THE IDEA OF RACE is a rather modern invention. Before the first Europeans landed on the shores of the New World in the late fifteenth century, the notion of racial difference does not seem to have existed.1 Earlier travelers remarked upon the appearance of those in foreign lands—the hue of their skin, the texture of their hair, the color of their eyes—but they took no interest in classifying strangers according to physical traits. They were far more concerned with religious differences, describing foreigners as “idolators” or even “infidels.” But after Europeans conquered the Americas and became colonists on a grand scale, forcing others into servitude and slavery, the language of difference began to change. The word “race” appeared in the English language in the sixteenth century, borrowed either from French or Italian.2 Its counterpart Rasse appeared in German nearly two centuries later, in 1791.3
It was a maddeningly vague word, however, and it gave rise to considerable confusion. Some writers used it to describe all of humanity, as in the phrase “human race.” Some politicians brandished the word to mean nationality, speaking of the French race, while scientists tried to define it more specifically, as one of the great divisions of humankind that could be distinguished scientifically by certain unvarying physical traits. All this confusion, however, made race a very valuable concept for Hitler and the early Nazis. They could use a word like Rasse to mean whatever was most expedient for them politically. And they added considerably to this confusion by referring to a mythical race, the Aryans.
The notion of the Aryans, however, did not begin with the Nazis as they schemed and plotted in the smoky beer halls of Bavaria in the 1920s. Nor did it first emerge from the overheated rhetoric of middle-class German nationalists in late nineteenth-century Germany. Its roots were much older and they were far more deeply entangled in European scholarship and science. The concept of the Aryans—a tall, slim, muscular master race with golden hair and cornflower blue eyes—traces its origins back to a line of legitimate scientific inquiry in eighteenth-century Great Britain. This research blossomed in India and took off in a strange new direction in Germany during the Romantic era. Only in the late nineteenth century did the concept of the Aryans undergo a final, virulently racist twist in the hands of German nationalists, becoming something truly malignant.
IT WAS A British naturalist, James Parsons, who planted the first unwitting seed of Aryanism. A contemporary of Voltaire and Dr. Samuel Johnson, Parsons had fallen under the influence of the European Enlightenment, an age when gentlemen in powdered wigs asked profound questions about the way the world worked and had a pronounced inclination to seek out answers. Parsons was a doctor by training, taking his medical degree in Rheims in 1736, but like many gentlemen scholars of the age, he possessed a daunting range of interests. He penned papers on the anatomy of crabs and corals, the preternatural conjunction of two female children, the fossil fruits of the Island of Sheppey, and the double horns of a rhinoceros.4 In his spare hours, he read widely in ancient history and joined the Antiquarian Society.
Parsons was passionately curious about the murky origins of the Irish and the Welsh, and he turned to one of his favorite reference books for possible clues: the Bible. In the book of Genesis, he noted, God instructed the three sons of Noah to go forth into the world and multiply. One of these sons was said to have fathered the Semitic peoples—the Arabs, Jews, Bedouins, and other related groups in the Middle East. The second had given rise to the Egyptians, Ethiopians, and other African peoples. And the third son, Japhet, had founded most of the remaining lineages of humankind, including the Europeans.5
But the Bible offered devout Christians few details about the peopling of the earth. Parsons hungered to know more about his ancestors. Were the Irish and the Welsh and for that matter all other Europeans truly the descendents of Japhet? And, if so, how could one prove this? Parsons took a novel approach to the problem. He decided to trace human origins by searching for possible affinities between major European and Asian languages. If the Europeans as well as the Persians and the Indians all descended from Japhet, as the Bible suggested, then their respective tongues should contain at least a few old shared words handed down from their common ancestor. Parsons decided to investigate.
He focused his research on words for numerals, reasoning that since numbers were essential to the culture of “every nation, their names were most likely to continue nearly the same, even though other parts of the languages might be liable to change and alteration.”6 He consulted foreignlanguage dictionaries, drawing up lists of the relevant words. Then he patiently compared the terms from one language to another. Striking similarities existed between many European and some Asian tongues. The word for three, for example, was identical in Irish, Welsh, Russian, and Bengali—tri. Moreover, the word phonetically resembled tre in Danish and Swedish, treis in Greek, tres in Latin, and drei in German.7 From such studies, Parsons concluded that Bengali, Persian, English, Irish, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, Danish, and German all sprang from a common ancestral language, one that could have been spoken by Japhet as he lit out into the world after the deluge.
