Aryans
Who is aryan?
The term arya in Sanskrit, Avestan, and Old Persian meant “noble” or “distinguished”. For Kurdish, Persian, and Urdu speakers, Aryan would mean “one who belongs to the noble people”.
Arya is also what people in Persia used to call their own race, and so to be Aryan also means “one who is from Persia”– today’s Iraq, Iran, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan.
Pre-1850, the use of “aryan” was two-fold:
- a term for ancient Iranians or speakers of Indo-Iranian and Indo-European languages to describe themselves.
- a term for western scholars to describe nomadic peoples who spoke Indo-european languages based on the theoretical migration from central Asia into ancient Iran and eventually the northern Indian subcontinent (modern-day Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka) between 5000 BCE and 1500 BCE.
Though recently disproved, historians from Iran, India and Pakistan continue to debate the ethnic origins of Aryans.
Diagram debunking the dated anthropological Aryan Migration theory (also known interchangeably as “Aryan Invasion theory”)
Rohan Venkataramakrishnan , “Who was here first? A new study explains the origins of ancient Indians” Quartz India. April 3 2018.
Philologist/Orientalist Max Muller debuted the idea that proto-Indo-European languages in opposition to Semitic language, thereby unintentionally sprouting the subsequent interest in Aryanism in dialogue with race.
Infographic by Tanmoy Chakraborty
Who gets to be aryan?
Through the 1800s, widely published pseudo-scientific texts by colonial scholars promoted race-class hierarchies, laying the groundwork for eugenic ideologies around American slavery and eventually, the anti-semitism that resulted in the Holocaust.
Illustration from Types of Mankind (1854), by Josiah Clark Nott and George Robins Gliddon posited that “Negroes” were a creational rank between “Greeks” and chimpanzees.
The concept of an “Aryan race” emerged in the mid-19th century due to multiple factors:
- the misinterpretation of Sanskrit texts
- identification of linguistic similarities between Greek and Persian languages
- the presumption that Persians and/or Greeks were ancestors to Germanic peoples
- anthropological assertions of separate origins for different races
Gradually, the term “aryan” shifted from a linguistic, geographic idea to a biologist, racial-and racist-ideal.
“Expansion of the Pre-Teutonic Nordics", map from American eugenicist Madison Grant's ''The Passing of the Great Race''(1916) depicting the imagined migration of the Nordic race
Arthur Gobineau, (Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau), who wrote The Inequality of Human Races
Before the Third Reich, self-proclaimed racial scientists like Madison Grant and William Ripley developed typologies of race within different white European ethnicities: identifying skull shapes and facial features that signified a “higher quality” of human.
Arthur Gobineau, Samuel Morton and Madison Grant promoted physical and intellectual stereotypes to qualify humans by three main races: white, black and yellow [-skinned].
Writing after arriving in America an America with differing white European immigrants, in “The Passing of the Great Race”, Madison Grant purports that immigrants with Nordic ancestry were superior in constitution to that of the Slavic, [southern European] Mediterranean, and “Alpine” neighbours.
William Z. Ripley’s racial classification scheme in The Races of Europe (1899)
William Z. Ripley’s racial classification scheme in The Races of Europe (1899)
In 1926, the race science journal Volk und Rasse invited public submissions of portraits for the “best male and female heads of the Nordic race”. Winning submissions were selected by none other than the race science ideologists of the day: Eugen Fischer, Hans F. K. Günther, Otto Reche, Walter Scheidt, and Bruno K. Schultz.
First prize for men in the 1926 “Nordic Heads” contest. From Deutsche Köpfe Nordischer Rasse: 50 Abildungen mit Geleitworten von Professor Dr. Eugen Fischer und Dr. Hans F. K. Günther (Munich: Lehmann, 1930)
Second prize “a” for women in the 1926 “Nordic Heads” contest. From Deutsche Köpfe Nordischer Rasse: 50 Abildungen mit Geleitworten von Professor Dr. Eugen Fischer und Dr. Hans F. K. Günther (Munich: Lehmann, 1930)
Winning entry in the 1927 contest for “Best Nordic Family Tree.” From Volk und Rasse, 1929, 4 (suppl).
