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* {{cite journal|publisher=[[The Johns Hopkins University Press]]|journal=[[German Studies Review]]|date=October 2013|volume=36|number=3|title=The Role of Darwinism in Nazi Racial Thought: Hitler and Darwinism|first=Richard|last=Weikrt|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/43555141}}
* {{cite journal|publisher=[[The Johns Hopkins University Press]]|journal=[[German Studies Review]]|date=October 2013|volume=36|number=3|title=The Role of Darwinism in Nazi Racial Thought: Hitler and Darwinism|first=Richard|last=Weikrt|url= https://www.jstor.org/stable/43555141}}
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== External links ==
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*[https://web.archive.org/web/20100707090923/http://www.wisdomworld.org/additional/ListOfCollatedArticles/TheAryanRace.html The Aryan race]
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20080612044041/http://www.port.ac.uk/departments/academic/biology/research/forensicanthropology/ Forensic Anthropology]


{{Historical definitions of race}}
{{Historical definitions of race}}

Revision as of 05:46, 15 March 2022

This article is about the historical race concept. For the historical term, see Aryan. For the ideology, see Aryanism. For other uses, see Aryan (disambiguation).

The fourth edition of Meyers Konversationslexikon (Leipzig, 1885–1890) shows the Caucasian race (in shades of grayish blue-green) as comprising Aryans, Semites, and Hamites. Aryans are subdivided into European Aryans and Indo-Aryans (for those now called Indo-Iranians).
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The Aryan race is an obsolete historical race concept which emerged in the late 19th-century to describe people of Indo-European heritage as a racial grouping.[1][2] Anthropological, historical and archaeological evidence do not support the validity of this concept.[3][4]

The concept derives from the notion that the original speakers of the Proto-Indo-European languages and their descendants up to the present day constitute a distinctive race or belonging to a subrace of the obsolete racial classification of Caucasian race, alongside the Semitic race and the Hamitic race.[5][6] This taxonomic approach to categorizing human population groups is now considered to be misguided and biologically meaningless due to the close genetic similarity and complex interrelationships between these groups.[7][8][9]

The term was adopted by various racist and antisemitic writers during the nineteenth century, including Arthur de Gobineau, Richard Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain,[10] whose scientific racism influenced later Nazi racial ideology.[11] By the 1930s, the concept had been associated with Nazism and Nordicism,[12] and used to support the white supremacist ideology of Aryanism which portrayed the Aryan race as a "master race",[13] with non-Aryans as racially inferior (Untermensch) and an existential threat to be exterminated.[14] Under Nazi rule, these ideas formed an essential part of the state ideology that led to the Holocaust.[15][16]

Etymology

Main article: Aryan

The term Aryan has generally been used to describe the Proto-Indo-Iranian language root *arya which was the ethnonym the Indo-Iranians adopted to describe Aryans. Its cognate in Sanskrit is the word ārya (Devanāgarī: आर्य), in origin an ethnic self-designation, in Classical Sanskrit meaning "honourable, respectable, noble".[17][18] The Old Persian cognate ariya- (Old Persian cuneiform: 𐎠𐎼𐎡𐎹) is the ancestor of the modern name of Iran and ethnonym for the Iranian people.[19]

The term Indo-Aryan is still commonly used to describe the Indic half of the Indo-Iranian languages, i.e., the family that includes Sanskrit and modern languages such as Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Odia Nepali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Romani, Kashmiri, Sinhala and Marathi.[20]

History

In the 18th century, the most ancient known Indo-European languages were those of the ancient Indo-Iranians. The word Aryan was therefore adopted to refer not only to the Indo-Iranian peoples, but also to native Indo-European speakers as a whole, including the Romans, Greeks, and the Germanic peoples. It was soon recognised that Balts, Celts, and Slavs also belonged to the same group. It was argued that all of these languages originated from a common root – now known as Proto-Indo-European – spoken by an ancient people who were thought of as ancestors of the European, Iranian, and Indo-Aryan peoples.[21]

