 9

Anticipating the arguments of Talal Asad (2003) and others, Kohn

portrayed secularization as a process that produces distinct ‘nation’ and ‘reli-
gion’ to replace an undefined unity of communality and faith:

The results of this assimilation process could be traced in all aspects of social, cultural
and psychological life, and were essentially similar to known phenomena observed
among other Eastern and medieval peoples, upon their entry into a modern mode of
life, upon their ‘Westernization’. The process of secularization in Jews’ life has begun.
Allegedly, this process was expressed in the retreat of Judaism to the synagogue and
exclusively religious institutions, in its being rendered into a mere ‘religion’, while many
sides of life, once… associated with religion were appropriated from it and embraced
under the wings of the secular-rational regime.... The modern national movement
treated favorably, post factum, this disengagement of religion from Judaism… (Kohn
1927d, part 1: 32)11

Reform and, later on, liberal Judaism argued that ‘Judaism is not a nation
but merely a religious association’, while subordinating Jewish religious life to
the rigorous test of the state’s needs. Kohn hinted that Herzlian Zionism is not
essentially different in that regard; it also aspires to reform Judaism according
to external standards. ‘True’ nationalism (originating, according to Kohn,
from modern Orthodoxy!), on the other hand, as expressed in the writings of
Joseph Salvador and Moses Hess, wishes to restore Judaism’s lost unity of ‘na-
tion’ and ‘religion’. For Kohn, that new-old brand of nationalism was crucial
for the completion of the French revolution (whose ideals of liberté, égalité,
fraternité stem from the Bible). (part 2, 13).
In the years 1924–1933, Kohn directed his interest in nationalism eastward;
he wrote extensively on Arab and Eastern forms of nationalism and
highlighted their religious character, contrasting them with modern
nationalism in the West. Kohn described how the peoples of the East,
contesting Western domination, followed the Western pattern of secularization
by replacing their religious identity with a national one. However, that process,
especially noticeable in Turkey, was gradually diminishing. Kohn argued that
a religious revival was taking place among the youth; religion would ‘continue
to bestow its vitalizing powers upon the believers’, as it had done for centuries.
Religion would be reformed along modern lines and then serve to bolster the
East’s political and cultural resistance to Western colonialism (Kohn 1928b,
compare 1929a). Eastern nationalism, like that promoted by Tagore in
India, aspires to abolish the destructive welding of nation and state (Kohn
1928a). Kohn (referring mainly to Islam and Hinduism) stressed the universal,
transnational nature of Eastern religions – a corollary of his portrait of
Judaism. He argued than Zionism could make use of that fact and struggle
for a new political framework, a ‘pan-Eastern’ union of the people of the East,
into which the Jewish commonwealth could integrate (Kohn 1925c).12 Outside
the prevailing destructive order of nation states and the separation of religion
and nationalism, Judaism could nurture an exemplary nationalism.
The political developments in Palestine, and the rise of Fascism and Nazism
in Europe, however, jolted Kohn from his naïve belief in the possibility of a

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10 Zohar Maor

better, ‘Asian’ or ‘Jewish’ nationalism. Religion was, again, instrumental in

generating and legitimizing cosmopolitanism, but this was another kind of
religion. Kohn no longer championed Buberian irrationalism and völkisch-
oriented religion, probably because of their demonic use by the Nazis. He
searched for other religious inspirations.

