The death of a Medievalist: Professor Norman Cohn

Professor Norman Cohn, who died on Tuesday aged 92, was a historian, philosopher, linguist, author and expert on persecution, genocide and extermination; his seminal book, The Pursuit of the Millennium: revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchists of the middle ages (1957), earned cult status.

Translated into 11 languages since its initial publication, The Pursuit of the Millennium became Cohn's best-known work and was acclaimed as one of the most important studies of apocalyptic ideas.

In the book Cohn revealed for the first time the history of revolutionary millenarians, people who believe that the old world is about to be transformed into a new order in which the chosen few reap their reward of an earthly paradise and everyone else perishes.

Having witnessed at first hand the apocalyptic atrocities of war, Cohn wondered whether the fanatical ideas of the Nazis and Communists were exclusively a 20th-century phenomenon or whether they had more ancient roots. Both tyrannies contained the myth of a final titanic struggle against a demonised enemy - the Jews in the case of Hitler's Germany, the bourgeoisie in that of Stalin's Soviet Union.

Although working as a linguist when he returned to academic life after the Second World War, Cohn - with no training as an historian but never hidebound - embarked on a quest for the historical origins of these ideas which took him back to the Middle Ages.

Armed with Latin and medieval German and French, he embarked on an 10-year investigation of sources for his book, with the aim of shedding light on the ancient collective fantasies that still exerted an influence on European culture.

In a clear, classical style, Cohn brought obscure medieval documents to life, creating scenes that portrayed, for instance, the starving, blood-spattered flagellants who in 1349 stormed the gates of Frankfurt to slaughter the Jews in a religious-ecstatic orgy of killing; or describing how, in 1251, a raggle-taggle army of paupers, led by a renegade monk, captured the villages of Picardy on the orders of the Virgin Mary.

In 1995, when the Times Literary Supplement listed the 100 non-fiction works that had had the greatest influence on the way in which post-war Europeans perceive themselves, Cohn's book ranked alongside works by Camus, Sartre, Friedman and Foucault.

At the turn of the century seven years ago, Cohn's apocalyptic themes again caught the zeitgeist and his book enjoyed a revival, thanks to those people who mistakenly believed that the advent of the new millennium portended the dawn of doomsday. As one critic noted, The Pursuit of the Millennium's cult status was confirmed by the fact that it was frequently quoted by people who had never even read it.

A modest man of deep convictions who shunned the limelight, Cohn exposed many of the modern world's collective fantasies, the archaic ideas responsible for much of the cruelty and fanaticism of history which he believed still characterised our thinking.

With his white beard and courtly air, he struck one observer as not unlike the prophets of Armageddon he had spent so many years researching, but "his expression is far milder and his tone epitomises English breeding - formed by the university culture of the interwar period and an upbringing in a bourgeois home with German-Jewish roots".

Norman Rufus Colin Cohn was born on January 12 1915 in London. His father August was Jewish, his mother Daisy was a Roman Catholic.

He was educated as a scholar of Gresham's School, Holt, and of Christ Church, Oxford, where in 1936 he took a First in Medieval and Modern Languages. He remained at Oxford as a research student until 1939.

From the outbreak of the Second World War Cohn served in the Queen's Royal Regiment, and then later in the Intelligence Corps, where his work brought him into contact with both Nazi and Communist ideologies, stimulating his ideas for the book that was to make his name.
Sent to Vienna in 1945, he was assigned to interrogate members of the SS, and met many refugees from Stalin's reign of terror - experiences that gave rise to questions that would occupy him for most of the rest of his life.

After demobilisation, from 1946 to 1951 Cohn lectured in French at Glasgow University. He was then appointed Professor of French at Magee University College, Londonderry, at that time linked to Trinity College, Dublin. In 1960 he took a similar post at King's College, Newcastle University.

In 1963 his career as a linguist changed direction completely. He became a professorial fellow at Sussex University and director of the university's Columbus Centre for studies of persecution and genocide.

The appointment resulted in his book Warrant For Genocide (1967), in which he examined one of the most important sources of the Nazis' hatred of the Jews, the fraudulent document known as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

As the son of a Jew himself, Cohn claimed a personal motive for straying beyond his field of expertise as a medievalist, recalling that many of his relatives in Nazi Germany had perished in the Holocaust. His book traced the roots of The Protocols' fundamental myth: the Jew as God's demonic opponent throughout history.

Noting that the same irrational hatred had been applied to witches and heretics in the medieval era, Cohn was struck by the continuing tradition of demonisation in modern times. In his book Europe's Inner Demons (1976) he demonstrated the existence of an almost immutable complex of ideas that emerges again and again when societies in crisis seek scapegoats.

In 1993 Cohn published Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come, in which he searched for the origins of humanity's propensity for apocalyptic belief. "It is a response to change, especially disorientating change," he told The Sunday Telegraph in 1996.

As the millennium approached, Cohn believed that the conditions existed for a worldwide rise in apocalyptic fervour. "Everything which our own society took for granted has been discredited," he declared. "No loyalty or relationship has remained unquestioned, including that of the family. Many values have been inverted. And there is a pervasive sense of time speeding up, which is very characteristic of apocalypticism."

From 1973 to 1980 Cohn was the Astor-Wolfson Professor of History at Sussex University; and he held various other academic appointments, several of them overseas. He was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and in 1978 was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

After retiring in 1980 he continued to write at his son's 300-year-old thatched cottage in Hertfordshire; and he enjoyed long, vigorous country walks.

Norman Cohn married first, in 1941, Vera Broido, who died in 2004. He married secondly, in 2004, Marina Voikhanskaya, who survives him together with the son of his first marriage, the writer Nik Cohn.

From: Telegraph