Emile was born March 29, 1935, in Warsaw, Poland. He died Jan. 16, 2019, in the University of Chicago Hospital. He was 83.

His was not a typical American suburban life. His family fled persecution of Jews in Europe, settling in Montreal. He came to the United States as an undergraduate, earning a degree at Princeton in 1955 and a Ph.D. in European history from Cornell in 1965.

He taught history at the University of Chicago until 1977. In 1969 he was awarded the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. His longtime friend and former president of the University of Chicago, Hanna Holborn Gray, said of him, “Emile’s was one of the most original minds and personalities I have encountered. He was wonderfully learned in all kinds of ways quite apart from his field of history, with a range and breadth of interests that could be astonishing and often off the beaten path.”

After earning a law degree in 1979 from the University of Chicago Law School, he changed careers, working in corporate law at the firm of Kirkland & Ellis and specializing in institutional venture capital and private-equity investing. He became a nationally regarded expert in working with the Small Business Administration.

A visit in 2004 to his cousin’s grave in the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery inspired a project to have every gravestone digitally photographed and indexed and to identify GPS coordinates as part of a master searchable base that would include the names, dates, and details inscribed on each gravestone. There are links to transcriptions and photographs of more than 100,000 gravestones. Emile was an avid supporter of the arts. He was interviewed about his life on the Yiddish Book Center website at yiddishbookcenter.org.

Emile was predeceased by his first wife, Dorothy Ramona Thelander. He is survived by his second wife, Virginia Robinson; his son, Paul; and stepsons William and Benjamin Jacobs.

Undergraduate Class of 1955