When Jonathan Frankel went on aliyah in 1964 aged 29, Anglo-Jewry lost one of its most promising scholars of Jewish studies, writes Michael Pinto-Duschinsky.
He devoted the rest of his life to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he became Professor of Modern Jewish and Russian History, and a world authority on Russian and Jewish history of the 19th and 20th centuries.
However, he always maintained his British links and acted for nearly a decade in the 1980s as visiting Goldsmid Professor in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London, following the retirement of Professor Chimen Abramsky. He also inaugurated a series of public lectures, which have become an important feature of Jewish life in London.
Professor Frankel's parents were prominent Zionists. His father moved from Frankfurt to London when Hitler came to power.
Ernst Frankel had been a leader of the Blau-Weiss Zionist youth movement in Germany and was later to found the ground-breaking Zionist Federation Educational Trust in 1955.
Jonathan's English mother, Ella, was descended from the Goiteins, who had been rabbis for three generations in the small Hungarian village of Hogy-esz, and from the well-known Snowman medical and communal family. For many years she headed the education department of the women's Zionist organisation, Wizo.
After evacuation during the Second World War to Cardiff, where Ernst Frankl owned a factory making goods for the army, Jonathan grew up in Hampstead Garden Suburb and was a keen member of Habonim.
From school at Christ's College, Finchley, he went to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he took a first in the history tripos. He then became a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge (1960-63) where his doctoral supervisor was the famed historian of Russia, EH Carr.
Since Frankel's special interest was in the ideas and political movements of Russian Jews, he obtained advice from Sir Isaiah Berlin and Professor Abramsky. His 1981 book, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, remains a classic.
He produced 15 further books, mostly for the Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, as author, editor or co-editor. Three more are due to appear posthumously.
Some of them formed part of the famed series of annual volumes which he founded at the Hebrew University's Institute of Contemporary Jewry.
Apart from his main works on the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, he produced in 1997 a definitive and riveting study, The Damascus Affair, "Ritual Murder," Politics, and the Jews in 1840, a story of antisemitism and the response of world Jewry, in which Sir Moses Montefiore played a leading part.
Between 1981 and 1997 his works received the Smilen, Jefroykin, Shazar and Wishnitzer prizes.
He was several times chairman of the Hebrew University's department of Russian studies and held visiting appointments and fellowships at Columbia, Dartmouth and Stanford Universities and the University of Pennsylvania. Much loved as a teacher and colleague, he was also active as a supporter of the Peace Now campaign.
He died after a five-year battle with cancer. He is survived by his wife and academic colleague, Edith Rogovin Frankel; two daughters, Leora and Rachel; and five grandchildren.