Professor John Klier (1944-2007) was a pioneering historian of Russian Jewry and a pivotal figure in academic Jewish studies and East European history in the UK and beyond. At the end of his career and life, Professor Klier was the Sidney and Elizabeth Corob Professor of Modern Jewish History at University College London.[1] He was an indefatigable historian who challenged scholarly opinion on the Jewish community under the Tsars
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John Doyle Klier was born in 1944 in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, and his family lived briefly in Washington before settling in Syracuse, New York. His father taught aeronautical engineering at Syracuse University. Brought up as a Catholic, John attended Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, a favoured choice among the brightest American Catholic youth,for his BA and MA in history.[2] He pursued doctoral study at the University of Illinois — long a powerhouse in Russian and Soviet history — where his interest in Russian Jewry was stimulated. He was intrigued, in his investigations of pre-revolutionary Russia, that little research had been conducted on Russian Jewry for most of the 20th century. His PhD dissertation examined the process by which Tsarist Russia, after the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, fitfully absorbed Jews into the Russian state system. This work was sharpened and expanded into his first book, Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the Jewish Question in Russia (1986), now considered a seminal text in modern Jewish history.[3]
In 1991, he was one of the first foreign scholars to undertake in-depth research on the Jews in Soviet archives, and mined resources in the coming years in Kiev, Moscow, St Petersburg and Minsk. In 1993 he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the United States to prepare surveys of Jewish materials in post-Soviet archives. Scores, if not hundreds, of researchers of East European Jewry have benefited from his insight and guidance. His second major monograph, 'Imperial Russia's Jewish Question, 1855–1881', appeared in 1995.
John was thoroughly devoted to his wife Helen Mingay and their two children, Sophia and Sebastian. He is survived by family members in Upstate New York and the UK.[4] A true renaissance man, John was an expert in many national literatures – which he preferred to read in their original. He also was well-versed in classical music, art, opera and theatre. He was a skilled competitive fencer. He also could carry a spirited, incisive conversation about both English and American football.[5]
Gentle by temperament, John had the firmness to hold together the Jewish studies department at UCL and was also a regular organiser of trips of Russianists from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies to the theatre and opera. If invited to a party, he would typically volunteer to bring along "Tex-Mex" dishes of his own spicy invention. He was also a skilled and competitive fencer and the UCLU club photo from 2005 now sits in his Memorial Library in the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Department.