For his doctoral dissertation in history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Yehuda Bauer focused on the British Mandate that before Israel’s independence controlled historic Palestine.

In a conversation with Abba Kovner, the poet who had led the resistance to Nazi rule in the Vilna ghetto, the young historian said he knew there was a larger story to tell but admitted that he was fearful of taking on a subject as monumental as the Holocaust.

Kovner convinced him that there was no more important event in Jewish history and that his fear of the subject was “a very good starting point.”

Over the next 60 years, Bauer, who died Friday at age 98, would go on to become perhaps the preeminent scholar of the Holocaust, chronicling in meticulous detail and pointed analysis the destruction of European Jewry, the unprecedented nature of the Shoah and the need to apply its lessons to prevent similar human catastrophes.

Among his groundbreaking books were “Out of the Ashes” (1989), about the American Jewish role in rehabilitating survivors of the genocide; “Jews for Sale?” (1995), about the morally troubling negotiations between Nazi and Jewish leaders in the early years of the war, and “Rethinking the Holocaust” (2001), an overview of the field of Holocaust studies that included sometimes searing critiques of his contemporaries.

“In many ways, the entire field of Holocaust education, remembrance, and research is part of Yehuda’s legacy,” Robert J. Williams, the executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, wrote in an appreciation this week. ’’For historians of my generation, many of the books we read in graduate school were Yehuda’s contributions. If we were not reading Yehuda, there was a good chance we were reading the works of historians trained and mentored by Yehuda.”

Bauer was also the first advisor to what became the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, an intergovernmental agency founded in 1998 to strengthen Holocaust education and remembrance. Last year, after Bauer announced his retirement as the IHRA’s honorary chair at age 97, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent a letter describing the historian as “an example we all want to emulate: someone who speaks the truth about the darkest chapter of our history, and someone who teaches us to look forward as we learn from looking back.”

Image - UWI/USC Shoah Foundation