PAST & PRESENT
A letter in a book
RAMACHANDRA GUHA
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An unexpected find reveals startling insights that are especially relevant today.
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Over the years, I must have bought and posted home several hundred books from Strand, but this was the first that arrived, as it were, with an added gift on top (or inside).
THE Strand Bookstore in New York advertises itself as “home to 18 miles of new, used, rare and out of print books”. I first visited the place 22 years ago, and have gone back at regular intervals since. In recent years my visits have been
in the nature of a double pilgrimage —for, on my way to or from the bookshop, I stop by at the statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Union Square, a stone’s throw away.
Visiting Strand towards the end of last year, I came across a slim book by a man who, even by the standards of the 20th century, led an extraordinarily interesting life. His name was Hans Kohn, and he was born (in 1891) and raised in the city of Prague. He was active in Zionist organisations as a young man; yet, like many Jews at the time, found himself fighting on the German side during the First World War. Captured early, he spent some four years in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp before returning to Prague to complete his doctorate. He then travelled in Palestine and lived in Paris and London before moving to the United States in 1934 to take up an academic appointment.
Theorist of nationalism
For the following three decades (he died only in 1971) Hans Kohn was a prolific writer on political and historical subjects. He was, among other things, the first major theorist of the modern world’s most mysterious and powerful religion — nationalism. Kohn wrote books and essays on American, British, Russian, German and Jewish nationalism. As an open-minded scholar, he saw the phenomenon as many-sided — as he pointed out, nationalism could be liberal or illiberal, designed to promote a spirit of citizenship or to aggressively advance one’s claims on someone else’s territory.
I had read and admired Kohn, so was delighted to find, in the Strand Bookstore, a copy of one of his lesser known books. Entitled Prophets and Peoples, it contained biographical portraits of representative national (or nationalistic) thinkers, among them John Stuart Mill, Michelet, Mazzini and Dostoevsky. I asked the bookshop to post it back to India. The packet arrived some months later; when I opened it, out came the book and a letter that had been hidden within its pages.
Over the years, I must have bought and posted home several hundred books from Strand, but this was the first that arrived, as it were, with an added gift on top (or inside). I read the letter with interest, for, it was written by Hans Kohn himself. Dated June 10, 1961, and addressed to a “Mr. Maurer”, the letter began by thanking the addressee for his letter of May 21. Mr. Maurer had apparently posed three questions, which Kohn answered one by one. He began by saying that, “I was only a few days in Egypt — and thus I can not answer your questions with any authority. The conditions of the Jews in Egypt is normal. They are not persecuted. (Even in the days of the invasion of Egypt by Israel no Jew was killed or physically harmed — the pro-Israel elements who were not Egyptians were expelled as were many Britishers and French, their nations participating in the aggression against Egypt). The Egyptian government (as every Arab government — in Iraq or Lebanon, Jordan or Tunisia) is, of course, anti-Israel, they are not anti-Jewish”.
Then he continued: “[Gamal Abdel] Nasser is a nationalist. I never heard him called a fascist. Some people think, on the contrary, that he is pro-communist. I do not think so, but he is certainly a socialist and tries hard to improve the status of the Egyptian masses”.
Finally, before signing off, Kohn wrote: “About Mr [Arnold] Toynbee, I wrote in detail in the chapter, devoted to him, in the 1957 (new, enlarged) edition of my book The Twentieth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1957) which also
contains my chapters on nationalism, communalism, fascism, racialism etc. which may interest you”.
Remarkable words
Reading this letter 46 years after it was written, I found two of its paragraphs quite unremarkable. One described the practice of a political leader, the second advertised the writer’s own wares. But it is the first paragraph that should still command our attention. As late as 1961, five years after the war of aggression launched on Egypt by Israel in collusion with France and Britain, Jews were completely safe in Cairo and around, living and working as they had done for hundreds of years before that.
As a sometime resident of Prague, Paris, London and a Russian prison camp, Kohn knew at first hand the practice of anti-Semitism. To his personal experience would have been added his studies as a historian, which too would have taught him that Christian anti-Semitism was far more poisonous and deadly than the Islamic variant.
Six years after Kohn wrote this letter, Israel and the Arab States fought another war, whose result — a rout of the Arab States —comprehensively altered the relationship between Jews and their neighbours in West Asia. There are those who would represent the relationship now as one of an unending “clash of civilisations”, and those who would yet seek, heroically and apparently against the odds, to work towards a just settlement of the rights of Jews and Palestinians. To this latter group that letter of Hans Kohn speaks directly — not merely for its reminder of times when Jews and Arabs lived in perfect amity, but also for its insistence that one can be “anti-Israel” without being “anti-Jewish”.