After the Nazi’s rise to power in 1932, the Dehomag (modern-day IBM Germany) created census machines to catalogue racial data from German citizens, and ultimately, aided in the Holocaust.
Alfred Ploetz introduced racial hygiene [Rassenhygiene] to educate the public on the threat of lower, inferior classes “contaminating” the superior “Nordic” German gene pool.
Hans F.K. Günther further divided the European populations into six races, the "Nordic" ("Nordische"), "Phalic" or "Phalian" ("Fälische"), "Eastern" ("Ostische"), "Western" ("Westische"), "Dinaric" ("Dinarische") and "East Baltic" ("Ostbaltische") race. In Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes ("Racial Science of the German People"), he implored Germans to avoid race mixing. Roughly 124,000 copies were in circulation by the late 1920s.
In Zeitschrift für Rassenphysiologie he claimed each race had its own smell, complaining of the “racial odor” (Völkerodor) of the Jews.
Eugenics poster entitled "The German Face.", no.52 in a series entitled, "Erblehre und Rassenkunde" (Theory of Inheritance and Racial Hygiene), published by the Verlag für nationale Literatur (Publisher for National Literature).
It declares that three categories of Aryan facial types are:
- Nordic racial core;
- Falian-Nordic racial core;
- Western influence
Eugenics poster entitled "The German Face.", no.53 in a series entitled, "Erblehre und Rassenkunde" (Theory of Inheritance and Racial Hygiene), published by the Verlag für nationale Literatur (Publisher for National Literature), Stuttgart.
It displays three more categories of Aryan facial types:
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Predominantly Eastern racial influence;
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East Baltic racial influence;
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Predominantly Dinaric racial influence.
The aforementioned figures developed the Nazi conception of a blond haired, blue eyed, Nordisch as the beacon of humanity’s master race [Herrenrasse].
Educational pre-war bust depicting a human male head of the "Aryan Race", from the collections of the Anatomical Institute of the University of Oslo. Photo taken at the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies
Besides propaganda and persecution, the Nazi government deployed Aryanization to prevent Jewish people from participating in all aspects of the German economy, academy, entertainment, and industries. This involved seizing Jewish-owned businesses and property, and transferring them to non-Jews.
Alongside the systematic denigration of the Jewish, disabled, mentally ill, queer and communist, it was clear the Third Reich celebrated select examples of Aryanism.
Werner Goldberg pictured as the "The Ideal German Soldier” in the Berliner Tageblatt. The photo also appeared on Wehrmact recruitment posters. Ironically, he was half-Jewish.
Hessy Taft, once portrayed as the perfect “Aryan baby” also turned out to be Jewish.
Footnotes
Anna Arabindon-Kesson. From Types of Mankind: Or, Ethnological Researches, Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races .... By George Gliddon and Josiah Nott, September 3, 2020
Subqo Islamic Center. “Aryan Name Meaning”, 2022 https://isubqo.com/baby-name/meaning/aryan
Knight Dunlap, “The Great Aryan Myth.” The Scientific Monthly, vol. 59, no. 4, 1944, pp. 296–300. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/18253
Rachel E. Boaz. In Search of “Aryan Blood”: Serology in Interwar and National Socialist Germany. NED-New edition, 1, Central European University Press, 2012. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7829/j.ctt1282zr
Andrew D. Evans, “Most Unusual” Beauty Contests: Nordic Photographic Competitions and the Construction of a Public for German Race Science, 1926–1935 Isis 2020 111:2, 284-309
David Motadel, Iran and the Aryan Myth, in Ali M. Ansari (ed.) | Perceptions of Iran: History, Myths and Nationalism from Medieval Persia to the Islamic Republic (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 119-145.
