John Klier

John Klier, (13 December 1944 – 23 September 2007) was a British-American 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, Klier was the Sidney and Elizabeth Corob Professor of Modern Jewish History at University College London. He was a historian who challenged scholarly opinion on the Jewish community under the Tsars.

Early life and university Klier was born on 13 December 1944 in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, USA, 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 for his BA and MA in history.

Work in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine 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 Kyiv, Moscow, St Petersburg and Minsk. In 1993, he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities of the United States government to prepare surveys of Jewish materials in post-Soviet archives. His second major monograph, "Imperial Russia's Jewish Question, 1855–1881", appeared in 1995.

At UCL Klier headed the Hebrew and Jewish Studies department at UCL during much of the 1990s until his death. and is survived by family members in Upstate New York and the UK. Klier was an expert in many national literatures – which he preferred to read in their original language. He was also a skilled fencer.