Parsons had devised an enormously powerful new tool for tracing the origins of peoples—comparative linguistics—and he astutely recognized its importance, publishing The Remains of Japhet, being historical enquiries into the affinity and origins of the European languages in 1767. The scientific world, however, ignored this book. Readers familiar with Parsons’s scattered papers on corals, fossil fruits, and rhinoceros horns wondered what an anatomist was doing meddling in fields he knew nothing about. Others dismissed Parsons’s ideas after stumbling upon his linguistic slipups, convoluted biblical theories, and lines of dubious evidence. However, in 1786, a prominent Orientalist, Sir William Jones, discerned these same linguistic affinities independently, and in the process of this research, he helped coin the term “Aryan.”
Jones was the founder of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. He was a lawyer by profession and had earned a solid reputation as an Orientalist, mastering nearly two dozen languages, including Hebrew and one of the Chinese tongues. In 1783, he sailed for India as a new justice in the Supreme Court. There, surrounded by the splendor of the British Empire, he began applying himself to acquiring Sanskrit. He intended to write a digest of Hindu and Muslim law, and it was while in the throes of this study that he began to discern a strong resemblance between the words and grammar of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin.
Intrigued, Jones mentioned these linguistic correspondences in a now famous paper he gave at the Asiatic Society on February 2, 1786. As an attentive audience of colonial officials and merchants, physicians and engineers gazed on, Jones observed that “the Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of the grammar, than could have been produced by accident; so strong that no philologer could examine all the three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.”8
Jones’s remarks were extremely well received. Over the next eight years of his life, he diligently expanded this new field of research, and it was in the thick of this work that he introduced a new word to European scholars—Arya.9 The word came from Sanskrit and it meant “noble.” In India, it was often employed to describe those who worshipped the Hindu gods, as opposed to the divinities of other Indian religions.10 Jones rather fancied the term and he borrowed it to describe those who spoke a particular group of Indian languages.
Inspired by Jones, other scholars began systematically comparing words and grammar from parlances across Europe and Asia, looking for possible affinities. They discovered that more than forty of the world’s major languages shared strong similarities to Sanskrit—from English, French, German, Danish, Swedish, and Irish Gaelic to Serbo-Croatian, Yiddish, and Romany.11 But no one could quite agree on what to call this newly identified group of languages. British linguists tended to favor the term “Indo-European,” while German scholars rather liked the sound of “Indo-German.” Others, however, happily settled on a word that Jones had first drawn to their attention: Aryan.
All these linguistic similarities raised many perplexing questions. How did Sanskrit, the language of ancient Hindu scholars, come to resemble German? Could the Brahmans of Calcutta be related in some way to the burghers of Bavaria or Hesse? In the old cathedral city of Cologne, a prominent nineteenth-century German scholar wrestled with these questions.
A SURVIVING PORTRAIT of Friedrich Schlegel shows a rather plain-looking man with dark circles beneath a pair of intense eyes and a rumpled collar framing his face. During his youth in Leipzig, Schlegel apprenticed with a banker, but it was the world of literature and ideas—not account books and balance sheets—that beckoned to him. For a time he studied Greek philosophy and culture and tried his hand unsuccessfully at writing a semiautobiographical novel, but eventually he realized that his real métier was literary criticism and history.
Schlegel was a man of restless enthusiasm, forever on the alert for new ideas to weave into his own writings. While in Napoleonic Paris in 1802 and 1803, he took up studies of Sanskrit and comparative linguistics, which convinced him of the antiquity and importance of the Indian culture. “Everything, absolutely everything, is of Indian origin,” he declared in a letter to a friend in 1803.12 This deep-seated conviction soon led him to a daring suggestion: perhaps Germans and other modern European peoples stemmed not from the Holy Land at all, as the Bible claimed, but from the remote valleys of the Himalayas.
In 1808, Schlegel explored this idea in a famous book entitled Essay on the Language and Wisdom of the Indians, a strange, poetic concoction of dry scholarship and historical fantasy. During the distant past, he proposed, a brilliant nation of priests and warriors lived quietly in the secret, hidden valleys of the Himalayas. At some point, a terrible crime, “some inconceivable desolation of the human conscience,” had transformed them.13 Abandoning their peaceful, vegetarian ways, they had become war-mongering carnivores, bursting out of their mysterious mountain stronghold.14 Some swept to the south, where they soon conquered the entire Indian subcontinent. Others surged westward, founding a string of great empires, until at last they arrived in the cold, drizzly forests of Germany and Scandinavia.
Schlegel recognized that some of his fellow scholars might find this a rather tall tale to swallow. Why, after all, would a nation of warriors from the “most contented and fertile region of Asia” want to settle in Europe’s chill northern extremities?15 But Schlegel had an explanation ready at hand. He had discerned references in Sanskrit legends to a sacred mountain in the North much revered by the ancient Hindus. Perhaps the Himalayan holy men had been drawn—as filings were to a magnet—to the northlands of Germany and Scandinavia.
