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PREFACE: A TRIBUTE TO JOHN DOYLE KLIER (1944–2007) John Doyle Klier was the Sidney and Elizabeth Corob Professor of Modern Jewish History at University College, London. He began his university teaching career at Fort Hays State University, Kansas. John moved to University College, London in 1990 and rose to the rank of Professor in 1996. For anyone engaged in the study of modern European history during the past two decades, familiarity with John Klier’s scholarship was a rite of passage. His seminal works—Russia Gathers Her Jews (DeKalb, 1986) and Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855–1881 (Cambridge, 1995)—are required reading in university courses around the globe. Scholars in the field had been waiting anxiously for the publication of his newest (and tragically , last) monograph. In the last few months of his life, John neared the completion of the manuscript for this book, titled “Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-1882,” to be published by Cambridge University Press. Following his death, Lars Fischer, François Guesnet and John’s widow, Helen Klier, took up the completion of that long-awaited project. John was fond of saying that the work of Hans Rogger sparked the reassessment of relations between the late Imperial Russian state and its Jews. It is equally true for anyone who knew his work that John Klier gave this revision its scholarly “teeth.” He was among the first pioneering Western scholars to work in the Soviet archives in the 1980s. As a result, John quite literally reshaped the way that scholars and laypeople thought about the behavior of the Russian state and its peoples toward their Jewish subjects and neighbors during the nineteenth century. Most notably, he helped to change the way recurring anti-Jewish violence was understood and allowed other scholars to question many assumptions about the connection between the Imperial Russian regime and the pogroms. The importance of this cannot be overstated, given the centrality of anti-Jewish violence in the varieties of national narratives of the Jewish people and the mark these have left on the popular memory about the Russian Empire. John helped to turn the study of pogroms and anti-Jewish violence into a field of study in its own right. For anyone who had the good fortune to know him, from the first meeting it was obvious that John was much more than a brilliant scholar. His unique blend of intellect, earthly common sense, and warmth made it x PREFACE possible for him to bridge generations and geographical barriers among colleagues—young and old—in our profession. Younger scholars among us know from firsthand experience that John was an extraordinarily gracious and helpful man who continuously went out of his way to assist aspiring scholars from around the world. All of these skills and qualities made John an axis of activity in our field. Jonathan Dekel-Chen met John Klier for the first time in 2004 while planning for the conference in Stockholm that formed the backbone of this volume. He recalls: Until then, John was for me little more than the author of landmark publications. But from that moment onward, I learned to trust John’s keen judgment and intuition in administrative affairs as well as in the more subtle aspects of the “human condition.” John Klier’s boundless energy, marvelous sense of humor, welcoming spirit, and integrity are a model for all who worked with him. Beyond all these, however, I remember John at his most human moments, like stopping to smile and straighten my jacket collar as we were about to enter a formal reception in Jerusalem or laughing together as we noticed some of the contradictions of life in Russia today. Natan Meir met John Klier while working on his doctoral dissertation, and immediately experienced the senior scholar’s generosity personally as Klier sent him photocopies of handwritten notes that he had taken when going through decades of issues of newspapers in libraries in Ukraine—thus saving Meir weeks or even months of research. My most cherished memory of John is from Moscow, 2004, when we were attending the SEFER conference of Jewish Studies. As we traveled together one evening from the conference site back to the hotel, John’s joy at being “back in the USSR,” as it were, was plainly evident . Even slipping and sliding on the black ice that is a fixture on Russian sidewalks in the winter was part of the fun. Rather than take taxis everywhere and eat in...

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