Romanticism and Darwinism

The influence of Romanticism in Germany saw a revival of the intellectual quest for "the German language and traditions" and a desire to "discard the cold, artificial logic of Enlightenment".[22] After Darwin's 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species and publicization of the theorized model of Proto-Indo-European languages, the Romantics convicted that language was a defining factor in national identity, combined with the new ideas of Darwinism.[23] The German nationalists misemployed the scientific theory of natural selection for the rationalization of the supposed fitness of some races over others, although Darwin himself never applied his theory of fitness to races or languages. The misleading mixture of pseudoscience and Romanticism produced newer ideologies of distorted Social Darwinist interpretation of race to explain "the superior biological-spiritual-linguistic essence of the Northern Europeans", who themselves conducted these self-congratulatory studies.[24][25][clarification needed] Subsequently, the German Romantics' inquiry for a "pure" national heritage lead to the interpretation of the ancient speakers of Proto-Indo-European languages as a distinct progenitors of "racial-linguistic-national stereotype".[26][27]

Invention of the Aryan race

Aryan, an ethnocultural self-designative identity of Indo-Iranians, began to be associated with racially-oriented interpretations as "a tall, light-complexioned, blonde, blue-eyed race".[28] According to David W. Anthony, the word Aryan was specifically chosen because the authors of oldest known religious texts—the Rig Veda and Avesta—called themselves Aryans, who lived in ancient India and Iran.[29] Scholars point out that, the idea of being an Aryan as asserted in the Rig Veda was cultural, religious, and lingustic, not racial; nor does the Vedas contemplate racial purity.[30][31][32]

However, in the context of nineteenth-century physical anthropology and scientific racism, the term Aryan race came to be misapplied to all people descended from the Proto-Indo-Europeans – a subgroup of the Europid or Caucasian race,[27][33] in addition to the Indo-Iranians (who are the only people known to have used Arya as an endonym in ancient times). This usage was considered to include most modern inhabitants of Australasia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, Siberia, South Asia, Southern Africa, and West Asia.[34] Such claims became increasingly common during the early nineteenth century, when it was commonly believed that the Aryans originated in the southwest Eurasian steppes (present-day Russia and Ukraine).

Max Müller is often identified as the first writer to mention an Aryan race in English,[35] and inaugurated the racial interpretation of the Vedic passages.[36] In his Lectures on the Science of Language (1861),[37] Müller referred to Aryans as a "race of people". At the time, the term race had the meaning of "a group of tribes or peoples, an ethnic group".[38] He occasionally used the term Aryan race afterward,[39] but in his book, Biolographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas (1888), he writes, " [...] ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes, and hair, is a great sinner as a linguist [...]".[40] Müller's concept of Aryan was later construed to imply a biologically distinct sub-group of humanity, by writers such as Arthur de Gobineau, who argued that the Aryans represented a superior branch of humanity.[37] Gobineau attempted to identify the races of Europe as Aryan and associated it with the sons of Noah emphasizing superiority, and categorized non-Aryan as an intrusion of Semitic race.[41] Müller objected to the mixing of linguistics and anthropology, and stated, "[t]hese two sciences, the Science of Language and the Science of Man, cannot, at least for the present, be kept too much asunder; [...] I must repeat, what I have said many times before, it would be as wrong to speak of Aryan blood as of dolichocephalic grammar".[42]

While the Aryan race theory remained popular, particularly in Germany, some authors opposed it, in particular Otto Schrader, Rudolph von Jhering and the ethnologist Robert Hartmann (1831–1893), who proposed to ban the notion of Aryan from anthropology.[37] Helena Blavatsky advocated the idea of root-races in which each cyclical rise and fall of seven consecutive root-races in the scale of spiritual development, each of which was divided into seven sub-races before ascending progressively superior root-races; in her cosmogony, the Aryan race was the fifth root-race, proceeded by the Atlanteans, and emphasized the principle of elitism and racial hierarchy.[43]

By the late 19th century the steppe theory of Indo-European origins was challenged by a view that the Indo-Europeans originated in ancient Germany or Scandinavia – or at least that in those countries the original Indo-European ethnicity had been preserved. The word Aryan was consequently used even more restrictively – and even less in keeping with its Indo-Iranian origins – to mean Germanic, Nordic or Northern Europeans.[44] This implied division of Caucasoids into Aryans, Semites and Hamites was also based on linguistics, rather than based on physical anthropology; it paralleled an archaic tripartite division in anthropology between Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean races.[citation needed] The German origin of the Aryans was especially promoted by the archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna, who claimed that the Proto-Indo-European peoples were identical to the Corded Ware culture of Neolithic Germany. This idea was widely circulated in both intellectual and popular culture by the early twentieth century,[45] and is reflected in the concept of Corded-Nordics in Carleton S. Coon's 1939 The Races of Europe.[citation needed]

Aryanism and racism

Theories of racial supremacy

The term was adopted by various racists and antisemetic writers during the nineteenth century for the promotion of pseudoscientific and pseudohistoric ideologies such as scientific racism, Nordicism and Aryanism.

