Norman Cohn


Norman Rufus Colin Cohn FBA was a British academic, historian and writer who spent 14 years as a professorial fellow and as Astor-Wolfson Professor at the University of Sussex.

Life

Cohn was born in London, to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. He was educated at Gresham's School and Christ Church, Oxford. He was a scholar and research student at Christ Church between 1933 and 1939, taking a first-class degree in Modern Languages in 1936. He served for six years in the British Army, being commissioned into the Queen's Royal Regiment in 1939 and transferring to the Intelligence Corps in 1944, where his knowledge of modern languages found employment. In 1941 he married Vera Broido, with whom he had a son, the writer Nik Cohn. In the immediate post-war period, he was stationed in Vienna, ostensibly to interrogate Nazis, but he also encountered many refugees from Stalinism, and the similarities in persecutorial obsessions evinced both by Nazism and Stalinism fueled his interest in the historical background for these ideologically opposed, yet functionally similar movements. After his discharge, he taught successively in universities in Scotland, Ireland, England, the United States and Canada.
In 1962, Cohn was approached by Observer editor David Astor after Astor gave a speech on the psychopathological roots of extremism. Cohn became the head of the Columbus Centre, which was set up and initially financed by Astor to look into the causes of extremism and persecution. In 1966, the Columbus Centre was formally set up as a research project at the University of Sussex and Cohn was appointed a professorial fellow. From 1973 to 1980, Cohn was Astor-Wolfson Professor at Sussex.
Norman Cohn died on 31 July 2007, in Cambridge, England, at the age of 92, from a degenerative heart condition.

Career

Cohn's work as a historian focused on the problem of the roots of that persecutorial fanaticism which became resurgent in modern Europe at a time when industrial progress and the spread of democracy had convinced many that modern civilisation had stepped out forever from the savageries of earlier historical societies. In his The Pursuit of the Millennium, an influential work translated into more than eleven languages, he traced back to the distant past the pattern of chiliastic upheaval that marred the revolutionary movements of the 20th century. Likewise, in Europe's Inner Demons he tracked the historical sources of the mania for scapegoating minorities which, within Christendom, culminated in the Great European witchhunt.
His book Warrant for Genocide is on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-semitic forgery purporting to describe a Jewish conspiracy for world domination. He argued that this conspiracy theory motivated its supporters to seek the of the Jewish people and became a major psychological factor in the Nazi Holocaust.
In Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith, he sought to trace the source of millennial religious themes in ancient civilizations. Cohn, with his background in dealing with totalitarian regimes and the sufferings of his relatives during the Holocaust, described all his work as studies on the phenomena that sought "to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil".
His work was honoured by his election as a Fellow of the British Academy, for which he was nominated by Isaiah Berlin. His The Pursuit of the Millennium was ranked as one of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century in a survey conducted by The Times Literary Supplement.

Works