Theorizing the nation in the shadow of fascism

As early as January 1930, immediately after he decided to depart from Zionism,

Kohn planned to write a comprehensive book on nationalism. He wrote to his
close friend, Robert Weltsch: ‘I decided to write, as my next big book, a book
on nationalism and nationalities law in the Soviet Union. This is an important
theme and an important preparatory work to my last big nationalism book…’
(Kohn 1930c). A series of publications in the years 1937–1944 unfolded his
crystallizing conception of nationalism and religion. Kohn may have left
behind many of his former convictions, but he still analysed ideologies through
the prism of religion/secularization.
After migrating to the United States, Kohn set aside the East and his hopes
that its nascent nationalism might serve as a more decent alternative to its
Western counterpart. This shift probably ensues from Kohn’s recoil from his
youthful völkisch, anti-liberal creed after European Fascism had drawn such
repelling conclusions from it. Kohn concluded that Western liberalism, is, after
all, the best basis of his desired model of nationalism. His growing admiration
of Great Britain, acquired in his visits before immigrating to Palestine and in
his encounter with the British administration in Palestine, helped to revise
his earlier, critical image of liberalism (see Gordon 2010). In his first book as
an American scholar, Nationalism in the Soviet Union, Kohn reversed his
assessment of ‘East’ and ‘West’ and, for the first time, portrayed the technolog-
ical and economic advantage of the West as a sign of its moral supremacy.
Weber’s ‘protestant ethic’ was presented as the secularized religious foundation
of the Western way of life (Kohn 1933: 2–9).
Nationalism in the Soviet Union offered a penetrating account of Bolshevik
transnationalism and Western nationalism. According to Kohn, the infrastruc-
ture of both was a secularized religion. Religion is founded on man’s longing
for the eternal, and Marxists err when they tarnish that longing as a mere flight
from the miseries engendered by Western capitalism. Notwithstanding its anti-
religious stance (justified only in regard to religion, not religiosity! [Kohn 1933:
80–4]), Communism’s declared universalism ultimately stems from religious
sources: namely, Christian anti-particularism. Unfortunately, Communism in
Russia also secularizes negative aspects of religion, specifically its fanaticism,
missionary outlook and unrealistic messianism. The West, on the other hand,
is more tolerant and sober, thanks to the influence of the Renaissance and
Reformation. Though the Western myth of progress also derives from
religious messianic sources, unlike its communist counterpart, it avoids

© The author(s) 2017. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2017
Hans Kohn 11

overzealousness by refraining from determining a specific end goal for progress

(Kohn 1933: 24–33). Yet despite his harsh criticism of Communism in Russia,
in confronting the rise of Fascism and Nazism, Kohn found the danger posed
by Western nationalism far greater and viewed Bolshevism as its last barrier,
as the only standard bearer for the religious tradition of universalism (100–4).
Kohn averred that all religions are basically universal; that nationalism, there-
fore, especially in its racial form, could not have risen without a bifurcated sec-
ularization, at once deferring universalist religious motifs and appropriating
particularist ones (122–3, n. 11).13
Kohn’s 1937 Force or Reason deepened his argument that modern secular-
ism had spawned the monster of Fascist nationalism. Though Kohn celebrated
the secular, anti-conservative character of eighteenth-century Enlightenment,
the provenance of the forsaken ‘good’ universal and humanistic nationalism
(Kohn 1937, 14–6, 49–51), he accused nineteenth-century secularism of beget-
ting contemporary ‘bad’ nationalism. The problem with the culture of the
nineteenth century, as epitomized in Darwin’s influential theory of evolution,
was twofold. First, it secularized the secular: ‘If God had been dethroned in
the eighteenth century, the later nineteenth century dethroned man’. The
‘dechristianization of Western humanity’ was followed by the ‘dehumanization
of Western mankind’ (32–3). The result was the death of moralism and human-
ism as expressed by Nietzsche and Spengler, and the eruption of aggressive
nationalism. Relinquishing his former convictions, Kohn did not blame this
development on the association of nationalism with the state. Another blunder
caused by Darwinism was the manner in which it enabled the restating of the
traditional ethos of inequality in ‘modern’, scientific garb, after its religious
justification was thoroughly discredited by the French encyclopaedists and
the German Left Hegelians (122–4, n. 12). Kohn cited with no reservation
Arnold Toynbee’s argument that the traditional vindication of the superiority
of the white man was founded on the protestant adaption of the zealous biblical
ethos of Jewish chosenness (147–8, n. 3814). After enlightened secularism finally
side-lined that disastrous notion, it was revived by nineteenth-century social
Darwinism.
Kohn warned that the combination of nationalism and dehumanization was
explosive; moreover, he insisted, nationalism per se was outdated and perni-
cious. While he reiterated his earlier abhorrence of the nation state, this time
he did not champion Jewish/Asian religious transnationalism. Here, universal-
ism is not an alternative to a decaying West, but rather the last phase in its de-
terministic progress. Kohn no longer relied on arcane, mystical links between
peoples for the establishment of his universal order; rather, he underlined
economic interdependence, a burgeoning universal (Western) civilization,
gradually encompassing Eastern peoples, and the jilted ideal of human dignity.
Kohn concluded his book with the argument that the League of Nations,
which Mussolini and Hitler had so successfully degraded, was destined to
become the core of a new world order (87–9, 104–5, 148–51, n. 40, see also
Kohn 1942: 257–60).

