Keynesian Historiography and the Anti-Semitism Question

Historians’ treatment of John Maynard Keynes’s putative anti-Semitism raises complex historiographic issues. Melvin W. Reder’s 2000 HOPE article “The Anti-Semitism of Some Eminent Economists” considered whether the term ambivalent anti-Semitism could be applied variously to John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter, and Friedrich Hayek by arguing that those three important economists evinced attitudes or made remarks that today would be characterized as anti-Semitic. I am not concerned here to appraise Reder’s argument about whether the label “anti-Semitic,” 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 possible anti-Semitism has played in Keynesian scholarship and how the community of Keynes scholars has treated that allegation.