Keynesian Historiography and the Anti-Semitism Question
E. Roy Weintraub1
“By ‘anti-Semitism’, I understand, first,
beliefs about Jews or Jewish projects that
are both false and hostile, and secondly,
the injurious things said to or about Jews
or their projects, or done to them, in
consequence of those beliefs.”
(Julius 2010, 65)
Historians’ treatment of John Maynard Keynes’s putative anti-Semitism raises complex
historiographic issues. These differ from such questions as whether Carl Jung’s or Paul de
Man’s standing as charismatic intellectual leaders of communities engaged in new ways of
thinking and acting was associated in some way with their anti-Semitic writings2. In contrast, as
Professor of Economics and Fellow, Center for the History of Political Economy, Duke
University, Durham NC 27708-0097. In the several years of this paper’s development, I have
received a large number of very useful comments and criticisms from various individuals. With
memory’s failures and tricks, I recall only Duke’s Neil DeMarchi, Gianni Toniolo, Pedro Duarte,
Bruce Caldwell, Kevin Hoover, Craufurd Goodwin, Malachi Hacohen, Julie Mell, Barbara
Herrnstein Smith, and Frank Lentriccia, and virtual colleagues Roger Backhouse, Mary Morgan,
Yann Giraud, and Tiago Mata. I am pleased to acknowledge the generosity of Lord Skidelsky in
permitting me to quote from his correspondence with Don Patinkin. Two anonymous referees for
HOPE were of great help at the end-stage of this paper’s progress, and I took their excellent
suggestions, without assuming that they agreed with all my conclusions. Finally, I am pleased to
acknowledge Maxine Borjon’s excellent assistance in preparing the manuscript.
1
For the Jung community, these matters were engaged in the conference, and conference
volume, Lingering Shadows: Jungians, Freudians, and Anti-Semitism (Maidenbaum and Martin
1991); for the literary theory community, these issues were the subject of Responses: On Paul
De Man’s Wartime Journalism (Hamacher et al. 1989).
2
Page 1 of 38
the charismatic intellectual leader of the “Keynesians”, Keynes has never3 been characterized as
having created a system of thought that was anti-Semitic. Nevertheless the publication of
Melvin W. Reder’s (2000) paper, “The Anti-Semitism of some Eminent Economists” opened up
a related question, namely whether the term “ambivalent anti-Semitism” could be applied
variously to John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, and Friedrich Hayek. That is, Reder
argued that those three important economists expressed themselves in ways that today would be
characterized as anti-Semitic. Although in their personal dealings each of these individuals had
apparent positive regard for individual Jewish colleagues, and even friends (e.g. Keynes and
Kahn), their utterances are characterized by what Reder called anti-Semitic stereotyping at least,
and political anti-Semitic argumentation at worst. Reder used the neologism “ambivalent antiSemitism” to characterize Keynes’s views.
I am not concerned here to appraise Reder’s argument about whether the label “antiSemitic”, whether “ambivalent” or not, is usefully attached to Keynes. I rather am concerned
with the issue of how Keynesian historiography has dealt with the anti-Semitism question. That
is, I am concerned with the role that Keynes’s attitudes and remarks about both individual Jews,
and “the Jews”, has played out in Keynesian scholarship, and how the community of Keynes
scholars has treated the allegation that Keynes was anti-Semitic.
Recognizing the Keynes Anti-Semitism Problem
To introduce the concerns of this paper, consider an exchange of letters between Robert
Skidelsky, Keynes’s biographer then at work on Volume Two (Skidelsky 1992) of the eventual
3
But see the discussion of David Felix, below.
Page 2 of 38
three volume work, and the economist Don Patinkin, who also had written extensively on
Keynes’s General Theory. In a letter to Skidelsky dated 22 July 19874, Patinkin raised the
following point:
There is an observation that came to my mind when I reread his
(Keynes’) ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’ . . .
which reminded me of a similar—though less explicit—sentence in
Volume 1 of the Treatise [on Money] (page 11) about ‘the Semitic
race is etc.’ These references probably reflect the genteel antiSemitism of the British upper middleclass.
But his hitherto
unpublished essay on Albert Einstein is a disgusting piece of
coarse anti-Semitism of the street. (I once told Donald Moggridge
that he should not have published it; but Moggridge said [that]
Keynes could have destroyed it, but left it in his papers—so he
meant it to be published. Maybe Moggridge was right.) . . . I think
that this is a subject that you must also treat in your biography, and
I hope that you will overcome any inhibitions that you might have
on that score. In Volume 1 you made it very clear that in order to
understand Keynes, one must also discuss his homosexualism [sic].
I think the same is true for his anti-Semitism.
Patinkin appears to have worried about this matter, and after a few years he wrote again
to Skidelsky (May 4, 1992)5, pointing to Keynes’s sentence “‘Perhaps it is not an accident that
the race which did most to bring the promise of immortality into the heart and essence of our
4
5
Patinkin Papers, Box 66, file folder “Skidelsky”.
Patinkin Papers, Box 61, file folder “Skidelsky”
Page 3 of 38
religions has also done most for the principle of compound interest and particularly loves this
most purposive of human institutions (JMK, IX, 330))’. That, to me, is an anti-Semitic remark.”
As noted, Patinkin was upset by Keynes’s remarks on Einstein penned for the New
Statesmen and Nation, 21 October 1933, which piece referred to Einstein as a “Jew boy” and
which went on to say “Yet Albert and the blond beast make up the world between them. If either
cast the other out, life is diminished in its force. When the barbarians destroyed the ancient race
as witches . . .”6
Skidelsky replied7 to Patinkin on 5 June 1994:
I would have thought that Keynes is simply saying that the world
needs both the impersonal intellect and the community spirit,
though the way he identifies these things with the Jews and the
Nazis respectively, was part of the atmosphere of the early 1930s.
Nowadays we would obviously see Nazism as a perversion of
community feeling, not as its somewhat unbridled expression, but
this was very early days.
On June 20, 1994 Patinkin replied8
if your interpretation of Keynes’s New Statesmen article is correct,
then it is really scandalous for by October 1933, the dictatorial and
violently anti-Semitic nature of the Nazi regime was evident for all
to see. After all, why had Einstein left Germany for England?
Patinkin also must have queried Einstein’s biographer, physicist Abraham Pais, on
Keynes’s Einstein remarks, for Pais replied (ibid.) to him on May 24, 1994 that those
remarks “do not strike me as anti-Semitic. The use of `Jew Boy’ was very common in
England that time, as you no doubt know.”
7 ibid.
8
ibid.
6
Page 4 of 38
Was that an expression of ‘community spirit’? So I think this
article is even worse than Keynes’s morally insensitive preface to
the German edition of the General Theory.
Skidelsky’s reply9 on 11 July, 1994 was that
I think you’ve got it out of perspective. To try to understand
something is not to excuse it . . . [W]hether his understanding of
the historical role of the Jews was defective is another matter. He
thought about them in a stereotypical way, but it was very abstract.