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12 Zohar Maor

While in Force or Reason, Kohn interpreted the Fascist corruption of

nationalism by casting secularization as a denial of the religious (in this case –
the religious humanist and universal tradition), in his 1939 Revolutions and
Dictatorships, he took secularization to task for transforming problematic
religious traditions. Kohn argued there that the Jewish messianic idea has
two branches – particularist and universalist – the first of which was radical-
ized by Hitler (Kohn 1939: 11–22, 37). Conversely, Kohn stressed, Socialism
was characterized by a similar radicalization of universalist messianism, a
trend he found no less dangerous (11–4). Nevertheless, the future of human-
ity lay in the Jewish universalist heritage, as phrased in Buber’s terms15;
Hitler’s demonic struggle with Judaism emanated from his radical hostility
to the universalism it represented. Unfortunately, ongoing hatred compelled
the Jewish people to forsake its own vision of unity and surrender to the
prevailing nationalist order (299–330, 394–401; see also Kohn 1942: 217–8,
246–56).
In Revolutions and Dictatorships, Kohn suggested two transnational factors.
The first was a surprising revisiting of the nineteenth-century Holy Alliance, in
which Kohn saw a candid effort to parlay the universalist heritage of
Christianity into an anti-national world policy. While its reactionary tendency
prevented the realization of its plans, Kohn hinted that Christianity yet
possessed the potential to curb national tensions (334–6). The second, more
realistic factor was Bolshevik federalism which, on the one hand, did not
ignore national aspirations, while on the other hand building a firm transna-
tional political framework (159–63).

The idea of nationalism: the dialectics of nationalism and religion

Kohn’s The Idea of Nationalism constitutes an impressive effort to distil from

thirty years of ideological and analytical study of nationalism and related
issues a systematic account of nationalism and its dynamics. It consists of three
main aspects: (1) a generalized sociological analysis of the national phenome-
non, (2) a detailed historical portrayal of various European national move-
ments, and (3) criteria to discern between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nationalisms
(without forgoing Kohn’s struggle against nationalism as such). In all these
three aspects of his magnum opus, the dynamics of religion/secularization
played a pivotal role.16 Kohn sees Christianity as a trans-national factor
(though he mentions some cases in which national churches were formed)
and argues that only its diminution enabled the flourishing of nationalism.
Biblical Judaism, conversely, served as model for nationalism, however curbed
by its inherent universal character. Simply put, Kohn’s argument is that
Nationalism rises after Christian universalism diminishes and that it is based
on Judaism’s religious nationalism. Kohn’s contemporary, Carlton Hayes,
also stressed the religious dimension of nationalism but attached nationalism
to religion as an abstract notion, that is, as a permanent tendency to worship

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Hans Kohn 13

and to absolutize (Hayes 1926, 1931, 1960). Kohn, conversely, linked nation-
alism to a specific religious tradition (though idealistically portrayed) –
Judaism.
In his outline of the contours of the national phenomenon, Kohn antici-
pated Anthony Smith by narrating the development of national movements
as the gradual and contingent evolution of a perennial ‘national’ nucleus in a
modern setting. Religion (as tradition) is both part of this nucleus and one of
the factors in its development. Kohn argued that humankind is characterized
by its love for familiar people, landscapes, culture and language, and its dis-
trust of alien versions. This produces the emotional bond to territory, mother
tongue and common descent, the ‘natural elements out of which nationalism is
formed; but nationalism is not a natural phenomenon, not a product of
“eternal” or “natural” laws; it is a product of the growth of social and intellec-
tual factors at a certain stage of history’ (6). By the same token, nations are not
identical with ethnos, which ‘are nothing but the “ethnographic material”, out
of which under certain circumstances a nationality might arise’ (13). Kohn
averred that the nation is not a ‘naturally experienced community’ but rather
an imagined one, gaining its reality from the social, intellectual and economic
work of the state (8–9).
Kohn’s anti-essentialist account of nationalism probably aimed to rob
nationalism of its pretence to being the final stage of history. Kohn historicized
the nation so as to demonstrate its historical beginnings and thus its possible
historical end. He reiterated arguments from his 1922 essay on nationalism,
to the effect that contemporary economic, intellectual and political develop-
ments had rendered nationalism an outdated and harmful political and social
form of life, and that nationalism, as a cultural and existential property, should
be severed from political power, just as religion was (21–4).17 Kohn’s construc-
tivist and subjectivist portrayal of nationalism informed his description of the
relationship between religion and nationalism in his general characterization
of nationalism. Kohn underlined the past centrality of religion in demarcating
borderlines between groups, but added that whether religion hindered or
fostered the formation of a nation depended on concrete circumstances (15).
For instance, where religion underwent a process of internalization (as in
German Pietism), it cleared the floor for a secular development of nationalism.
Conversely, where local struggles against the papacy engendered a national-
ized Catholicism (like French Gallicanism), nationalism and religion became
intertwined (190–1). At any rate, processes of secularization and religious
transformations play a key role in the shaping of various nationalisms.
The constructivist narration of the nation in the first, general chapter gives
way to an essentialist narration in the second, dealing with two ancient ante-
cedents of nationalism – Israel and Greece.18 In those cases, religious notions,
rather than economic and social processes, are seen as the wellspring of nation-
alism. That part of the work embraces Buber’s early distinctions between the
Greeks, people of sight and place, and the Jews, people of hearing and time
(Buber 1967 [1923]; see Pianko 2010a). Kohn expressed his deterministic

