Norman Cohn, Historian, Dies at 92
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Obituaries
The New York Times
August 27, 2007
Norman Cohn, a historian who influenced a generation of historians and social scientists with his insight that totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, chiefly Communism and Nazism, were propelled by mythologies associated with medieval apocalyptic movements, died on July 31 in Cambridge, England. He was 92.
The cause was a degenerative heart condition, said his son, Nik Cohn.
In highly detailed, laboriously researched studies that depended on his knowledge of many ancient languages, Mr. Cohn reached far back into history to illuminate subjects of compelling current interest from totalitarianism to anti-Semitism to repression of minorities.
His gift for seeing old stories with new eyes shone in his book on the development and interpretation of the biblical story of Noah, “Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought.” His crisp writing drew praise.
He was an unusual historian in that as a student he did not study history, but was trained as a linguist; he then put his knowledge of medieval Latin, Greek, Old French and High and Low German to work in his famously meticulous research. He also brought passion to his search for the roots of hatred: he had lost relatives in the Holocaust.
The Times Literary Supplement included his seminal 1957 book, “The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages,” in a 1995 list of the 100 nonfiction works with the greatest influence on how postwar Europeans perceive themselves. Other books on the list were by Camus, Sartre and Foucault.
Beginning with the Crusades and concluding with 16th-century Anabaptists, Mr. Cohn showed in this book how the desire of the poor to improve their lot merged with prophecies of a final struggle between Christ and Antichrist, to be followed by the emergence of a new paradise.
“In situations of mass disorientation and anxiety, traditional beliefs about a future golden age or messianic kingdom came to serve as vehicles for social aspirations and animosities,” he wrote.
This vision, he suggested, passed among cultures and languages and from religious to secular discourse without losing its coherence or power to jolt the downtrodden to rise up. Messianic leaders like Stalin and Hitler appealed to the deep, biblically inspired belief that after intense struggle history would end, and an elect of believers would inherit paradise.
“The old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious,” he wrote. “For it is the simple truth that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still.”
Mr. Cohn’s theory emerged from a decade of research into millennial movements like the Flagellants who massacred the Jews of Frankfurt in 1349, the 16th-century Anabaptist theocracy of Münster, Germany, and the Ranters of the English Civil War.
Anthony Storr, a psychoanalyst who has written on historical figures, once called Mr. Cohn “the historian of important parts of history that other historians do not reach.”
Norman Rufus Colin Cohn was born on Jan. 12, 1915, in London to a Jewish father and a Roman Catholic mother. He began studying linguistics at Gresham’s School in Holt, which he attended on a scholarship. He graduated from Christ Church, Oxford, with first-class honors in medieval and modern languages.
During World War II, Mr. Cohn was in the Intelligence Corps. Immediately after the war, in Vienna, he interrogated members of the SS and met refugees fleeing Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. He then lectured in French at the University of Glasgow from 1946 to 1951. There, he began the millennium book, which took him a decade to complete and has been translated into at least 11 languages.
Mr. Cohn went on to teach at universities in Ireland, Britain, the United States and Canada. In 1966, he published “Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” He showed how ancient myths coalesced with modern ideologies to give prominence to a racist tract proved to be a hoax.
In 1975, he published “Europe’s Inner Demons: An Inquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt,” which argued there was no credible evidence behind the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries. He found precursors to the witch hysteria in the persecution of early Christians by the Romans and elsewhere.
His “Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith” (1993) plowed deeper into the roots of belief in an apocalyptic end of time, finding that the Iranian prophet Zoroaster laid the groundwork for the phenomenon. Older conceptions of time, like the Egyptian and Mesopotamian, did not lead inexorably to a final end, he said.
In 1996, Mr. Cohn published “Noah’s Flood,” which explored the flood story in the context of scientific progress.
Mr. Cohn was married to Vera Broido, an author and daughter of Menshevik revolutionaries in Russia, from 1941 until her death in 2004. In addition to his son from that marriage, he is survived by his wife, Marina Voikhanskaya.
Mr. Cohn summarized his work by explaining that it was all about the same phenomenon, “the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil.”