. . but, as I say, such theological fancies did not influence his
personal conduct or reaction to the actual events in Germany.
Nothing would be more sterile, in my view, than to start a “was
Keynes anti-Semitic?” debate. There would probably be plenty of
takers (there always are), but anything less important for the
appraisal of his work can scarcely be imagined.
Patinkin insisted on having the last word. On 18 August 1994 he wrote10 to Skidelsky
I have little doubt that Keynes shared the anti-Semitic attitude of
his upper middleclass English milieu as well as that turn-of-thecentury (and later!) Cambridge. . . but what should we do with the
kind of expressions `Jew boy . . . [who] has had his bottom many
times kicked, and expects it’ and similar ones in his unpublished
piece on Einstein (JMK12, pages 382-84)? That’s anti-Semitism
of the gutter. On the other hand, there were his close relations with
9
ibid.
ibid.
10
Page 5 of 38
Richard Kahn and the warmth of his two concluding paragraphs in
his essay on Melchior. . . . I certainly have no thought of starting a
‘was Keynes anti-Semitic’ debate.
Skidelsky (2003) readdressed these matters when he revised his three volume work to
produce a one volume abridged version of the biography. In many ways a stronger narrative
emerged as the later materials could be woven into the earlier chapters. In that new volume,
Skidelsky addressed the anti-Semitism issue via examination of Keynes’s essay “Economic
Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” which essay had contained Keynes’s remark about Jews and
the principle of compound interest. Skidelsky wrote:
[There] are a few other references to Jews in Keynes’s writings
which would now be construed as anti-semitic. In A Short View of
Russia he had doubted whether communism ‘makes Jews less
avaricious’.
After a visit to Berlin in June 1926, he depicted
Germany as under the ‘ugly thumbs’ of its ‘impure Jews’, who had
‘sublimated immortality into compound interest’. This was for a
talk to The Memoir Club, published only posthumously; it was his
most prejudiced utterance on the subject, but it falls a long way
short of the murderously flip remakes which even someone like
Dennis Robertson was capable of making.11 (373-374)
Skidelsky went on to say that
11
In (Skidelsky 1992) we find a note from Robertson to Keynes (p. 664, note 60) from August
30, 1929: “I ran into the Prof. [Pigou] and Tom Gaunt on the way to Zermatt, and also made
acquaintance with the latter’s attractive negroid wife and her overdressed mama. They are a
curious party. How hard it seems not to murder Jews.”
Page 6 of 38
[Such] stereotyping of Jews was common in Keynes’s circle, and
the stereotypes were usually unfavourable. Keynes’s letters are
mercifully free from personal abuse – not so Lydia’s, or those of
some Bloomsberries.
Individual Jews were exempted by the
devices of exceptionalism or non-recognition of their Jewishness.
Thus was decency reconciled to prejudice. But the occasion for
decency did not often arise. Although Virginia Woolf married a
Jew12, and Sraffa and Wittgenstein were half-Jewish13, there were
very few Jews in Keynes’s world in the 1920s…meanwhile,
stereotyping could flourish, and there was no need to mind
manners…Keynes’s
own
stereotyping
took
place
on
the
philosophical, not vulgar, plane. (374)
Skidelsky characterized Keynes’s views as grounded in the idea that Jews embodied the
spirit of capitalism, which was associated with an abstract love of money. He argued that
Keynes distinguished between pure or religious or intellectual Jews and money loving Jews. In
this discussion Skidelsky noted a letter of complaint to Keynes by University of California
Professor Max Raden about the Economic Possibilities essay, where Raden had told Keynes that
not only was immortality unimportant theologically for Jews, but that Jews were not especially
concerned with the accumulation of money. In his reply to Raden “Keynes apologized for having
been thinking along ‘purely conventional lines’ (ibid.). But he was reluctant to give up his
12
I note, in passing, that Leonard Woolf (1935), at the time of the intense anti-Semitic campaign
being waged in Hitler’s Germany, took up the issue of English anti-Semitism quite directly in
Quack, Quack. That volume’s “Appendix: A Note on Anti-Semitism” (195-201) provides a quite
contrasting Bloomsbury view to that of Keynes.
13
According to Hayek, his second cousin, Wittgenstein was in fact three-quarters Jewish.
Page 7 of 38
fancy: ‘I still think that the race has shown itself, not merely for accidental reasons, more than
normally interested in the accumulation of usury.’ This correspondence took place in the autumn
of 1933.” (374) Skidelsky concluded this discussion by remarking “Keynes anti-Semitism, if
such it was, was little more than a theological fancy: expression, perhaps, of some unresolved
conflict about his own Non-Conformist roots. There is no evidence that it influenced his
personal conduct.” (374-375)
This is somewhat misleading. One hundred and fifty pages earlier in that 2003 volume
Skidelsky addressed Keynes’s dealings with Klotz, the French finance minister at the Versailles
conference. Skidelsky quotes Keynes writing that Klotz was “‘A short, plump, heavymoustached Jew, well-groomed, well kept, but with an unsteady roving eye, and his shoulders
were a little bent with instinctive depreciation.’14 Klotz represented, to Keynes, the other face of
France’s grasping sterility – a view not uninfluenced by the anti-semitism which was normal to
his class and generation.” (222) Skidelsky then proceeded to quote from the Melchior essay15:
Never have I seen the equal of the onslaught with which the
poor man [Klotz] was overwhelmed [by Lloyd George who]
had always hated and despised him; and now saw in a
twinkling that he could kill him. Women and children were
starving, he cried, and here was M. Klotz prating of his
‘goold’. He leaned forward and with a gesture of his hands
indicated the image of a hideous Jew clutching a money bag.
Skidelsky’s reference for this quote is in error – it does not appear in the volume of Keynes’s
Collected Works where Skidelsky places it, but rather it appears in Keynes’s biographical essay
on Melchior, namely page 422 of Collected Works: Volume X (not XVI).
15
This essay was eventually published by Rupert Hart-Davis in 1949 as Two Memoirs. In the
Collected Works, editor Moggridge states that “it was certainly read before January 1932, and
probably in the summer of 1931” (CWX, 387) to the Memoir Club.
14
Page 8 of 38
His eyes flashed and the words came out with a contempt so
violent
that
he
seemed
almost
to
be
spitting
at
him…Everyone looked at Klotz… the poor man was bent
over his seat, visibly cowering. (223-224)
What this passage in Skidelsky’s one volume biography leaves out, with ellipses, is more than
some unnecessary words. The penultimate sentence is actually the third from the last, and what is
missing is Keynes’s sentence “The anti-Semitism, not far below the surface in such an
assemblage as that one, was up in the heart of everyone.” (422) And the last ellipsis of the quoted
passage replaced the words “with a momentary contempt and hatred” (ibid). These edits should
disturb attentive readers since the missing sentence and phrase lends credence to the idea, denied
later in the one volume biography, that such anti-Semitism did influence Keynes’s personal
conduct at least in this instance. The point of course is not whether Keynes was an anti-Semite,
but rather how material related to such an allegation was treated by, in this case, Keynes’s
primary biographer.