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14 Zohar Maor

essentialism when distinguishing between the Greek gift for plastic art and
drama, and the Jewish gift for poetry, arguing that ‘Even to this very day
the Jew has remained a lyrist’ (33). Historical consciousness, serving in the first
chapter to prove the fluidity and contingency of national characters, appears in
the second as a Jewish sensitivity to history as ‘the way of God’. Only this
notion saves history from its contingent fetters, endows it with unity and
allows it to serve as a core of national identity (34–5). All the basic tenets of
nationalism, according to Kohn – namely historical consciousness, a sense of
chosenness, national messianism, and allegiance to a specific homeland – stem
from religious sources. Messianism, for instance,

…lent its forms and symbols to the obscure longing of millions. It ended by being
clothed in the garments of philosophy of rationalism and modern social science. As a
secular idea of progress and of new order, it dominates political and social aspirations
today, deprived of its religious forms but retaining its religious fervor. …The
intermingling of national ambitions, religious concepts, and a distant universalism
deeply influenced later national movements. National political hopes became deepened
into the belief that their fulfillment was an action of divine justice and that the struggles
for their realization must be carried on as commands of God. (43–4)

In a note referring to the above text, Kohn further stressed the sacred nature of
modern nationalism: ‘…Messianism has especially influenced nationalism,
where the nation as a corporate Messiah replaced the personal Messiah, to
bring about a new order of things. The nationality transcends thus the limits
of a political or social concept; it becomes a holy body sanctified by God’
(585). Like Karl Löwith, Kohn thus related nationalism to the religious con-
cept of meaningful time, spanning from a sacred past to a sacred future (48)
– unlike Benedict Anderson, who sharply discerns between religious and
national concepts of time (Löwith 1949; Anderson 1991, 22–36).
Arguably, Kohn’s surprising shift resulted from his wish to posit the Jewish
and (to a lesser extent) Greek national heritages as guiding lights for national-
ism in the wake of the catastrophes of the first and second world wars. Thus,
Kohn portrayed those two peoples not historically but idealistically, as primal
embodiments not only of the national phenomenon, but of what he presented
as the ‘good’ nationalism: democratic, individual-oriented, universalist and
ethical.19 The foundation for these merits of the Jewish biblical nationalism
is the Jewish religion, that unwavering craving for unity that emanates from
the ideal of God’s own unity. That religiosity is at the same time ‘secular’, in
the sense that it is ‘this-worldly’. Immortality, for instance, ‘was conceived
only as an element in the continuity of national life’ (35). Indeed, Kohn saw
the ‘religious’ past of the Jewish people through secular, Buberian eyes, and
ignored completely the transcendent and ritual aspects of ancient Judaism:
‘Like [the prophets and Psalms, Jesus] insisted on a religion of the heart and
rejected outer forms of sacrifice and religious observance’ (48).20
The dialectics of religious transformation and secularization played a key
role in Kohn’s account of the historical development of various national