In 1853, Arthur de Gobineau published An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, in which he identified the Aryan race as the white race, and the only civilized one. Further, he hypothesized that the northern Europeans had migrated across the world and founded the major civilizations, before being diluted through racial mixing with indigenous populations described as racially inferior, leading to the progressive decay of the ancient Aryan civilizations.[2] In 1899, Houston Stewart Chamberlain published what is described as "one of the most important proto-Nazi texts", The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, in which he theorized an existential struggle to the death between a superior German-Aryan race and a destructive Jewish-Semitic race.[46]

In 1916, Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race, a polemic against interbreeding between "Aryan" Americans with immigrant "inferior races", which according to him were, Poles, Czechs, Jews, and Italians. The book was a best-seller at the time.[28] In 1920, H. G. Wells's bestseller The Outline of History,[47] used the term in the plural ("the Aryan peoples"). In 1922, in A Short History of the World, Wells depicted a highly diverse group of various "Aryan peoples" learning "methods of civilization" and then, by means of different uncoordinated movements that Wells believed were part of a larger dialectical rhythm of conflict between settled civilizations and nomadic invaders that also encompassed Aegean and Mongol peoples inter alia, "subjugat[ing]" – "in form" but not in "ideas and methods" – "the whole ancient world, Semitic, Aegean and Egyptian alike".[48]

The Aryan race in Nazi racial theories

Main article: Nazi racial theories
See also: Racial policy of Nazi Germany

Racial policies of the Nazi Germany, the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, and the racist doctrines that of Adolf Hitler, considered Jews and Slavs, including Poles, Czechs, Russians, Roma and Serbs as "racially inferior sub-humans" (German: Untermensch, lit. 'sub-human');[49][50][51][52][53][54][55] the term was also applied to Mixed race and Black people.[56][55] However, a definition of "Aryan race" that included all non-Jewish Europeans was deemed unacceptable by the Nazis, therefore the Expert Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy of 1933 bought together predominant Nazi figures such as Alfred Ploetz, Fritz Thyssen, and Ernst Rüdin to plan the course of Nazi racial policy, whom defined Aryan as someone who is "tribally related to the German blood and descendant of a Volk".[57][58] Hitler regularly invoked the Social Darwinist concepts such as, higher evolution (German: Höherentwicklung), struggle for existence (German: Existenzkampf), evolution (German: Entwicklung), including the theories that of Ernst Haeckel, for his Nazi racial ideology, which had played the central role in the chapter "Nation and Race" of his book, Mein Kampf.[59] In 1938, the Reich Ministry of Education released the German biology curriculum that reflected the curriculum developed by the National Socialist Teachers League which had emphasized on the Social Darwinst interpretation of the evolution of human races.[60] Hans Weinert, who had joined the Schutzstaffel and worked for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology publishing theories of Nazi eugenics and racial evolution, claimed the Nordic race as a highly evolved race, and Aboriginal Australians as being the lowest ranking race in the racial hierarchy.[61] Hans F. K. Günther was considered to be the most influential on Nazi anthropologist, although he was not professionally trained. Günther's racist writings on Nordicism was suffused with that of Gobineau and Darwinism, who believed the Nordic race had originated in the northern Europe and spread through conquest; this had expressed approval of the Nazi eugenics policies, and had critical influence on scientific racism,[62] including attraction of applauses from Hitler, who included it as a recommended reading material for the Nazi Party members.[63] Nazi racial theories pseudoscientically considered the "purest stock of Aryans" as the Nordic people, being identified with physical anthropological features such as tall, white-skin, blue-eye, narrow and straight nose, doliocephalic skull, prominent chins and blond haired race, and peoples such as the Scandinavians, Germans, English and French.[64][65]

White supremacy

Main article: White supremacy
See also: White nationalism and White pride

Many white supremacist neo-Nazi groups and prison gangs, notably in the United States, pseudoscientifically view themselves as part of an Aryan race, including the Aryan Brotherhood, Aryan Nations, Aryan Guard, Aryan Republican Army, White Aryan Resistance, Aryan Circle, Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, and others.[66][67]