He wrote, “It occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history.”
Obituaries
The New York Times
August 27, 2007
Norman Cohn, a historian who influenced a generation of historians and social scientists with his insight that totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, chiefly Communism and Nazism, were propelled by mythologies associated with medieval apocalyptic movements, died on July 31 in Cambridge, England. He was 92.
The cause was a degenerative heart condition, said his son, Nik Cohn.
In highly detailed, laboriously researched studies that depended on his knowledge of many ancient languages, Mr. Cohn reached far back into history to illuminate subjects of compelling current interest from totalitarianism to anti-Semitism to repression of minorities.
His gift for seeing old stories with new eyes shone in his book on the development and interpretation of the biblical story of Noah, “Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought.” His crisp writing drew praise.
He was an unusual historian in that as a student he did not study history, but was trained as a linguist; he then put his knowledge of medieval Latin, Greek, Old French and High and Low German to work in his famously meticulous research. He also brought passion to his search for the roots of hatred: he had lost relatives in the Holocaust.
The Times Literary Supplement included his seminal 1957 book, “The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages,” in a 1995 list of the 100 nonfiction works with the greatest influence on how postwar Europeans perceive themselves. Other books on the list were by Camus, Sartre and Foucault.
Beginning with the Crusades and concluding with 16th-century Anabaptists, Mr. Cohn showed in this book how the desire of the poor to improve their lot merged with prophecies of a final struggle between Christ and Antichrist, to be followed by the emergence of a new paradise.
“In situations of mass disorientation and anxiety, traditional beliefs about a future golden age or messianic kingdom came to serve as vehicles for social aspirations and animosities,” he wrote.
This vision, he suggested, passed among cultures and languages and from religious to secular discourse without losing its coherence or power to jolt the downtrodden to rise up. Messianic leaders like Stalin and Hitler appealed to the deep, biblically inspired belief that after intense struggle history would end, and an elect of believers would inherit paradise.
“The old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious,” he wrote. “For it is the simple truth that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still.”
Mr. Cohn’s theory emerged from a decade of research into millennial movements like the Flagellants who massacred the Jews of Frankfurt in 1349, the 16th-century Anabaptist theocracy of Münster, Germany, and the Ranters of the English Civil War.
Anthony Storr, a psychoanalyst who has written on historical figures, once called Mr. Cohn “the historian of important parts of history that other historians do not reach.”
Norman Rufus Colin Cohn was born on Jan. 12, 1915, in London to a Jewish father and a Roman Catholic mother. He began studying linguistics at Gresham’s School in Holt, which he attended on a scholarship. He graduated from Christ Church, Oxford, with first-class honors in medieval and modern languages.
During World War II, Mr. Cohn was in the Intelligence Corps. Immediately after the war, in Vienna, he interrogated members of the SS and met refugees fleeing Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. He then lectured in French at the University of Glasgow from 1946 to 1951. There, he began the millennium book, which took him a decade to complete and has been translated into at least 11 languages.
Mr. Cohn went on to teach at universities in Ireland, Britain, the United States and Canada. In 1966, he published “Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” He showed how ancient myths coalesced with modern ideologies to give prominence to a racist tract proved to be a hoax.
In 1975, he published “Europe’s Inner Demons: An Inquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt,” which argued there was no credible evidence behind the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries. He found precursors to the witch hysteria in the persecution of early Christians by the Romans and elsewhere.
His “Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith” (1993) plowed deeper into the roots of belief in an apocalyptic end of time, finding that the Iranian prophet Zoroaster laid the groundwork for the phenomenon. Older conceptions of time, like the Egyptian and Mesopotamian, did not lead inexorably to a final end, he said.
In 1996, Mr. Cohn published “Noah’s Flood,” which explored the flood story in the context of scientific progress.
Mr. Cohn was married to Vera Broido, an author and daughter of Menshevik revolutionaries in Russia, from 1941 until her death in 2004. In addition to his son from that marriage, he is survived by his wife, Marina Voikhanskaya.
Mr. Cohn summarized his work by explaining that it was all about the same phenomenon, “the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil.”
He wrote, “It occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history.”
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