John took his own special approach to every historiographical or intellectual problem.
In the first place, he was not emotionally guided and relied instead upon documentary
evidence. He was always objective in his approach and was never afraid of opposing or
differing from established academic views or traditional perspectives. Openness, transpar-
ency were very important to him. In studying the history of the Jewish question, he was
one of the earliest to recognise the role of the periodical press in the struggle for Jewish
emancipation.
John Doyle 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.[1] He was a historian who challenged scholarly opinion on the Jewish community under the Tsars.
His PhD dissertation examined the process by which the Russian Empire, after the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, absorbed Jews into the Russian state system. His first book, Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the Jewish Question in Russia (1986), expanded on the PhD thesis.[2]
Work in Russia
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 in the United States to prepare surveys of Jewish materials in post-Soviet archives. His second major monograph, “Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855–1881”, appeared in 1995.