Yehuda Bauer, whose family narrowly escaped the Nazis in their flight to Mandatory Palestine from Czechoslovakia in 1939, and who later drew on that experience in becoming a leading scholar of the Holocaust and antisemitism, died on Friday at his home in Jerusalem. He was 98.
His daughter Anat Tsach confirmed his death.
Dr. Bauer did not initially intend to study the Holocaust; he was more interested in the recent history of Israel, his adopted land. But a conversation in 1964 with his friend Abba Kovner, who had fought the Nazis as a partisan in Belarus and later became a poet, persuaded him to change direction.
For the first decades after the end of World War II, many scholars treated the Holocaust as off limits; the need to bring West Germany into the anti-Soviet fold put a damper on research into the Nazi era, and many people, especially in Israel, considered those who died to be hapless victims.
Then, in 1961, the political scientist Raul Hilberg published “The Destruction of the European Jews,” the first book to document how the Germans planned and carried out the Holocaust. But Dr. Bauer, a friend of his, found Dr. Hilberg’s focus on the German side of the story inadequate. It fit too easily with the prevailing victim narrative, he thought, while he knew many survivors, like Mr. Kovner, who had staunchly resisted.
Over the following decades, Dr. Bauer led a new generation of scholars in researching the Jewish side of the Holocaust.
“What Bauer did was to puncture that myth, to make it clear that Jews did not allow themselves to be killed,” Menachem Rosensaft, who teaches about genocide at Cornell Law School, said in an interview.
Fluent in German, English, Yiddish and other languages, Dr. Bauer pored over archives and conducted numerous interviews with survivors, material he used in writing some 40 books and countless journal articles.
“He was the Israeli scholar who best understood the multiple perspectives with which to understand the Holocaust,” said Michael Berenbaum, who studied under Dr. Bauer at Hebrew University.
Resistance, Dr. Bauer found, was not just physical or armed; it could mean anything that allowed Jews to retain their humanity during the Holocaust, he argued.
His first major book, “Flight and Rescue: Brichah” (1970), analyzed one example of such resistance: the movement of some 300,000 Jews to Palestine from Europe after World War II, which he showed was coordinated by a network of official and unofficial Jewish organizations.
Witty and urbane, with a penchant for the Welsh folk songs he learned as a student in Wales, at Cardiff University, he lectured around the world, reaching audiences far beyond his fellow academics with a nuanced reading of the Holocaust as a historical event.
“He had a foot in both camps, and he did it without compromising his scholarship,” said Deborah Lipstadt, a historian and the U.S. special envoy for monitoring and combating antisemitism.
Dr. Bauer bristled at the suggestion that the Holocaust was an act of God, but just as adamantly rejected the suggestion that it was simply another example of genocide in a century overflowing with them. Because the extermination of the Jews was central to the Nazi ideology, he argued, it was historically different.
“The Holocaust is unprecedented,” he often said. “But it is not unique. If it were unique, we could forget about it, because it could happen only once. But it could happen again. We are here because we want to avoid that.”
Yehuda Martin Bauer was born on April 6, 1926, in Prague. His parents, Viktor and Uly (Fried) Bauer, were Zionists, and as it became clear that the Germans were poised to take over their country, they made plans to flee. They left on the last train to Poland on March 15, 1939, the same day the Germans occupied the western half of Czechoslovakia.
Traveling through Romania to reach Palestine, they settled in Haifa. His father, an engineer, struggled to find work, and his mother supported the family as a seamstress.
Yehuda won a scholarship to study history at Cardiff University but interrupted his studies to fight in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1948 and a master’s in 1950.
After returning to Israel, he joined Kibbutz Shoval, a socialist collective in the Negev desert, in 1952; he also became active in Mapam, a socialist junior partner to the dominant Labour Party.
He received his doctorate from Hebrew University in 1960, and the following year became a professor at the university’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry, where he remained for 34 years. In 1995, Dr. Bauer left to direct the International Institute for Holocaust Research, at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial.
He received the Israel Prize, the country’s highest cultural honor, in 1998.
Although he stepped down from his director role at Yad Vashem in 2000, Dr. Bauer remained an academic adviser there until his death. Until very recently, he maintained a regular lecture schedule, in person and remotely — often in different languages, for different global audiences, on different days.
His first marriage, to Shula Bauer, ended in divorce. He married Ilana Meroz in 1993; she died in 2011. Along with his daughter, he is survived by another daughter, Danit Cohen; his stepsons, Gal, Eyel and Ran; six grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
While Dr. Bauer was an eager critic of other historians, he reserved his strongest criticism for politicians who, he felt, used the Holocaust to justify their actions, singling out Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“They use the Holocaust as a tool for politics,” he told The Times of Israel in August 2023. “This is especially true of the prime minister. He’s got no clue, simply has no idea what happened. He deals with Iran, he knows something about Iran; he doesn’t know anything about the Holocaust.”
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