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Hans Kohn 15

phenomena, and in his explicit and implicit judgment of ‘good’ and ‘bad’
nationalisms. My focus here will be on England, the prototype of ‘good’
nationalism, and Germany, its antipode.
Intellectually, nationalism begins with renouncing the medieval tradition of
universal religion and the fragmentation of political life, by way of renaissance
secularization and reform particularism. Machiavelli’s and Luther’s deep
pessimism triggered unrestrained state nationalism; Calvin and Zwingli, con-
versely, resumed the Jewish tradition of a sacred (that is: moral) people which
finds its secularized expression in democratic and peaceful nationalism.
English nationalism, Kohn’s favourite,21 perfected Calvinism. It balanced
the Jewish consciousness of national chosenness with liberal individualism
and universalism, and Kohn stressed the religious sources of all those compo-
nents. He cited Ernst Barker’s characterization of the nationalism espoused by
the Puritan revolution: ‘…a community decided not by blood but by faith. The
English nation for which they were passionate was a nation by adoption and
grace, after the manner of the Old Testament’ (167). ‘The seeds of modern
secular civilization were planted and nurtured in a primarily religious
revolution’ (177). For Kohn, even the liberal and individualistic character of
English nationalism was religious in nature:

A nation had come into being, directing its own destiny, feeling responsible for it, and a
national spirit permeated all institutions. It sprang from a uniqueness of conscious of
the identity of divine, natural, and national law, based upon the dignity and liberty of
every individual as God’s noblest creature, upon his individual conscience inspired by
the inner light of God and reason alike (183, see also 192).

That formulation echoes Kohn’s early mysticism, as exemplified in his 1911

letter to Weltsch, in which he based individuality and human dignity on man’s
resemblance to God.
English nationalism did not only rise from religious sources, it ‘has always
been, and still is, closer than any other to the religious matrix from which it
arose’. Unlike its German counterpart, English religiosity ‘rarely [withdrew]
into the sanctuary of inner life and inner liberty’ but was rather ‘full of social
activism’ (178). Thus, the exemplary nationalism of England, diametrically
opposed to Fascism in its democratic, individualistic and universalist fibre, is
a reincarnation of the ancient Hebrew nationalism (633–5, n. 73). American
nationalism is portrayed along similar lines, with the same accent on the
impact of biblical heritage (268–80).
Central-European nationalism, especially German, was Kohn’s historical
exemplar for ‘bad’ – namely, anti-democratic, collectivist, parochial and
amoral – nationalism. Arguably, one of Kohn’s primary objectives in his book
was to explain Nazism by suggesting a sweeping version of German Sonderweg
(special path) and unravelling the ‘rotten roots’ of German nationalism.
Unexpectedly, though Kohn underscored that ‘good’ Western nationalism
was present-oriented and its ‘bad’ Eastern counterpart was past-oriented, he
presented Western, rather than Eastern, nationalism as drawing its inspiration

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16 Zohar Maor

from religious traditions. As seen before, Kohn stressed the dissociation of the
main German religious currents, Lutheranism and Pietism, from national
ideology and activity (332–42, 355).22 He dwellt the effect of Christianity
and biblical Judaism upon Herder, describing it as mostly ethical and univer-
salist. Kohn ventured to present the German cultural luminaries, particularly
Kant, Goethe, Schiller and Herder, as alienated from German nationalism
and (in the case of Herder) unsuccessfully advocating a ‘Western’ nationalism.
Kohn’s discussion of Herder’s völkisch ideology is especially revealing in
this context. It was assuredly informed by Kohn’s own völkisch past and the
appalling manner in which that ideology was misused by the Nazi regime.
To Kohn, Herder’s quest for an authentic, natural and essentialist national
character can easily morph into zealous particularism, as it did in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. In this sense ‘folk could easily become a mysti-
cal primeval force, outside the process of change and intercourse, growing only
within itself’ (446). Furthermore, the de-universalization of nationalism is
prone to catalyse hazardous ethical relativism. What saved Herder (to a
certain extent) from such pitfalls was the eighteenth century’s rational univer-
salism, along with his Christian devotion. ‘The spirituality of the Christian did
not allow his folk concept to sink to the level of a purely natural concept’ – as
the Nazis’ folk concept later did. Kohn ended his extensive discussion of
Herder with the latter’s rumination on the ‘primitive’ religions of small peoples
and the manner in which they were driven to extinction by Christianity. On the
one hand, Herder sympathized with those vanished religions as candid expres-
sions of Volksgeist; on the other, he held up ‘the great symbol of Christianity…
one shepherd and one flock – the message of a united mankind’ (449; see
Calhoun 2005: xxxvii–xxxix). The contradiction is resolved by Christianizing
national religions rather than peoples. The natural need for a national religion
should be squared with the ‘essence of Christianity – which is nothing but the
pure laws of humanity’ (449). Thus, Kohn did not detach himself completely
from his völkisch past, while not entirely negating the German national
heritage. Here, too, he cast religion as a universal balance to extreme
particularism.
Kohn’s struggle against state nationalism at that point was founded upon
three arguments, all related to religion. First, his interpretation of the pro-
phetic gospel: Kohn followed Buber (Buber 1967 [1932]) – without mentioning
him by name – in presenting the state and the national god as the erroneous
initiative of the ancient Jewish people. The prophets, on the other hand, pre-
ferred, according to this narrative, an anarchic bond between communities
and introduced God as a transnational deity, the God of right, not of might
(36–43). Second, Kohn emphasized that the two great world religions,
Christianity and Islam, and the two pillars of classical tradition, Greece and
Rome, were basically transnational.
Third, Kohn claimed that modern Enlightenment and its offshoot, democ-
racy, are basically universal; their national realization in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, as seen in the French revolution, emanated from ‘the existing