See also

References

  1. ^ Knight Dunlap (October 1944). "The Great Aryan Myth". The Scientific Monthly. 59 (4). American Association for the Advancement of Science: 296–300. Bibcode:1944SciMo..59..296D. JSTOR 18253.
  2. ^ a b Arvindsson 2006, p. 13-50.
  3. ^ Arvidsson 2006:298 Arvidsson, Stefan (2006), Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, translated by Sonia Wichmann, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
  4. ^ Ramaswamy, Sumathi (June 2001). "Remains of the race: Archaeology, nationalism, and the yearning for civilisation in the Indus valley". The Indian Economic & Social History Review. 38 (2): 105–145. doi:10.1177/001946460103800201. ISSN 0019-4646. S2CID 145756604.
  5. ^ Mish, Frederic C., Editor in Chief Webster's Tenth New Collegiate Dictionary Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.A.:1994--Merriam-Webster See original definition (definition #1) of "Aryan" in English--Page 66
  6. ^ Pattanaik, Devdutt (27 March 2016). "Leveraging the Aryans". www.mid-day.com. Retrieved 27 February 2022.
  7. ^ Templeton, A. (2016). "Evolution and Notions of Human Race". In Losos, J.; Lenski, R. (eds.). How Evolution Shapes Our Lives: Essays on Biology and Society. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press. pp. 346–361. doi:10.2307/j.ctv7h0s6j.26. ... the answer to the question whether races exist in humans is clear and unambiguous: no.
  8. ^ Wagner, Jennifer K.; Yu, Joon-Ho; Ifekwunigwe, Jayne O.; Harrell, Tanya M.; Bamshad, Michael J.; Royal, Charmaine D. (February 2017). "Anthropologists' views on race, ancestry, and genetics". American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 162 (2): 318–327. doi:10.1002/ajpa.23120. PMC 5299519. PMID 27874171.
  9. ^ American Association of Physical Anthropologists (27 March 2019). "AAPA Statement on Race and Racism". American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Retrieved 19 June 2020.
  10. ^ Paul B. Rich (1998). "Racial ideas and the impact of imperialism in Europe". The European Legacy. 3 (1): 30-33. doi:10.1080/10848779808579862.
  11. ^ Anthony 2007, p. 13-40.
  12. ^ Gregor, A James (1961). "Nordicism Revisted". Phylon. 22 (4): 352–360. doi:10.2307/273538. JSTOR 273538.
  13. ^ Bryant 2001, p. 33-50.
  14. ^ Longerich, Peter (5 April 2010). Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780191613470.
  15. ^ Gordon, Sarah Ann (1984). Hitler, Germans, and the "Jewish Question". Mazal Holocaust Collection. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. p. 96. ISBN 0-691-05412-6. OCLC 9946459.
  16. ^ "Aryan". Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 25 February 2022.
  17. ^ Monier-Williams (1899).
  18. ^ "Monier Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary (2008 revision)". UNIVERSITÄT ZU KÖLN. Retrieved 25 July 2010.
  19. ^ Bailey, H.W. "Arya". Encyclopædia Iranica. Retrieved 21 April 2018.
  20. ^ Fortson, Benjamin W. Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction. 2nd ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, paras. 10.28 and 10.58.
  21. ^ Anthony 2007, p. 7.
  22. ^ Anthony 2007, p. 7-8.
  23. ^ Anthony 2007, p. 8.
  24. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1992, pp. 12–14.
  25. ^ Anthony 2007, p. 8-9.
  26. ^ Anthony 2007, p. 8-10.
  27. ^ a b Mish, Frederic C., Editor in Chief Webster's Tenth New Collegiate Dictionary Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.A.:1994--Merriam-Webster Page 66
  28. ^ a b Anthony 2007, p. 9.
  29. ^ Anthony 2007, p. 9-10.
  30. ^ Bryant 2001, p. 60-63.
  31. ^ Anthony 2007, p. 11.
  32. ^ Witzel, Michael (2001). "Autochthonous Aryans? The Evidence from Old Indian and Iranian Texts". Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies. 7 (3): 24. doi:10.11588/ejvs.2001.3.830.
  33. ^ Widney, Joseph P Race Life of the Aryan Peoples New York: Funk & Wagnalls. 1907 In Two Volumes: Volume One--The Old World Volume Two--The New World ISBN B000859S6O
  34. ^ Rand McNally's World Atlas International Edition Chicago:1944 Rand McNally Map: "Races of Mankind" pp. 278–279.
  35. ^ Bryant 2001, p. 33.
  36. ^ Bryant 2001, p. 60.
