Yehuda Bauer, Czech-born Israeli historian of the Holocaust who redefined Jewish ‘resistance’

He argued that Jewish actions like keeping religious traditions, smuggling food and underground political activism amounted to resistance

Yehuda Bauer, who has died aged 98, was a leading historian of the Holocaust and academic adviser to Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
In the early 1960s the Holocaust, in which the Nazis murdered six million Jews, was still a festering wound. Survivors were still shocked and trying to rebuild their lives, reluctant to talk openly about what had happened to them. In 1960, just after finishing his PhD, Bauer became one of the first scholars to embark on rigorous research on this sensitive subject.
One particular aspect which Bauer investigated was Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, which was not an easy subject to grapple with, as in Israel shame surrounded the perception that European Jews had gone “like sheep to the slaughter”.
Bauer collected oral testimonies from survivors who told him a very different story of Jewish resistance, particularly in Polish ghettos. He then challenged the idea that resistance to Nazi Germany consisted only of physical violence or armed struggle, arguing that any Jewish action that ran contrary to Nazi policies – keeping religious traditions, smuggling food, underground political activities – was resistance.
By redefining and widening the term “resistance”, Bauer’s research changed the narrative that Jews did not fight back against those who wished to kill them.
Bauer published more than 40 books on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. These included American Jewry and the Holocaust, probing the American response to the Second World War; Jews for Sale? about negotiations to rescue Jews during the mass killings; Death of the Shtetl, about the decimation of the small Jewish communities in Eastern Europe; and Rethinking the Holocaust, in which Bauer examined key questions such as whether the Nazis’ slaughter of the Jews can be compared to other genocides.
He held that, although there had been other genocides, the Holocaust was unique and distinct. This was, first, because of its global scope – the plan to annihilate every Jew, everywhere; second, because of its ideology in that, unlike other mass killings, which were often pragmatic in nature, the Holocaust was a burden on the German people, who could have used the Jews as slaves, but instead chose to exterminate them.
Bauer’s contribution to Holocaust studies went beyond academia. In 1998, with European heads of state, Bauer was instrumental in setting up the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), a coalition of more than 35 countries that requires its members to devote government funding to education and commemoration.
With the IHRA, Bauer also helped establish the “working definition” of anti-Semitism, which many governments and organisations use to help define hate crimes and discrimination against Jews. The definition is: “Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities”.
This has encountered opposition, primarily from Left-wing voices who argue that it silences criticism of Israel. Bauer, however, felt that the definition was better than any alternatives.
Bauer’s views became the foundation of Holocaust studies. He held that Hitler personally issued direct orders to kill all the Jews. He based this claim on an entry in Heinrich Himmler’s notebook dated December 18 1941, in which Himmler, the second most powerful official in the Third Reich, wrote down the question: “What to do with the Jews of Russia?” Hitler’s response, Himmler recorded, was: “Exterminate them as partisans.” In Bauer’s view, this was as close as historians could ever get to a definitive order from Hitler to eliminate the Jews.
On his career as a Holocaust historian Bauer once said: “I’ve worked very hard. I’ve dealt with the most terrible events that Jewish historians could have encountered. I would not have survived without my family and my interest in music.”
Yehuda Bauer was born on April 6 1926 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, into a Jewish family. Although not religious himself, he once said that “if one has to be born into an ethnic group, it is better to be born Jewish. It is a fascinating group… annoying… awful, but wonderful too.”
On March 15 1939, the day Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, the family fled Prague on a train alongside Max Brod, a friend of Franz Kafka. They travelled through Poland and Romania before boarding a ship to British Mandated Palestine.
The Bauers settled in Haifa, northern Palestine, where young Yehuda attended high school. At 18 he joined the Palmach, the spearhead of the Haganah, the semi-military Jewish organisation operating under the British Mandate.
In 1946, Bauer was awarded a British fellowship to study abroad. Subsequently he travelled to Wales to read history at Cardiff University, “equipped with the wrong clothes which my mother put in my suitcase”. In 1948, when Arab armies invaded the newly born state of Israel, Bauer interrupted his studies and returned home to join Israeli forces in their war of independence. When the war ended, he returned to Cardiff and stayed there to do a PhD on the British Mandate in Palestine.
In 1952 Bauer returned to Israel, where he joined Kibbutz Shoval in southern Israel and studied at the Hebrew University. He was initially a stalwart Marxist, but he grew disillusioned as news of repression increasingly came out of the USSR. “I know Marxism very well,” he once said. “I read all that stuff from A to Z. It took me some time to get out of it… a lot of this is based on errors. When I found that out, I left.”
After receiving his PhD from the Hebrew University, Bauer became a professor at the university’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry, staying for more than three decades. He was fluent in Czech, Slovak, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, English, French and Polish, and he could also speak Welsh, which he studied at Cardiff University while a student. His mastery of languages enabled him to research original source material and connect directly with audiences worldwide.
In 1995 Bauer left Hebrew University to head the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. Three years later he gave a speech to the German Bundestag in which he said: “I come from a people that gave the Ten Commandments to the world. Let us agree that we need three more: Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Thou shalt not be a victim, and, thou shalt never, but never, be a bystander.” That year, he was awarded the Israel Prize, one of the country’s highest honours, for his achievements in scholarship.
Bauer retired in 2000 but continued to serve as an academic adviser to Yad Vashem. In 2001 he was made a member of the Israel Academic of Sciences and Humanities. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and served on the editorial board of the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, a Yad Vashem publication.
When Hamas terrorists crossed from the Gaza Strip and killed hundreds of Israelis on October 7 2023, Israeli political leaders compared the events to the Holocaust. Bauer disagreed with the comparison, noting that Hamas was not as strong or as organised as the Nazis and that the state of Israel exists to provide a military response.
Bauer was an impressive public speaker and a meticulous researcher, and universities worldwide tried to recruit him. But he rejected the offers, saying: “Israel is my country, which I’ll never leave. I hope my children will not leave it either, because the cliché ‘I Have No Other Country’ is true.”
Bauer lived in Jerusalem for the last decades of his life and was a lover of music. He had a deep baritone and was known to sing duets with some of his academic partners or to break into the Welsh folk songs he had learnt as a university student.
Bauer’s first marriage, to Shula Sugarwhite, was dissolved. His second wife, Illana Meroz, died in 2011. He is survived by two daughters from his first marriage and three stepchildren.
Yehuda Bauer, born April 6 1926, died October 18 2024