Professor John Klier (1944-2007)

Abstract

SEER, Vol. 86,No. i,January 2008 Professor John Klier (1944-2007) Professor John Doyle Klier died after a short illness on 23 September 2007 at the age of only 62. His sudden and untimely death at the height of his powers has profoundly shocked and saddened his family, friends and colleagues. Klier was arguably themost innovative and influential historian of Russian Jewry working in recent decades. Capable of communicating his research effectively to a variety of audi ences he was an inspiring and sought-after speaker who was well known and will be sorely missed far beyond the realm of the academy. Klier was born on 13December 1944 in Bellefonte (Pennsylvania) but grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his father taught aeronau tical engineering at Syracuse University. Coming from a Catholic back ground, he took his first two degrees atNotre Dame University (Indiana) before moving as a doctoral student to the University of Illinois, then a focal point for Russian and Soviet history. It was not least the maltreatment of Jews by the Soviet regime that directed his interest increasingly towards the history of Russian Jewry and his PhD thesis eventually discussed the protracted and haphazard process by which tsarist Russia sought to absorb the large Jewish population that had come under its control as a result of the Polish partitions towards the end of the eighteenth century. Soon after beginning work on his dissertation itbecame increasingly clear toKlier just how little original, archive-based research had actu ally been undertaken in this field formuch of the twentieth century. This was due in large part to the difficulties involved in gaining access to the relevant archival material, for the history of Russian Jewry was still considered a sensitive topic and its systematic study ultimately remained a taboo in the Soviet Union. Klier was able to circumvent these constraints by claiming that his field of study was in fact the Russian popular press. It was not least the unprecedented access to archives he gained as a postdoctoral researcher at Leningrad State University in the late 1970s and again in the early 1980s that allowed him to present a startlingly fresh and innovative viewpoint on his topic that challenged much of the previously accepted wisdom. Klier never denied that theJews' situation in Imperial Russia, for a whole variety of reasons, was indeed dire. Yet on closer examination it transpired that the conspiracy-theory version of events portraying the tsarist regime's dealings with Russian Jewry as born of a persistent and wilful desire to do theJews harm, was simply not tenable. The circum stances and conflicts that generated the difficult situation in which 112 PROFESSOR JOHN KLIER Russian Jewry found itself turned out to be altogether more complex and Klier did more than any other scholar to clear the way for an understanding of the history of Russian Jewry that genuinely takes this complexity into account. Klier was not the sort of scholar who drew satisfaction from the breaking of taboos for the sake of it and the com passion and integrity he brought to this project rendered the occasional isolated attempt to portray him as a revisionist, not in the scholarly but in the polemical sense of the word, utterly misguided. Klier's thesis eventually grew into his first book, Russia Gathers Her Jews:The Origins ofthe JewishQuestionin Russia (DeKalb, IL, 1986).Not only has this book become universally acknowledged as a standard text indispensable to the study of Russian Jewry, it also put Klier firmly on themap as a historian widely respected among scholars of both modern Jewish history and Russian history more generally. In 1991 a collection of essays, co-edited with Shlomo Lambroza, Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Jewish History (Cambridge and New York), followed. It too became an instant classic. While in no way questioning the significance and impact of anti-Jewish violence in Imperial Russia on itsown terms, the research assembled in this volume demonstrated clearly that pogroms were in fact rarely initiated by the regime or the authorities nor can they be considered the primary cause ofJewish emigration to theWest. Among the contributors to this volume was the late Hans Rogger whom...