With respect to his earlier biographer, Roy Harrod’s (1951) authorized The Life of John
Maynard Keynes set out the limits of the discussion in the early postwar period. The question of
Keynes’s attitude to Jews is untouched, nor was there any mention of Keynes’s bisexuality16.
In the 1960s, Sir Roy Harrod was my parent’s houseguest for extended periods in each of
several years as he came over to the US to teach summer school at the University of
Pennsylvania. One evening at dinner, in my presence, the conversation turned to the then new
Michael Holroyd biography of Lytton Strachey, which book revealed in print for the first time
Keynes’s homosexual life before Lydia. My father, a Post Keynesian and a homophobe, said
that he for one did not believe it, and moreover Harrod’s own biography made no mention of this
issue. Harrod replied that his own book “suggested” it in several passages of obscure prose (e.g.
“They [Strachey and Keynes] had certain affinities … (Harrod 1951, 90), and “It was Keynes’s
great intimacy with Duncan Grant … (ibid., 131)) but that no one looking at the photograph of
Maynard and Duncan Grant (ibid. cit., facing page 130) gazing into each other’s eyes could have
missed the message. My father of course was appalled. My mother, embarrassed, left the room.
16
Page 9 of 38
Skidelsky’s Volume 1 (1986), and (especially) Moggridge’s full biography of 1992 dealt with
the issue of homosexuality in more detail. The latter’s discussion of Keynes’s references to Jews
is however somewhat sketchy. And other than the brief discussion of the issue by Mark Blaug
(1994) in a joint review of Moggridge’s and Skidelsky’s books17, I have found nothing
whatsoever about anti-Semitism in any article or book review written about Keynes by the
hundreds of historians of economics engaged with Keynes and his writings.
Lydia
One of the difficulties of dealing with the question of Keynes and anti-Semitism is that
almost all of the discussions of which I’m aware are based on various writings that have been
produced through Moggridge’s production of Keynes’s thirty volume Collected Works for the
Royal Economic Society. A number of the letters in the collected works have also been used, as
well as some unpublished writings, as for example the bit on Einstein. One source that has not
been employed however is a collection of letters, specifically letters between Maynard and Lydia
Lopakova, first as they were courting, and later following their marriage, which appeared after
the publication of the various volumes of Keynes’s Collected Works. These letters, produced for
a wider audience than historians of economics, were edited and published by Polly Hill and
Richard Keynes, Maynard’s and Lydia’s niece and nephew respectively. They are a separate
window into the kinds of questions that might emerge in a discussion of Keynes and antiSemitism. That is, these letters were never meant for public view, and are a unique entree into
Blaug there wrote (op. cit., 1213) that “These two biographies tell us much about Keynes that
we never knew before: his mild anti-semitism, so typical of educated people in the interwar years
(Skidelsky 1992, pp. 238- 39; Moggridge 1992, pp. 609, 728); his insensitivity about Hitler and
indeed indifference to the Nazi experience (Skidelsky 1992, pp. 86- 88, 581).”
17
Page 10 of 38
the unguarded thoughts and expressions of these two individuals. There is however one matter
that needs to be faced immediately.
These letters are a sample from a very large number of letters between Maynard and
Lydia, currently deposited in the library of King’s College, Cambridge. The letters that appear in
this volume have been edited as the editors say for clarity and to eliminate stylistic grotesqueries.
It is not just spelling that has been changed though, and the editors are forthright in their
introduction about the process they used to perform the editing task. What they do not discuss
however is the presence of material in these letters that may have been expurgated. That is, if
there was truly inflammatory material in the letters, the editors have not given us information
about whether they suppressed such material. Thus any discussion of the letters’ employment of
various anti-Semitic tropes and expressions comes up quickly against the possibility that if what
appears here in the letters is representative, there is certainly more material there to examine. If
what appears here is not representative, but is in fact a cleansed sampling, it would behoove
scholars to examine the entire cache of letters more closely. Moreover, these letters from 1918
through 1925 were apparently to have formed but one volume of several. But that project never
continued as Polly Hill’s ill health, and subsequent death in 2005, foreclosed the possibility. And
of course the larger collection of Lydia Lopokova’s correspondence and papers has not been
examined in print by historians of economics18.
That said, the letters provide evidence for Skidelsky’s assertion, noted above, about
Lydia’s letters “[not] being mercifully free from personal abuse [of Jews].” Two examples, from
18
Those letters do, however provide a major documentary source for a recent biography of
Lopokova by the dance critic and historian Judith Mackrell titled Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia
Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs. John Maynard Keynes (2008). That volume takes on the
issue of Lopokova’s anti-Semitism directly (pp. 350-351).
Page 11 of 38
the eleven that could be brought forward, will suffice (page references are to (Hill and Keynes
1989):
L to M, 25 October, 1923. “Do you like to hear quotations? ‘Jew:
A man who kills two birds with one stone and then wants the stone
back.’” (115);
L to M, 9 February 1925.
“Being a versatile
business woman, I went to the Alhambra, watched NicolaevaLegat programme, their last dance is a Jewish one, Legat was
magnificently dressed in everyday clothes with a long coat and a
nose of Jewish dimension, the hooky one, almost aquiline and
isn’t, I did my best with hands and voice, but it is uninspiring to be
in an empty theatre.” (286)
Such remarks suggest that these stereotypes about Jews were, for Maynard and Lydia,
common and acceptable in private conversation. There was no hesitancy about characterizing
someone as a Jew, and thereby creating a particular set of reader responses based on shared
presuppositions about Jews and Jewish characteristics. There is no evidence that the letter
writers considered such reader expectations to be objectionable on any grounds. It is difficult to
know how Maynard’s and Lydia’s personal behaviors might have been affected, but certainly the
Jew as other, other than “us”, is readily apparent here and cannot be entirely masked in more
public performances. This, of course, is not the kind of anti-Semitism which calls for Jews to be
excluded from England or English institutions, sent off to Africa, placed in concentration camps,
or murdered, yet it does suggest that Maynard and Lydia shared a mindset that “Jews were
different from us”, even if Lydia was hardly a typical Englishwoman. Without delving into
questions requiring explanation, it simply suffices for our argument to note these references and
Page 12 of 38
also note how they have never explicitly appeared in any of the various discussions about
Keynes, nor in any reference to Keynes and anti-Semitism that have appeared previously.
Enter Reder, et al.