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Hans Kohn 17

possibilities of geographic conditions and organizational forms’.23 Surprisingly,

he even presented democracy as a secular version of religious universalism:

…democracy was based on the faith in the liberty and equality of each individual – on
the divine substance of each human soul which makes man in Kant’s words ‘an end in
himself’ – and on the faith in mankind as the bearer of absolute values. Natural law
secularized and rationalized these religious conceptions… The rationalists of the
eighteenth century did not deny the Heavenly City; they transferred it from heaven to
earth, from the millennium to the present day. The City of Man, with its natural law,
was as universal in its scope and message as Christianity (192).

Accordingly, Kohn underlined the religious penchant of Rousseau, whom he

designated a champion of liberal, universal nationalism – ‘a rational Christian-
ity… devoted to the cult of the supreme Being and to the eternal duties of
ethics’ (259).
In conclusion, Kohn’s account of nationalism, which focused on its intellec-
tual and cultural, rather than economic and political, aspects, posited religion
as the key factor in national dynamics. Nationalism replaced institutionalized
religion, ‘giving meaning to man’s life and justifying his noble and ignoble pas-
sions before himself and history, lifting him above the loneliness and futilities
of his days and endowing the order and power of government, without which
no society can exist, with the majesty of true authority’ (574–5). In some cases,
secular nationalism substituted religion; in others, it co-opted it for its needs.
Kohn explained that religion and nationalism are essential in that they imbue
the state with ‘emotional warmth [and] the intimacy of union’; without it, the
state degenerates into ‘a cold monster’, devoid of popular support and affilia-
tion (188). Therefore, the vanishing of nationalism, which he envisioned,
would necessarily render religion indispensable. Only a resurrection of the uni-
versal religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam can enable the development
of a transnational state with popular support. Kohn himself suggested such
revisions to Judaism. In 1958, he wrote a memorandum for the activity of
the liberal Menorah collegium in USA, in which he advocated for American–
Jewish intellectuals to work together to reform and regenerate Jewish religious
tradition so that it better accords with the multi-religious and -ethnic foundations
of the United States.24
Kohn’s conception of nationalism continued to develop. In his 1964 autobi-
ography, a reflection on his life and intellectual career, he restated the secular-
ized character of nationalism, this time focusing on the Hegelian morphing of
Jewish and Christian Heilsgeschichte into national history. There, however, he
bluntly discarded that notion and suggested a more radical secularization in
order to impede it (see also Kohn 1961). Correspondingly, in his 1957 book
on American nationalism, he argued that ‘the American idea of liberty – with
its recognition of diversity in origins and religious background – has proved a
stronger national cement… than bonds of common blood or religion…’ (Kohn
1957, 149; see Langeheine 2014, 207–9). Ostensibly, as years went by and
Kohn pulled away from his youthful Buberian religiosity, he further