  37. ^ a b c Orsucci, Andrea (10 March 2002). "Ariani, Indo-Germanic, stirpi mediterranee: aspetti del dibattito sulle razze europee (1870-1914)" (in Italian). Cromohs Journal, University of Florence. Archived from the original on 10 March 2002.
  38. ^ OED under race, n.6 I.1.c has "A group of several tribes or peoples, regarded as forming a distinct ethnic set. Esp. used in 19th-cent. anthropological classification, sometimes in conjunction with linguistic groupings."
  39. ^ Thapar 1996, p. 6.
  40. ^ Jon R. Stone, ed. (2002). The Essential Max Müller On Language, Mythology, and Religion. Springer Publishing. p. 18. doi:10.1007/978-1-137-08450-7. ISBN 978-1-137-08450-7.
  41. ^ Thapar 1996, p. 5.
  42. ^ Speech before the University of Stassbourg, 1872, Chaudhuri, Nirad, Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Professor the Rt. Hon. Friedrich Max Muller, Chatto and Windus, 1974, p.313
  43. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 1992, pp. 20–21.
  44. ^ Vacher de Lapouge (trans Clossen, C), Georges (1899). "Old and New Aspects of the Aryan Question". The American Journal of Sociology. 5 (3): 329–346. doi:10.1086/210895.
  45. ^ Arvidsson, Stefan (2006). Aryan Idols. USA: University of Chicago Press, 143. ISBN 0-226-02860-7.
  46. ^ Arvindsson 2006, p. 155.
  47. ^ Wells, H.G. The Outline of History, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1921), Ch. 20 ("The Aryan-Speaking Peoples in Prehistoric Times"), pp. 236-51.
  48. ^ "H.G. Wells in 1922 on the early history of "the Aryan peoples" (Proto-Indo Europeans)". bartleby.com. Retrieved 16 August 2015.
  49. ^ Gordon, Sarah Ann (1984). Hitler, Germans, and the "Jewish Question". Mazal Holocaust Collection. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. p. 96. ISBN 0-691-05412-6. OCLC 9946459.
  50. ^ Longerich, Peter (2010). Holocaust : the Nazi persecution and murder of the Jews. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 83, 241. ISBN 978-0-19-280436-5. OCLC 610166248.
  51. ^ Rathkolb, Oliver. Revisiting the National Socialist Legacy: Coming to Terms With Forced Labor, Expropriation, Compensation, and Restitution. Transaction Publishers. p. 84. ISBN 9781412833233.
  52. ^ Curta, Florin (2001). The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, c. 500–700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 9, 26–30. ISBN 9781139428880.
  53. ^ Aly, Gotz; Chroust, Peter; Pross, Christian. Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene. Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 13. ISBN 9780801848247.
  54. ^ Rodriguez, Junius P. The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery. ABC-Clio. p. 464.
  55. ^ a b Berenbaum, Michel; Peck, Abraham J. (1998). The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Indiana University Press. pp. 59 & 37. ISBN 9780253215291.
  56. ^ Reichsführer-SS (1942). Der Untermensch "The subhuman". Berlin: SS Office. Archived from the original on 10 January 2022. Retrieved 14 March 2022.
  57. ^ Ehrenreich, Eric (2007). The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution. Indiana University Press. p. 10. ISBN 978-0-253-11687-1.
  58. ^ Proctor, Robert N. (1988). Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Harvard University Press. p. 95. ISBN 9780674745780.
  59. ^ Weikrt 2013, p. 541.
  60. ^ Weikrt 2013, p. 542.
  61. ^ Weikrt 2013, p. 543-544.
  62. ^ Weikrt 2013, p. 544.
  63. ^ Ryback, Timothy W. (2010). Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life. Vintage Books. p. 132. ISBN 9780307455260.
  64. ^ Stocking, George W. (1 July 1996). Volksgeist as Method and Ethic : Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition. University of Wisconsin Press. p. 92. ISBN 9780299145538.
  65. ^ Barrowclough, David (20 January 2017). Digging for Hitler: The Nazi Archaeologists Search for an Aryan Past. Fonthill Media; University of Cambridge. p. 110.
  66. ^ Goodrick-Clarke 2002, pp. 232–233.
  67. ^ Blazak, Randy (2009). "The prison hate machine". Criminology & Public Policy. 8 (3). Portland State University : 633–640. doi:10.1111/j.1745-9133.2009.00579.x. ISSN 1745-9133.

Sources

External links

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