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 Oct. 18 at his home in Jerusalem. He was 98.

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.

“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.”