Gammer, M. (1950–2013)

Moshe Gammer, historian of the Caucasus and Central Asia, and professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University, passed away on April 16, 2013.

Moshe Gammer was a contributing author to our journal. His article ‘Proconsul of the Caucasus’: a Re-examination of Yermolov’ (published in Vol. 2, in 2003) was among the first contributions to our journal Social Evolution & History which had been founded only one year earlier and was making its first steps to the readers. And the contribution to the present issue – ‘Empire and Mountains: the Case of Russia and the Caucasus’ – is among his last publications.

Born in the USSR on September 24, 1950, Moshe immigrated to Israel in 1960. He studied for his B.A. and M.A. at Tel Aviv University. His B.A. thesis (1975), supervised by Dr. Baruch Gurevich and entitled ‘Shamil in Soviet Historiography’, engaged a subject that Moshe would revisit in depth during his Ph.D. studies, from 1983 to 1989, at the London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London). Indeed, his Doctoral Dissertation on ‘Shamil and the Muslim Resistance to the Russian Conquest of the North-Eastern Caucasus’, supervised by Prof. Elie Kedourie, was later reworked and published in a monumental
volume.