Yehuda Bauer, who has died aged 98, was a leading historian of Holocaust studies and academic advisor 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.