Aryan Race

The Aryan race is an obsolete historical race concept that emerged in the late-19th century to describe people of Proto-Indo-European heritage as a racial grouping. The terminology derives from the historical usage of Aryan, used by modern Indo-Iranians as an epithet of "noble". Anthropological, historical, and archaeological evidence does not support the validity of this concept.

The concept derives from the notion that the original speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language were distinct progenitors of a superior specimen of humankind, and that their descendants up to the present day constitute either a distinctive race or a sub-race of the Caucasian race, alongside the Semitic race and the Hamitic race. 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. The isomorphism of race, culture, and language has been rejected as an erroneous conception by modern scholars.

The term was adopted by various racist and antisemitic writers during the 19th century, including Arthur de Gobineau, Richard Wagner, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose scientific racism influenced later Nazi racial ideology. By the 1930s, the concept had been associated with both Nazism and Nordicism, and used to support the white supremacist ideology of Aryanism that portrayed the Aryan race as a "master race", with non-Aryans regarded as racially inferior (''Untermensch'', ) and an existential threat that was to be exterminated. In Nazi Germany, these ideas formed an essential part of the state ideology that led to the Holocaust.

History

Debates on linguistic homeland

In the late 18th century, Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was constructed as the hypothesized common proto-language of the Indo-European languages. Sir William Jones, who was acclaimed as the "most respected linguist in Europe" for his ''Grammar of the Persian Language'' (1771), was appointed one of the three justices of the Supreme Court of Bengal. Jones, who arrived in Calcutta and began his study of Sanskrit and the Rig Veda, was astonished by the lexical similarities between Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages such as Persian, Gothic, Greek, and Latin, and concluded that Sanskrit—as a descendant language—belonged to the same proto- or parent-language in the language family—that is PIE, as the other Indo-European languages, in his ''Third Anniversary Discourse on the Hindus'' (1786). However, the linguistic homeland of the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European was a politicized debate among the archaeologists and comparative historical linguists since the start, entangling in chauvinistic causes. Some European nationalists and dictators, most notably the Nazis, later attempted to identify the Proto-Indo-European homeland in their country or region as racially superior.

Romanticism and Social 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". After Darwin's 1859 publication of ''On the Origin of Species'' and publicization of the theorized model of Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), the Romantics convicted that language was a defining factor in national identity, combined with the new ideas of Darwinism. 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 vague entities such as races or languages. The "unfit" races were suggested as a source of genetic weakness, and a threat that might contaminate the superior qualities of the "fit" races. The misleading mixture of pseudoscience and Romanticism produced new racial ideologies which used distorted Social Darwinist interpretations of race to explain "the superior biological-spiritual-linguistic essence of the Northern Europeans" in self-congratulatory studies. Subsequently, the German Romantics' quest for a "pure" national heritage led to the interpretation of the ancient speakers of PIE language as the distinct progenitors of a "racial-linguistic-national stereotype".Mish, Frederic C., Editor in Chief ''Webster's Tenth New Collegiate Dictionary'' Springfield, Massachusetts: 1994. Merriam-Webster p. 66

Invention of the Aryan race

Racial association of the term Aryan

The term "Aryan" was originally used as an ethnocultural self-designative identity and epithet of "noble" by Indo-Iranians and the authors of the oldest known religious texts of ''Rig Veda'' and '' Avesta'' within the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European language family—Sanskrit and Iranian, who lived in ancient India and Iran. Although the Sanskrit ā́rya- and Iranian *arya- descended from a form *ā̆rya-, it was only attested to the Indo-Iranian tribes. Benjamin W. Fortson states that there may have been no term for self-designation of Proto-Indo-Europeans, and no such morphemes has survived. J. P. Mallory et al. states although the term "Aryan" takes on an ethnic meaning attesting to Indo-Iranians, there is no grounds for ascribing this semantic use to the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction of lexicon ''*h₂eryós'' i.e. there is no evidence that the speakers of proto-language referred to themselves as "Aryans". However, in the 19th century, it was proposed that ā́rya- was not only the tribal self-designation of Indo-Iranians, but self-designation of Proto-Indo-Europeans themselves, a theory rejected by modern scholarships. "Aryan" then came to be used by scholars of the 19th century to refer to Indo-Europeans. The now-discredited and chronologically reconstructed North European hypothesis was endorsed by such scholars who situated the PIE homeland in northern Europe, which led to the association of "Proto-Indo-Europeans", originally a hypothesized linguistic population of Eurasian PIE speakers, with a new, imagined biological category: "a tall, light-complexioned, blonde, blue-eyed race" - supposed phenotypic traits of Nordic race. The anglicized term "Aryan" then developed into a purely racialist meaning implicating Nordic racial type. However, modern scholarship of Indo-European studies use "Aryan" and "Indo-Aryan" in their original senses referring to Indo-Iranian and Indic branch of Indo-Europeans.