As noted above, despite Patinkin’s (and Skidelsky’s) wish not to start a debate about
whether Keynes was an anti-Semite, Mel Reder (2000) did just that. Reder went through, in
detail, a number of “Items” that served to make his points about Keynes’s anti-Semitism. He
used the “Jew boy” references, as well as those to the “very gritty Jewish type”. Following
Moggridge (1992), he noted Keynes’s remark to Lydia in 1933 that “[I] made my usual
conversation about the Jews in the Combination Room last night” prior to signing a petition “in
their favor”. In his 1926 sketch of Einstein, he wrote that “If I lived there [in Berlin], I felt I
might turn anti-Semite. For the poor Prussian is too slow and heavy on his legs for the other kind
of Jews, the ones who are not imps, but serving devils, with small horns, pitch forks, and oily
tails. It is not agreeable to see a civilisation so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who
have all the money and the power and the brains.” And finally Reder shows that such remarks
did not end with World War II. In 1945 Keynes writes about the British left’s complaints about
Bretton Woods that (Reder 2000, 838) “the doctrine of non-discrimination does not commit us to
abjure Schactian methods, which their Jewish economic advisers (who, like so many Jews, are
either Nazi or Communist at heart and have no notion of how the British Commonwealth was
founded or is sustained) were hankering after.19”
A HOPE referee of this paper asked whether “Keynes would have been so nasty about
Schactian methods if he had known that Schacht was then a prisoner at Dachau?”
19
Page 13 of 38
In a follow-up to his 2000 paper, in a reply to Hamowy’s criticism of his argument about
Hayek, Reder (2002) referred to a paper he had recently seen in a well-known Indian weekly.
There World Bank economist Anand Chandavarkar (2000), who earlier wrote a well-received
book on Keynes and India (1985), addressed Keynes’s possible anti-Semitism directly. This
article by Chandavarkar is a detailed and historically focused piece on Keynes’s possible antiSemitism. Besides a thorough examination of the Collected Works, he reprinted a letter sent to
him by Isaiah Berlin dated 18 April 1994, which letter concluded
[S]o you are basically right. Keynes did suffer from the prejudices
and tastes of his milieu. He greatly admired, e.g., Lord Samuel,
who served in various liberal administrations but nevertheless
[Keynes] could certainly bring himself to crack some joke about
[Samuel as a Jew] in what might be thought doubtful taste – but it
was no more than that. (1623)
Chandavarkar reprised all of the comments that Keynes made about Jews, but he brought forth
one additional piece of material that had not previously been noted. Specifically, he discussed
the fact that Keynes was “the only non-Jewish member of a high powered advisory committee
under the chairmanship of Herbert Samuel (at Versailles) which prepared the preliminary draft
report for presentation of the Zionist case for a Jewish national home in Palestine, for the peace
conference in Paris on February 23, 1919. The other members of the committee were [Jews]
Lionel Abrahams of the India office and James de Rothschild.” (1622) Chandavarkar noted that
this committee prepared the ground for the Balfour Declaration, and its work was favorably
discussed in Chaim Weizmann’s autobiography. Chandavarkar concluded his piece saying “in
retrospect, Keynes’s anti-Semitism will be seen more as a peripheral fringe of an inherently
Page 14 of 38
compassionate personality, an unamiable foible rather than a fatal flaw of character, a blind-spot
which never blurred the totality of his social and political vision.” (1623). Chandavarkar’s use of
the word “will” is performative, not simply predictive.
Kaun and Paulovicova
I have located only two other published papers on this particular subject, each published
in journals unfamiliar to historians of economics. In the July 2000 issue of Midstream, economist
David E. Kaun published “The Anti-Semitism of John Maynard Keynes.” Kaun’s argument
developed from his Marxian perspective, claiming that “Keynes’s failure to take Marx’
economics seriously” is possibly associated with Keynes anti-Semitism. Leaving to one side
Kaun’s own objectives, his own discussion of Keynes’s “temperament and class” was based on
the claim that “[Keynes’] belief [was] that one’s material condition was determined by character
rather than the reverse” and that anti-Semitism was inextricably associated with Keynes’s class.
Reviewing the material that Skidelsky had earlier developed, Kaun stated that “[Skidelsky’s]
examples suggest more the complexity of the man than the absence of anti-Semitism.” Kaun
went on to argue that:
[A] component of Keynes’s anti-Semitism did, like that of Marx,
focus on the alleged trait of money grubbing. But Keynes is guilty
of a much wider set of biases. These extend beyond the casual use
of anti-Semitic slang, to a visceral hostility as evidenced in his
assumption of deep-seated Jewish ethnic and character flaws. The
Page 15 of 38
thoughts of an anti-Semite were manifest at an early age. (Kaun
2000, 6)
With that opening salvo, Kaun went somewhat beyond Skidelsky noting that, as early as a
seventeen-year old at Eton, Keynes had penned “in the West it is the individual that is all
important, in the East the mass…[the Jews, as Eastern people, possess] deep-rooted instincts that
are antagonistic and therefore repulsive to Europeans [and as such] they can no more be
assimilated to European civilization than cats can be made to love dogs.” (Skidelsky 1983, 92)
Kaun commented that, some twenty-two years after Eton, “…Keynes lamented the condition of
Europe, still torn between liberalism and radicalism. Bolshevik radicalism flowed, Keynes
wrote, from a ‘besotted idealism and an intellectual error out of the peculiar temperaments of
Slavs and Jews.’”
Kaun reprised Skidelsky’s observation that Keynes grew up in a household with German
nannies, and as a result the household was generally pro-German. However Kaun’s stringing
together various quotes scattered throughout Keynes’s Collected Works, and Skidelsky’s
biography, directed attention to Keynes’s repeated comments about Jews and money grubbing.
Kaun thus linked Keynes in some ways to Marx even as Kaun attempted to use Keynes’s antiSemitic attitudes to explain Keynes’s distaste for Marx. Unless we talk about the psychological
mechanism of “splitting”, and provide a way to employ it sensibly in this argument, Kaun’s
discussion is incoherent since Marx was contemptuous of exactly those characteristics of Jews
that Keynes wrote about.
Apparently as part of her larger study of anti-Semitism, a young historian at the
University of Alberta, Nina Paulovicova (2008), wrote an article “The Immoral Moral Scientist:
John Maynard Keynes” which appeared in the graduate student journal Past Imperfect. She there
Page 16 of 38
attempted to show that earlier discussions of this subject had been historically thin, failing to
locate Keynes properly in the several worlds in which he operated, and in which anti-Semitism
took on various meanings and expressions. She stressed that scholars needed to pay a “great deal
of attention to the question of ‘Who was generally defined as an anti-Semite in Keynes’s own
societal milieu?’ rather than ‘Which qualities of current forms of anti-Semitism can be traced in
Keynes’s worldview?’” (40) Her conclusion stands in real contrast to that of Reder say:
“Keynes simply appropriated anti-Semitic clichés as one facet of a
modus operandi in political circles. However, seeing himself as
‘immoral’, i.e. critical of generally accepted norms of his time, he
naturally stood out as the defender of those that the society put
down – hence his public philosemitism and his sympathy for the
women’s movement. Offering a new lesson [with respect to antiSemitism] based on the Keynes case seems to be pointless” (55).
There is though one suggestive story recounted by David Landes20 (1994) in his
memorial notice for Abba Lerner in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences. There
Landes wrote:
In a country that was not unready to appoint to a professorship in
Oxbridge on the basis of a single article, Lerner should
have been professor many times over. But his achievements
were counterbalanced in British eyes by religious origin,
dress, and manners: Abba Lerner, Jew from Eastern Europe
and then the brick and grit of the East End, bare feet in
Although this story was first published by Landes, “the story was told” to him by David
Colander, and it appears a bit later in (Colander and Landreth 1996).
