Jonathan Frankel

Thought-provoking contributor to Jewish and Russian history

Jonathan Frankel, who has died aged 72, was in every sense a towering figure. A brilliant historian of Russian and Jewish history, he was also a prominent figure of the Jewish left and, while non-aligned in a party sense, embodied its best traditions. Over 6ft tall, he quietly dominated seminars and conferences, speaking softly, with immense deliberation, scholarly authority and personal integrity.

Jonathan was born in London and grew up in Hampstead Garden Suburb, with a wartime interlude in Wales. His mother was British-born, while his German father supported the Zionist cause. Jonathan and his brother both eventually settled in Israel.

He studied history at Cambridge, gaining his PhD in 1961 with an innovative study of Russian Jewish politics in the late-19th century, and he was a fellow of Jesus College from 1960 to 1963. He married Edith Rogovin, a fellow East Europeanist, and in 1964 was appointed to a lectureship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where Edith also held a post. He became a professor in 1985, closely involved with the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Jewry, founded by Moshe Davis.

Jonathan translated two seminal texts from the Russian revolutionary tradition, which appeared as Vladimir Akimov on the Dilemmas of Russian Marxism, 1895-1903 (1969). His magnum opus, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917, finally arrived in 1981. This huge study transformed the previous understanding of history by looking at where Jewish radicals settled in their flight from tsarist persecution. In contrast to previous accounts, Jonathan argued that every trend shared a unique, apocalyptic temperament and a messianic impulse rooted in Judaism, but transmuted into secular form. Within his sweeping narrative he encompassed the fate of both collective and individual dilemmas of identity, analysing the rigidities of Jewish political thought, and placing them within the shifting context of a world in turmoil. He also utilised the texts historians had ignored: the popular press (in several languages), cartoons and photographs.

In the early 1980s, Davis invited him to edit an annual of the best work on the modern Jewish experience. With Peter Medding and Ezra Mendelsohn as editors, the first volume of Studies in Contemporary Jewry appeared in 1984. They produced more than 20 volumes, Jonathan doing the greater part. The themed volumes that he edited reflected his range of interests. They embraced the transformation of Jewish historiography, Jews and the European crisis 1914-21, new interpretations of the Holocaust, Jews and messianism, gender, and most recently Jews and communism.

He also co-edited several stimulating collections of essays on Russian history. Assimilation and Community: The Jews in 19th-century Europe (1992), which he co-edited with Steven Zipperstein, contributed to an entirely new reading of "modernisation" in a Jewish context. He also produced the definitive study of a notorious "ritual murder" case of 1840, The Damascus Affair (1997).

For several years in the 1980s Jonathan held, and intermittently occupied, the Goldsmid chair in the department of Hebrew and Jewish studies at University College London. His professionalism and open-mindedness were an inspiration to researchers in Jewish history and culture working, often in isolation, in Britain. He was also a stalwart of the Israeli peace movement in these years and, on his visits to London, gave valuable advice to its beleaguered supporters in the UK. My abiding memory of Jonathan is of a tall, gangly English Jew standing next to his colleague professor Israel Getzler, a short, rotund German Jew, both men steeped in the radical tradition, remonstrating with Jewish settlers at a Peace Now demonstration at Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, in spring 1982.

Jonathan was diagnosed with cancer five years ago, but continued stoically to work until shortly before his death. He is survived by Edith, their two daughters and five grandchildren.

· Jonathan Frankel, historian, born July 15 1935; died May 7 2008

Today's best video

Today in pictures