In any case, scholars point out that, even in ancient times, the Aryan identity as asserted in the ''Rig Veda'' was cultural, religious, and linguistic, not racial; nor do the ''Vedas'' contemplate racial purity. The Rig Veda affirms a ritualistic barrier: an individual is considered Aryan if they sacrifice to the right gods, which requires performing traditional prayer in the traditional language, and does not connote a racial barrier. Michael Witzel states that term Aryan "does not mean a particular ''people'' or even a particular 'racial' group but all those who had joined the tribes speaking Vedic Sanskrit and adhering to their cultural norms (such as ritual, poetry, etc.)". Scholars state that the historical Aryans, the Vedic period Bronze Age tribes who lived in Iran, Afghanistan, and the northern Indian subcontinent—composers of the Rig Veda and Avesta—were unlikely to be blond or blue-eyed, contrary to the proponents of Aryanism and Nordicism.

North Europe hypothesis and archaeological affirmation

The racial interpretation of ''Aryans'' stems from the now-pseudoscientific culture-historical archaeology theory of Gustaf Kossinna, who asserted a one-to-one correspondence between archaeological culture and archaeological race. According to Kossinna, the continuity of a "culture" exposits the continuity of a "race" which lived continuously in the same area, and the resemblance of a culture in a younger layer to a culture from an older layer indicates that the autochthonous tribe from the homeland had migrated. Kossinna developed an ethnic paradigm in archaeology called settlement archaeology, and practiced the nationalistic interpretation of German archaeology for the Third Reich. The obsolete North European hypothesis was endorsed by Kossinna and Karl Penka, including German nationalists, which was later used by the Nazis to condone their genocidal and racist state policies. Kossinna identified the Proto-Indo-Europeans with the Corded Ware culture, and placed the Proto-Indo-European homeland in Schleswig-Holstein. He argued a diffusionist model of culture, and emphasised the racial superiority of Germanic peoples over Romans (Roman Empire) and French, whom he described as destroyers of culture as compared to Germanics. Kossinna's ideas have been heavily criticised for its inherent ambiguities in the method and advocacy for the ideology of a Germanic master race. The isomorphism of race, culture, and language has been rejected as an erroneous conception by modern scholars.

Earliest utilization of Aryan race

Max Müller popularized the term Aryan in his writings on comparative linguistics, and is often identified as the first writer to mention an Aryan race in English. He began the racial interpretation of the Vedic passages based upon his editing of the ''Rigveda'' from 1849 to 1874. He postulated a small Aryan clan living on a high elevation in central Asia, speaking a proto-language ancestral to later Indo-European languages, which later branched off in two directions: one moved towards Europe and the other migrated to Iran, eventually splitting again with one group invading north-western India and conquering the dark-skinned ''dasas'' of Scythian origin who lived there. The northern Aryans of Europe became energetic and combative and they invented the idea of a nation, while the southern Aryans of Iran and India were passive and meditative and focussed on religion and philosophy.

Though he occasionally used the term "Aryan race" afterward, Müller later objected to the mixing of the linguistic and racial categories, and was "deeply saddened by the fact that these classifications later came to be expressed in racist terms". In his 1888 lecture at Oxford, he stated, " hescience of Language and the science of Man cannot be kept too much asunder ..it would be as wrong to speak of Aryan blood as of dolichocephalic grammar", and in his ''Biographies of Words and the Home of the Aryas'' (1888), he writes, " heethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes, and hair, is a great sinner as a linguist ...

European scholars of 19th century interpreted the Vedic passages as depicting battle between light-skinned Aryan migrants and dark-skinned indigenous tribes, but modern scholars reject this characterization of racial division as a misreading of the Sanskrit text, and indicate that the Rig Vedic opposition between ''ārya'' and ''dasyu'' is distinction between "disorder, chaos and dark side of human nature" contrasted with the concepts of "order, purity, goodness and light", and " dark and light worlds". In other contexts of the Vedic passages the dinstiction between ''ārya'' and ''dasyu'' refers to those who had adopted the Vedic religion, speaking Vedic Sanskrit, and those who opposed it.

However, increasing number of Western writers of this era, especially among anthropologists and non-specialists influenced by Darwinist theories, contrasted ''Aryans'' as a "physical-genetic species" rather than an ethnolinguistic category.

Encyclopedias and textbooks of historiography, ethnography, and anthropology from this era, such as Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, Nordisk familjebok, H. G. Wells