20
Page 17 of 38
sandals (because, he said, his feet sweat), unpressed trousers
hanging, shirt collar open, was a hippie before his time.
In some things he could be difficult; in others he was too
permissive. He had a disconcerting way of saying what he
thought. The would-be genteel folk of academe could not
see him twirling a sherry glass and making small talk in
wood-paneled common rooms. The story is told, based on
unpublished letters21, that Professor Lionel Robbins of LSE
consulted Keynes in this regard when a post opened at the
London School. Lerner was an unavoidable candidate.
Keynes Brit-wittily replied by referring to Lerner's origin as
from the Continent. Maybe, he wrote, if they found a job
for Lerner as a cobbler during the day, they might wear
him out and have him teach in the evening. Lerner did
not get the job. He probably continued to pay for his
particularities when he moved to the other side of the Atlantic.
At any rate, he did not receive a post at a major
university until very late in his career. (212-213)
This story does no credit to Keynes. Unlike Richard Kahn, or Leonard Woolf, Abba Lerner was
not the kind of Oxbridge Jew likely to share Keynes’s interests. Even after Lerner came to
Cambridge on a postgraduate scholarship in 1934-5, and he became a “Keynesian”, Keynes was
unsupportive of his career.
21
Colander states that the letter, from Keynes to Robbins, was dated May 2, 1935.
Page 18 of 38
Nevertheless even with their limitations, Kaun’s and Paulovicova’s papers are singular in
their scholarly discussions of Keynes and anti-Semitism. In the Keynes historiography there is
nothing comparable to Anthony Julius’s (1995) T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form
which opened the T. S. Eliot historiographic/interpretive canon to important details of Eliot’s
anti-Semitism.
Other Histories
With respect to discussions of these matters in books, there are several examinations of
Keynes’s anti-Semitism. In Keynes and Population, John Toye (2000) examines all of Keynes’s
writings and opinions on matters of population, and is thus well-prepared to explore the
eugenicist and racialist Keynes. In his Chapter 4, “The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit”, Toye
explicitly takes up, in section 6, “With Prejudice to Some: Keynes’s Anti-Semitism” (149-156).
After reviewing much of the material we have examined above, and placing it a wider frame of
reference about categorization of “others”, Toye concludes (156) that Keynes’s 1943 arguments
with Harry Dexter White and E. M. Bernstein and his accusation of American “talmudism” was
“further evidence of a habit of prejudice that Keynes was never able to break with completely. It
was a habit that stretched back over forty years, to a time well before the writing of
‘Population’”.
In the 1990s, following his retirement as professor of development economics and
economic history at Washington University St. Louis, David Felix began writing books about
Keynes and his ideas. Felix’s interpretations of Keynes’s ideas are cranky and failed to engage
the Keynesian historical community to any real extent. He regarded Keynes’s theory of
Page 19 of 38
unemployment as resting on logical fallacies associated with false assumptions about the
determination of the rate of interest. In the second of his books (1999), Keynes: A Critical Life
Felix addressed the issue of anti-Semitism. In a remarkable passage (pp. 247-249), linking to
some earlier remarks in his book, Felix argued:
“The Shylockian passion for liquidity suggests another reason for
Keynes’s clinging to his view of the Jews as a usurious race…
Keynes is not quite so professional [as Marx in his anti-Semitism].
His theorizing undergoing metastasis, he has his Jew clinging to
his “goold” and burying himself at the bottom of The General
Theory of the Rate of Interest, and thus at the bottom of The
General Theory. If the Jew is not absolutely necessary in the
theoretical machinery, Keynes, perhaps signaling the weakness of
his case, nevertheless finds him useful as an auxiliary in
representing an excessive demand for liquidity and its depressive
effects…The General Theory of the Rate of Interest is as mad as it
seems…[D]id Keynes know that he was perpetrating nonsense, or
rather, considering his marvelously operative brain, how could he
not know?”
For Felix, Keynes was a beaten and battered [sic] child (at the hand of John Neville Keynes) who
acted out his sexual life in response to those paternal beatings. The extent of his anti-Semitism is
discussed (227-232) but its roots are unexamined beyond the statement that it was a “very
ordinary phenomenon among the English (and French, Germans, other Europeans, and
Americans) of his time” (228).
Page 20 of 38
More recently, there have been two other discussions of Keynes and anti-Semitism, by
well-regarded historians in well-received books. In the first, Jerry Z. Muller’s (2010) Capitalism
and the Jews, the discussion about Keynes is located in a long history of Western European and
Christian thought that associated Jews and usury, via the mechanism of compound interest. Thus
Keynes’s “speculative writings are redolent of the prejudicial association of Judaism with the
features of capitalism from which he sought to distance himself, and eventually, his society”
(61)22.
In the second, Anthony Julius’s (2010) comprehensive Trials of the Diaspora: A History
of Anti-Semitism in England considers Keynes to be an exemplar of particularly English views.
Distinguishing among various “kinds” of anti-Semitism, he places Keynes in an intellectual
tradition that created no new anti-Semitic alliances or political machinery, nor any large debates.
“Anti-Semitism in England [in the modern period] tended to attach itself to more immediate, and
less culturally fundamental issues – scandals, controversies, panic, fears, and the like – and then,
mostly those with a foreign-policy character” (397). Going on in this vein, Julius’s Keynes
“displayed a certain intrigued interest in Jews… [P]rone to amateur speculations about the
distinctive nature of the Jewish mind…he was ready…to mock the Jewish race’s love for the
principle of compound interest, or to doubt that communism makes Jews less avaricious…He
had Jews pinned down, the object of his lazy, amused surveys, uninformed, dispassionate, and
above all deriving from his own supreme self-confidence” (397).23
22
This same argument linking Jews and capitalism was made, in passing, by William Coleman
(2002, 213-219) as he tracked some writings by and about economists primarily in the nineteenth
century.
23
Keynes is, in Julius’s schema, an exemplar of the “normative anti-Semitism of English writers
and intellectuals.” (414)
Page 21 of 38
The Anti-Semitism Issue and the Post Keynesian Discussion List
To look through another window on this discussion, I turned to the World Wide Web,
and the PKT (Post Keynesian Thought) mail list. That web based discussion forum had been
located at the University of Colorado, but is no longer is active24. That list, devoted to the
exploration of Keynes’s ideas and Post Keynesian theory as especially guided by the Journal of
Post Keynesian Economics, were rather muted with respect to the initial mention, on that list, of
Reder’s article. John M. Legge, on February 20, 2001 noted:
I think that that the social context [of anti-Semitism] was changed
irrevocably by the Holocaust. Before then, you didn’t have to be
off the planet to make a disparaging remark about Jews,
individually or as a group….politically incorrect remarks about
“others” were a normal part of conversation in Keynes’s day and
unless one wants to condemn every generation before ours, we
should accept that verbal disparagement and gas chambers are not
part of some dreadful continuum but are different in kind.