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18 Zohar Maor

disengaged religion from nationalism. His earlier and somewhat immature

religious reading of nationalism in The Idea of Nationalism was probably inor-
dinate, yet it loaded that trailblazing book with an abundance of innovative
insights. Kohn’s emphasis on the centrality of religion and secularization for
the formation of nationalism is especially important today, in a postsecular
age, marked, inter alia, by a growing sensitivity to the implicit or explicit
political theologies of nationalism (see Agamben 2005, Asad 2006: 516–22).
Kohn blurred the borderlines between ‘religion’ and ‘nationalism’, viewing
religion as a sentiment and attitude toward life and not only as a set of beliefs
and practices, and nationalism as consciousness and culture and not only as a
political movement. This approach can be highly fruitful when exploring the
intricate relationship of religion and nationalism, usually treated as two
distinct phenomena. Furthermore, although religions have rarely contributed
to the moderation of national movements, Kohn seems right in suggesting
their potential to do so.

Endnotes

1 On Brit Shalom see Lee-Hattis 1970, Ratzabi 2002, Aschheim 2007: 9–44; Maor 2013.
2 See Mosse 1971: 85–9; Mendes-Flohr 1991: 83–109.
3 On secularization as transformation see, for instance, Löwith 1949.
4 On the Jewish oriental reorientation see Robertson 1996.
5 This new accent is probably based on Buber’s later addresses, like 1918’s ‘The Holy Way’. See
Buber 1967 (1923): 108–148.
6 The motive of self-sacrifice probably emanates from Kohn’s early mystical ruminations, in
which he underlines self-annihilation as man’s highest goal. See Maor 2010a, 122–4.
7 His account of Eastern (that is Indian) nationalism corresponds to that of Jewish nationalism.
See Kohn 1922, 72–86, and Maor 2010b.
8 Kohn’s account of biblical ‘Kingship of God’ as the core of Jewish theopolitics anticipates
Buber’s later (and more detailed) accounts in his ‘The kingship of God’ and ‘Moses’ (Buber 1946,
1967 [1932]). Buber may have been influenced by Kohn; however, he did not refer to his work.
9 See Kohn 1927b; Weiss 2004; Gordon 2013. On Kohn’s critique of colonialism, see Maor
2010b.
10 On Kohn’s gradual break with Zionism see Lavsky 2002; Wiese 2006, 2015; Gordon 2013,
Langeheine 2014, 148–69.
11 A later English version of this essay appeared in Kohn 1930b.
12 This corresponds to Kohn’s ongoing opposition to the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire see
Kohn 1940a: 56–7; Kohn 1964: 11–8; Langeheine 2014, 42: 70–2.
13 Kohn chooses discrimination against American blacks as his example for the misuse of
religious traditions for legitimizing a differentiating discourse
14 Kohn greatly appreciated Toynbee, met with him in London in 1930 and asked him for a letter
of recommendation for the Hebrew University. See Toynbee to Kohn, 13 November 1930, Kohn
Archive, box 8, folder 1.
15 In this book, Kohn follows Buber’s combination of admiration of ‘religiosity’ and hostility
towards institutionalized religion. See for instance Kohn’s sympathetic account of Kemal
Atatürk’s process of secularization in Turkey (Kohn 1939: 258–67).
16 Many historians of nationalism share this perspective. Compare, for instance, Anderson 1991,
9–19; Smith 2003. Craig Calhoun (2005) underlined in his penetrating introduction to the new
edition of The Idea of Nationalism, the centrality of religion in Kohn analysis of Nationalism.

© The author(s) 2017. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2017
Hans Kohn 19

17 Kohn declares in his introduction that his 1922 essay ‘contained already in outline some of the
main conclusions of The Idea of Nationalism’ (viii). Most likely, he refers to his hope that univer-
salism will replace nationalism in the foreseeable future, and to his essentialist account of Judaism.
18 Pianko (2010b: 299–303) points to the affinity between this part and Kohn’s earlier Die
politische Idee des Judentums.
19 Although Kohn does not ignore the fact that the Jewish heritage can likewise serve as a foun-
dation for chosen people’s imperialism (38–9).
20 Kohn’s account of early Christianity (47–50) is thoroughly Buberian.
21 See also Kohn 1940b.
22 In some of his narrations of ‘Eastern’ nationalisms, Kohn stresses the hostility of the local
religious establishment to the national awakening. See for instance the case of Greece (539–47).
23 See also 215–7, where Kohn portrays Enlightenment as a religious makeover, rather than a
rebuffing of the religious tradition.
24 Kohn [1958]. Kohn’s involvement in religious regeneration in this period of his life needs
further research.

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