John Klier, who died Sunday in London at 62, was a leading scholar on the treatment and perceptions of Jews in Russia from the late 18th century until the end of the Tsarist Empire.

He helped to turn his own studies of pogroms and shtetls into a historical field in its own right.

Born December 13, 1944, in Syracuse, Klier grew up with an aeronautical engineer father who often sported a T-shirt that boasted, “I really AM a rocket scientist.”

Klier attended Notre Dame and then the University of Illinois at Urbana, where his dissertation focused on how the Russian state integrated Jews into its official workings. A book grew out of the dissertation, “Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the ‘Jewish Question’ in Russia” (1986). He followed it up with another monograph, “Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855–1881” (1995).

In order to gain access to sensitive Soviet archives in an era when muckraking investigations into Judaism were hardly encouraged, Klier posed as a researcher of the “Russian popular press.” He was later given funding by the National Endowment for the Humanities to prepare surveys of Jewish materials in post-Soviet archives.

In recent years, Klier completed another chapter in his survey of Russian Jews, this one covering the tumultuous years 1881–82, when large-scale attacks on Russian Jews attracted enough international attention that the word “pogrom” became part of the English language.

Along with his wife, Helen Mingay, Klier was also author of the popular history “The Search for Anastasia: Solving the Riddle of the Lost Romanovs” (1996). He was bemused that it was by far his best seller.

In 1996, he was named professor at University College London, and he became chairman of the Hebrew and Jewish studies department.

He was also a skilled fencer, as well as that rarest of sports fans, an expert in both British and American football.