That response drew a response from Noemi Levy Orlick. “It’s very doubtful what you are
saying, since persecutions against Jews have existed long before the Holocaust and in part were
originated from those types of comments. Jewish people never have seen those comments as
something normal. And anti-Semitism or any type of segregation should not be seen as “normal”
at any other time.”
24
The list moderator, Ric Holt (Professor of Economics, Southern Oregon University) shut down
the list in July 2004. The PKT-List Archive though is presently available at
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pkt/index.htm
Page 22 of 38
In a related follow-up, Clifford Poirot wrote “That Keynes may have held anti-Semitic
views is a travesty, though a sad testament to the extent to which anti-Semitism and other forms
of bigotry have often penetrated “polite” society. In a way, it does not surprise me any more
than Marx’ virulent racism and chauvinism. The other issue is whether there is a connection
between expressed anti-Semitism and one’s theory. It seems to me there is none in either
Keynes’s or Hayek’s case.” Continuing this line, Legge replied “Keynes was a man of his time
and used the language of his time. It is utterly illogical to single him out. When faced with a
practical challenge of Nazi anti-Semitism, Keynes was vigorous in both easing the life of Jewish
refugees and their access to Britain and ensuring that Britain offered Hitler no alternative to
unconditional surrender.” Barkley Rosser, casting a somewhat wider net in the discussion,
returned to Reder’s article with the observation that “It is not a simple matter, but in the case of
Keynes, I fear that Reder is correct. Again, the point of his article was to use these examples to
show a general set of widespread social attitudes and furthermore to discuss why those attitudes
changed after World War II.25” And Colin Danby pointed out that “Keynes was as we know
elitist; he also took an interest in eugenics. A staple of the elitism he grew up with is a notion of
“blood” or “stock,” like breeding racehorses. There are remarks that suggest that he regarded
workers as genetically different. So it is possible that race was part of Keynes’s social ontology,
in which case it might not be totally irrelevant to his economics.”
Matthew Forstater, one of the PKT List’s creators, responded (February 20, 2001) to
several of the postings, noting
The logical problem of excusing past discrimination based on the
idea that everyone felt that way then, is that everyone did not feel
Although as the earlier discussion about Keynes and “talmudism” demonstrates, Keynes’ negative comments
about Jews did not abate at all after World War II.
25
Page 23 of 38
that way then. …It may be true that it took more courage to speak
out then, but it is not true that “everyone felt that way” so it is ok.
Once we start excusing these kinds of things, where does it end? It
is also true however, that just because someone was wrong about
one thing, they were not necessarily wrong about everything. So if
Keynes was an anti-Semite, that in itself is not a refutation of The
General Theory.
After that comment, the discussion ended with no real engagement by any of the Post
Keynesians.
Conclusion
Historiographically, within the last decade we have seen studies of the interconnection of
the economics profession with the eugenics movement. The early twentieth century literature on
immigration provides an entrée into economists’ eugenicist arguments, but these of course had
some basis in nineteenth century ideas as David Levy and Sandra Peart (2005) have pointed out.
And as Thomas Leonard (2005) has argued, the dark side of progressivism, and the
institutionalist economics out of which the American economics profession developed, proffered
a curious mélange of eugenicist propositions. The racism of many in the economics community
in the late 1800s did not disappear either, as careful perusal of the 20th century AEA archives,
and the papers of many eminent economists (e.g. Duke’s Joseph J. Spengler), can attest. The
Review of Black Political Economy has made available to the economics profession large
numbers of studies examining the racism of the economics profession both as a systematic
Page 24 of 38
community problem and as individual failures. Moreover it is acceptable within the emergent
literature in feminist economics (e.g. in the journal Feminist Economics) to reflect with scorn on
the sexist biases of economists’ arguments. Indeed, those critical writings extend to the work of
particular economists who are argued to have conscious gender biases. We have various studies
on the narrowing of opportunity for women in the economics profession following the closing of
colleges of home economics. But anti-Semitism seems to be a forbidden topic. Discussions of
anti-Semitism have been particularistic, not systematic. The larger intellectual debate that
developed around Jerome Karabel’s (2005) The Chosen, which detailed the anti-Semitic college
admissions policies of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton over the course of the first two-thirds of the
twentieth century, has passed unnoticed by historians of economics. The puzzle is that historians
of economists understood, though remained silent about, the restrictions on admission of Jewish
students as undergraduates to these important intellectual bastions, but they made no public, or
seemingly even private, connection between the economics done, and the economists at, those
very same institutions. It is as if anti-Semitism had stopped at the exit door of the Admissions
Office. While mathematicians have examined their own institutional histories with openness and
courage, and have studied in detail the effect on the American mathematics community of
different attitudes among universities toward Jews in response to the European immigration of
the 1930s and 1940s, there has been no similar examination by historians of economics. Perhaps
that is a result of the paucity of institutional histories of economics departments in the twentieth
century. Nevertheless, questions of anti-Semitism, and the role of the great American research
universities of the East Coast in reproducing the American elites, has escaped the notice of
historians of economics26.
26
The exception that “proves” the assertion is the rather extensive attention to the fact that antiPage 25 of 38
There are real contrasts in other words between the limited discussions about the antiSemitism of Keynes and the extensive examinations by the Jung community of Carl Jung’s antiSemitism, and by the literary theory community of de Man’s anti-Semitic 1930s wartime
writings in Belgium. I have, in another context, referred to the Sherlock Holmes “Silver Blaze”
story, with its remark about the failure of the dog to bark in the night. Why has this antiSemitism dog failed to bark in economics?
It is difficult to create a compelling argument about why a logically and empirically
possible event has not occurred. Nevertheless I believe that there are at least three27 (neither
mutually exclusive nor exhaustive) possible answers to the question of why historians of
economics concerned with Keynes, and members of the Keynesian community, have avoided
addressing Keynes’s putative anti-Semitism. First, perhaps it is a matter of Keynes himself,
namely that the allegation is simply inappropriate to associate with an economist of his
importance. Second, perhaps there is something about economics that makes such questions
inappropriate. And third, the allegation that any particular individual is anti-Semitic is simply too
socially or politically dangerous for the rhetor who wishes to interrogate it. Let me take each of
these up in turn.
John Maynard Keynes plays a role in the history of economics second only perhaps to
that of Adam Smith. Appeals to Keynes are as frequent as appeals to the invisible hand, and for
both the appeals are often incoherent and contradictory. Nevertheless arrayed against Newton
Semitism played a role in Harvard’s encouraging Paul Samuelson to leave Harvard to take up the
offer from MIT. Harvard’s then Chairman Burbank will live on in the history of economics
solely for that exercise in bigotry.
27
There is an obvious fourth argument as well. It might be the case that no Keynes scholar has
been interested in looking at the topic because the topic appears prima facie uninteresting; after
all the community is small, and time is short, and George Stigler once told the history of
economics community that personalia should not concern scholars.
