LIONEL KOCHAN was one of Britain’s leading experts on the history of Central and Eastern Europe.

In his search for the roots of 20th-century upheavals, he focused with special intensity on the past of Germany and Russia. This yielded books which have been the staple of decades of university courses.

This research also led him to a pioneering role in establishing Jewish history as an academic discipline in this country. And in that field he caused a bitter controversy about the place of the Holocaust in Jewish history and contemporary life.

Kochan received his crucial training as a European historian from Sir Charles Webster, one of Britain’s outstanding modern historians. Webster held the chair of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the middle of the last century.

Kochan enrolled with Webster to write the PhD thesis that would establish his own academic credentials. Its subject was Russia and the Weimar Republic. The publication of this thesis immediately showed him to be a historian of stature. It helped him to get his first post as an assistant lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, which was followed by a senior lectureship and then a readership in the School of European studies of the University of East Anglia.

Kochan’s first book was followed by The Making of Modern Russia. This volume has stayed in print for 40 years, and never yielded its fixed place on the reading lists for A-level and degree courses.

His work on modern Russian history led to close contacts with E. H. Carr, the prominent historian of Soviet Russia, with Isaac Deutscher, The Observer’s “Kremlinologist” and the author of a biography of Stalin, and the historian E. P. Thompson. The link with them was their shared fascination with Russian history. In other respects it was a surprising association in that all were Marxists, and Thompson was also known to be a committed communist. Kochan never even flirted with those camps. He was from the first too rigorous an academic to allow his work to be skewed by a particular ideology.

His work on German history produced Struggle for Germany l914-l945, which chronicled the drama, heroics and ultimate ruin of Germany in the first half of the 20th century. These researches also led to a connection which changed the focus of Kochan’s work for ever. The Wiener Library in London, established to document the progress of Nazism, invited him to write a book on the November 9, l938, “Kristallnacht” pogrom in Germany. That fanned Kochan’s interest in Jewish history into a consuming passion.

It was a field which was, until then, barely tilled in Britain. Cecil Roth had held a readership in Jewish studies in the University of Oxford from l939, and had written on Jewish history. But the passage of time and progress of research had not been kind to his work. When Lord Bearsted funded a readership in Jewish history at Warwick University, Kochan became its first occupant and held it until his retirement l9 years later.

From that base he established Jewish history as an academic discipline in its own right. He tackled it with all the exacting tools of modern scholarship. His published work in the field, such as The Jew and His History (1977), or The Jewish Renaissance and Some of its Discontents (l992), and especially his last work, The Making of Western Jewry, l600-l829, which was published only thisyear, won him great respect not only as a scholar, but also for the intrinsic interest of his subject.

The ultimate recognition of his pioneering work lay in the establishment of similar lectureships at a number of other British universities, new and old.

The more surprising, therefore, were the violent waves Kochan caused in the last decade with his condemnation of what he pejoratively described as “the Holocaust industry”. As a historian, he believed that the Nazi Holocaust, which wiped out most of European Jewry, was being given too prominent a part in contemporary Jewish life. He also opposed the establishment of January 27 as an annual Holocaust Remembrance Day in this country.

With that intervention, Kochan also fanned the embers of a bitter dispute about the place of the Holocaust in German history, which had riven German historians a decade earlier.

When his ideas are viewed against the background of more than 3,000 years of Jewish history, Kochan had a case. But his critics maintained that he ignored the fact that the Holocaust and its aftermath — to this day thousands of camp survivors are still alive — continue to play an inescapable part not only in daily Jewish life but also in the life of all Central Europe.

Kochan’s intervention may have cost him admirers, but his friends and disciples remained unshakeably loyal to him. The breadth and depth of his scholarship in Jewish and wider European fields were hailed as seminal and unassailable.

Lionel Edmond Kochan was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a president of the Jewish Historical Society, the current president (since 2001) of the Society for Jewish Study, and an honorary resident Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.

He married Miriam Buechler, the daughter of a noted scholarly family, in l951, and is survived by her, two sons and a daughter.

Lionel Kochan, historian, was born on August 20, 1922. He died on September 25, 2005, aged 83.