Page 26 of 38
and Einstein, or Darwin, or Euclid and Gauss, or Galileo and Kepler, Keynes has some name
recognition and authority. Denigrating, or appearing to denigrate, Keynes would be an act of lèse
majesté, of debunking a heroic figure and sneering at the good and the true and the beautiful. It
would be a sacrilege. The Keynes community achieved such a position quite deliberately, as
Keynes’s disciples used the mythic Keynes to defeat those who had not learned from the master
at Cambridge. They kept guard over the Keynes legacy by first controlling what could be known
about him by protecting his papers and by contributing frequent historical recollections of his
charisma and intellectual prowess. These moves were uniformly hagiographic and open
hostility, and restricted access, was sometimes the Cambridge response to anti-Keynesians. The
Robinson-Kahn treatment of D. H. Robertson comes immediately to mind, as does the creation
of the U.K. Post Keynesian movement to preserve and promulgate the one true and original
vision of Keynes’s work.
A second line of argument about why the anti-Semitism allegation had so little purchase
might be associated with the difference between economics and other fields of scholarly work. I
have alluded to the major controversies that have arisen about the allegations of anti-Semitism in
the historiography of both analytical psychology and post structuralist literary theory, associated
with the writings and behavior of Carl Jung and Paul de Man. In each case at issue was the
charismatic character of the intellectual leader, and whether the individual’s leadership was
undermined by evidence of putative anti-Semitic public writing. In Jung’s case, the record seems
clear that the Jung community addressed the matter with some courage, even though there was
no emergent consensus on the issue of whether Jung’s anti-Semitism went beyond writing to
actual cooperation with Nazi authorities in eliminating all Jews from positions in the
Page 27 of 38
Psychoanalytic Society in the 1930s28. With de Man, the issue for scholars went to the concern
with the basis of deconstructive readings of texts as a real or metaphorical response to de Man’s
hiding (and thus potentially being unmasked by, or discovered in) his own history29 as a Nazi
collaborator and author of anti-Semitic articles as a journalist in occupied Belgium. In both these
cases the main arguments which the communities engaged concerned the individual’s work and
its relation to the author’s putative anti-Semitism.
In contrast, consider the case of Lev Semonovich Pontryagin (1908-1988), the eminent
Soviet mathematician. Pontryagin was noted for his contributions to modern geometry, notably
homology theory and cobordism. Later in his career he made very important contributions to
optimal control theory, and became well-known to economists in the 1960s because that theory
had immediate applicability to the theory of economic growth30. Yet in his later years, say from
the 1960s, he gave expression, in public, to a virulent anti-Semitism which, given his position as
an eminent Soviet mathematician, served to construct and then reinforce many prohibitions
“Jung became the nominal editor of the Society’s journal, the Zentralblatt für
Psychotherapie, which had been published in Germany. It was in this publication, in late
1933, that a manifesto appeared by Matthais Goering—with consent of Jung who had
thought that it was to be published only as a special German edition—which called for a
rallying by professional colleagues to the racial colors of Nazi Germany. To compound
matters, appearing in that same issue of the journal was Jung’s essay “On the State of
Psychotherapy Today,” in which he starkly reiterated the differences between German and
Jewish psychologies that he had posited some years earlier. In addition, his article
compared Jews unfavorably to `nomads and women’, and criticized Freud and Adler for
stressing pathology while failing to appreciate the creative aspects of psychological life. . .
This essay … became the principal theoretical document that Jung’s accusers offered as a
demonstration of his anti-Semitism.” (Martin 1991, 7)
28
“In 1987 … a Belgian researcher Ortwin de Graef discovered a number of articles by Paul de
Man written between 1940 and 1942 for the collaborationist newspapers Le Soir and Het
Vlaamsche Land.” (Rajan 1991, 231)
29
30
There were 194 references to Pontryagin in JSTOR-Economics between 1960-1980.
Page 28 of 38
against Jewish mathematicians31. His role in what later mathematicians called “intellectual
genocide” against Jewish mathematicians and scientists is unarguable (Shifman 2005).
Nevertheless, with all such material fully in view, Pontryagin’s mathematics itself remains
unquestioned, indeed unquestionable. Whether or not Werner Heisenberg was a Nazi
collaborator, his contributions to quantum mechanics are of lasting importance.
It appears that in humanities scholarship the connection between one’s persona and one’s
work remains important, and is thus worth an historian’s attention32. In mathematics and the
natural sciences, such appears not to be the case. It is as if the created scientific work is
appropriated by the relevant scientific community as a product alienated from its creator. The use
of the passive voice and the mantle of impersonality that characterize a modern scientific
publication render the author’s character nugatory.
Economics, with its knowledge products being neither as personally grounded as they are
in the humanities, nor as impersonally presented as they are in the natural sciences, is
epistemically more confusing. Is Economics an art or science? Of course the recent literatures in
science studies show us that such a question is ill-posed. “What are the community’s practices?”
and “What are the rules?” are questions that are, at least, answerable in principle. And here we
have some evidence to suggest that for economics the community’s practices are more like those
found among mathematicians than among literary theorists. The historiography of Keynes’s
anti-Semitism more nearly imitates those of physicists (e.g. whether or not Heisenberg had been
His autobiography, published in Russian in the late 1970s, includes such sentences as “…
Zionist circles carry out persistent attempts to present Einstein as the sole creator of the theory of
relativity. This is unfair.” (Vershik 2005, 145n.)
32
Of course the New Criticism denied that historical/biographical information about the author
was appropriately part of the interpretative process, but with respect to biography, and historical
work on literary figures, the matter is quite different. And in any case, the views of the New
Criticism are today mostly repudiated by literary scholars.
31
Page 29 of 38
a Nazi collaborator, his physics was a remarkable act of genius) than those of literary theorists (if
literature has a moral dimension, Ezra Pound’s poetry, and T.S. Eliot’s, must be diminished in
our estimation by his anti-Semitism).
There is another issue, of greater complexity and weight, related to this last point. I have
passed quickly over the argument by Felix that Keynes’s General Theory was an anti-Semitic
work in the sense of its identifying capitalism’s faults with a Jewish Capitalism. The deeper
issue is where did Keynes’ own ideas about “usury”, “Jews and compound interest”, “hoarding”
and so on come from? The comments he was accustomed to make about Jews and money,
witness his letter to Max Raden noted earlier in which he wrote ‘I still think that the race has
shown itself, not merely for accidental reasons, more than normally interested in the
accumulation of usury’, suggests that his beliefs were, in his mind, well-founded in evidence. It
is very difficult to answer a question like “How could an intelligent historical personage believe
something so stupid?” without falling into historiographic presentism. Nevertheless, it is
important in this case to understand the rootedness of such an idea in both Keynes’ education and
the Cambridge and economics communities, indeed the community of serious European
intellectuals, in which he worked.
In recent historical work, Julie Mell (2007, 12) reconsidered "Die Stellung der Juden im
Mittelalter, betrachtet vom Standpunkt der allgemeinen Handelspolitik" (The Status of the Jews
in the Middle Ages Considered from the Standpoint of Commercial Policy) … Wilhelm
Roscher's 1875 essay [which] argued that the Jews had functioned in the middle ages as a
commercial carrier and ‘tutor’ to the ‘younger nations.’" Roscher’s liberalism was inclusive, and
thus for his time philosemitic. Mell (ibid., 13) however extends and deepens arguments
originally presented in the 1940s by Toni Oelsner (1958-9), pointing out that:
Page 30 of 38
[Oelsner] attacked the "special 'economic' function of the Jews" as
mere folk-psychology, which when "deprived of [its] philo-Semitic
and liberal guise could be turned into models for and instruments
of the destructive Nazi 'Jewish science'" … Oelsner challenged
assumptions which had played a decisive role in modern Jewish
history. Jewish economic characteristics formed one of the key
components of the political debates over the inclusion of the
Jewish population in the modern European nation state from the
seventeenth century on. The nineteenth-century German notions
of a special affinity between Jews and commerce were notions
shared by Jews and Christians, philosemites and antisemites, and
used for apology and polemic. Nazi antisemitic imagery of bloodsucking Jewish capitalism was but the negative underside of
widely held assumptions about Jewish economic difference -- and
the awful conclusion to these debates.”
As Oelsner and Mell argue the matter, the historical “evidence” of specifically Jewish
connections to the rise of capitalism is simply not present. Such claims are in fact falsified by the
evidence. Though well-meaning, Roscher’s desire to find a role for Jews in the new German
economic system, by claiming that they had historically had such an important role, was founded
on his misreading and misconstruction of the historical record. But Roscher’s place in
economics, as leader of the German Historical School, meant that his views (as interpreted by
Page 31 of 38
Sombert and Weber) on the history of the Jews and capitalism, usury and compound interest
particularly, became canonical33. These were the tools with which Keynes made his arguments,
these were the components of his integrated view of the Jews as “more than normally interested
in the accumulation of usury.” It is in this sense, and this sense only, that Keynes might be said
to have had a systematic misunderstanding of the connection between the Jews and
capitalism/commerce. Only then to the extent that such unfounded beliefs might have shaped his
economic arguments could it now be suggested that Keynes’ vision of modern capitalism was
touched by anti-Semitic ideas.
Third and finally, the issue of why anti-Semitism so little concerns historians of
economics today may be associated with the volatile nature of the rhetoric associated with
studies of anti-Semitism in the post War era. As emergent knowledge of the extent of the
Holocaust made anti-Semitism (and eugenics) unpalatable for common consumption – antiJewish sentiment was the moral equivalent of mass murder – it likewise made impossible
discussion of whether some prewar figure was or was not anti-Semitic. The Holocaust admitted
no matters of degree. Moreover, the use made of “the Jewish question” in the early postwar
period allied the “left” with the new state of Israel, and drew lines very clearly between fascists
and those opposed to fascism. The community of anti-fascists was populated by Jews whose coreligionists were fascism’s victims, and those others who had “always” seen its evil, Communists
The story of how these ideas “became” canonical, and thus became part of the mental
equipment of economists and social scientists more generally, can be easily tracked as Mell has
done. “I aim to show that the narrative was fashioned out of nineteenth-century discourses on
Jews and commerce in response to the issues of Jewish emancipation and German capitalism and
shaped in accord with German scholarly methods and theories. This public discourse moved into
mainstream scholarship principally through the works of Wilhelm Roscher, Werner Sombart,
and Max Weber. Through these scholars, the narrative was stamped with the organic folk model
of the German Historical School, based upon the Historical School’s theory of economic stages,
and shaped in relationship to the scholarly study of capitalism.” (Mell 2007, 15)
33
Page 32 of 38
for instance. But as the cold war took hold, and as many of the “premature anti-fascists” and
“fellow travelers” seemed to have Jewish names, anti-Semitism reemerged from the background
into which it had only temporarily disappeared. Following the end of the 1967 Yom Kippur
War, with Israeli conquest and occupation of Palestinian lands, attacking Zionist (read Jewish)
“imperialism’ became a fashionable activity and anti-Semitism, often in the guise of antiZionism, returned to its earlier place as a commonly accepted set of beliefs and opinions held by
many well-educated non-Jews.
It is troublesome that in the history of economics it is hardly possible to discuss such
matters even in a larger economics community in which twenty seven of the first sixty two (to
2009) Noble Laureates were Jewish34. The silence is palpable; to speak of these matters offends
against the community’s comfort. Without tenure, one might well consider writing on some other
topic. As “social security” was once said to be the “third rail” of election politics in the US, so
too discussions of anti-Semitism appear to have such electric power in historical scholarship
today.
When Reder’s article appeared, the Hayek community’s response gives some indication
of the topic’s virulence. On the then functioning maillist Hayek-L, its moderator Greg Ransom
wrote:
Reder has some far more serious matters to clear up than any offhand or off-target remarks of anyone on the Hayek-L list. So does
the HOPE editorial staff & its board. Reder's remarks were not offhand, and the decision on the part of HOPE & its editors to publish
34
This point is discussed in greater detail in the very recent paper by E. Glen Weyl (2011).
Weyl’s exceptional introduction to Simon Kuznets’ writings on economics and the Jews should
open a number of serious lines of inquiry, perhaps by economic historians as well as historians of
economics, into some of the questions raised in this section.
Page 33 of 38
Reder's article as it stood against the heated objection of one of his
anonymous referees calls into question the judgment of those
involved, and the scholarly standards and procedures used at that
publication…Politicians love to get their enemies by pulling the
"When did you last beat your wife" stunt. Academic journals and
credible scholars shouldn't be in business of playing anything even
close to this game. When the matter is one of whether or not to
label someone an anti-semite, someone had better meet a very high
level of scholarship, proof & care -- at least as high as the level of
moral opprobrium which would go with the labeling. Reder &
HOPE didn't come close to meeting this standard in my judgment.”
(Ransom 2001)
A demand that the HOPE Editor be fired came from a North Carolina legislator, prominent
among letters sent to the President of Duke University and Duke University Press, while reports
of disfavor attributed to members of the Hayek family in England35 were conveyed to HOPE by
third parties. Indeed, it was this episode which led me to examine these issues in the first place.
In the history of economics, matters are no easier to address when Keynes is the subject. In
economics, a field which lays claim to have created the notion of the free marketplace of ideas,
the historiographic issues herein addressed are worth considering.
35
Hayek’s best biographer, Bruce J. Caldwell, has a good discussion of this in his book, Hayek’s
Challenge (Caldwell 2004, 145-146 n. 16)
Page 34 of 38
References
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Caldwell, B. (2004). Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek. Chicago,
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Chandavarkar, A. (2000). "Perspectives: Was Keynes Anti-Semitic?" Economic and Political
Weekly May 6: 1619-1624.
Colander, D. C. and H. Landreth, Eds. (1996). The coming of Keynesianism to America:
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