In one fell swoop, Schlegel had added a whole new dimension to the scientific study of Indo-European languages, transforming a well-grounded linguistic concept into an anthropological fable. Eleven years later, he added a final important detail. The ancient Himalayan invaders of his imagination possessed no name. So the German literary critic gave them one—the Aryans. By such means, the Aryans entered into popular culture, a mythical group of Himalayan warriors and holy men with a bizarre fictional history and a borrowed name.16
Schlegel, of course, had no idea what he had helped to create or how his ideas could be distorted and used to such catastrophic effect by future German nationalists. If he had known this, he would have been horrified. He had personally campaigned to give German Jews the right to vote.17 His wife, Dorothea, was Jewish.18
FOR ALL THE many liberties that Schlegel had taken in his writings, he had clearly put his finger on two important truths. Some ancient human society had indeed spoken the ancestral tongue that eventually evolved into more than forty major languages across Europe and Asia. And this society had clearly expanded its sphere of influence from a rather confined area to many parts of Eurasia. But scholars needed proof before they would accept Schlegel’s vision of ancient Himalayan invaders. And where was evidence to be found? Theodor Benfey, a renowned nineteenth-century Sanskrit scholar, mulled over these problems carefully in the old university city of Göttingen.
Benfey was the son of a Jewish merchant, and as such he had struggled for much of his life against the strong currents of anti-Semitism in German society.19 Earning a doctorate degree at the tender age of nineteen, he had taken a position at the University of Göttingen as a private lecturer, only to watch in frustration as younger and less accomplished men rapidly climbed above him. Indeed, it was only after twenty-eight years of waiting, and after finally converting to Christianity in his despair, that he finally attained the rank of professor.
Benfey decided to trace the Aryan wanderers back to their homeland by means of language. He could apply precise, well-tested linguistic rules to modern words for plants and animals in the Indo-European languages and determine which, if any, belonged to the lost ancestral vocabulary.20 Those that did, he surmised, would shed light on the ecology of the old Aryan homeland. So the scholar set about patiently drawing up a list of the ancestral words and comparing them to the flora and fauna in possible Aryan homelands. He published his findings in 1869. Northern Europe, he concluded, with its expansive forests of beech and pine, bore the closest resemblance to the ecosystem preserved in the ancestral vocabulary.21
Benfey’s work suggested that the Aryans had first emerged from northern Europe, not the Himalayas. It was a slender line of evidence, one later contradicted by other similar studies, but in the simmering cauldron of German politics in the late nineteenth century, nationalists pounced on it gleefully.22 Germany’s diverse royal families had only recently joined forces to create a united German state, and nationalists were keen to stitch the new patchwork together. Benfey’s study seemed a particularly handy tool. It implied that it was Germany’s forefathers who had swept across the plains of Europe all the way east to India, carrying their distinctive language with them. And in the minds of the nationalists, it seemed to cast their ancestors in the role of energetic conquerors, restless, unstoppable masters of the ancient world.
So enthralled were nationalists with this vision that they immediately began to embroider upon it, filling in the large gaping holes that science could not. They speculated wildly, for example, on the physical appearance of the Aryans, relying heavily on a description of the Germanic tribes penned by the Roman historian Tacitus. In Germania, Tacitus had blithely remarked upon the large frames, blue eyes, and red-blond hair of the German tribes-people. Classical scholars had long doubted the veracity of many of his observations, for Tacitus had seemingly done his research from the comfort of his Roman home.23 But German nationalists were oblivious to such scholarly concerns.24 They fully embraced the idea of tall, blond-haired and blue-eyed Aryan ancestors.25 Some even went so far as to suggest that Schlegel’s manufactured name, “Aryan,” came from an ancestral root word meaning light, a reference to the color of Aryan hair and skin.
It was all perfectly absurd, but the idea of the conquering, flaxen-haired Aryans from the north seemed to touch a deep chord among nationalists in Germany. It appealed powerfully to their vanity. And in the decades preceding the rise of the Third Reich, this vision began to merge dangerously with a concept that was rapidly taking hold in German imaginations—the Nordic Race.
SINCE THE EARLY 1800s, researchers had tried to divide all of humankind into races that could be distinguished scientifically by certain unvarying physical traits.26 To identify these traits, researchers had traveled the world, measuring human bodies, studying the shapes of human heads, puzzling over the texture of their hair, and charting the color of their skin. It had been long, arduous work, with few rewards. Despite many claims to the contrary, anthropologists in the early twentieth century had failed to arrive at any sound scientific criteria for classifying humankind into races.27 “At present,” noted the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1939 in its entry for anthropology, “all the methods in use to determine race are precarious, and their provisional findings must be accepted with the utmost caution.”28
But that, of course, did not deter politically motivated amateurs from drawing up their own criteria, and in 1920, an obscure German philologist, Hans F. K. Günther, turned his attention to the subject of race. Günther was the son of a violinist in the Freiburg city orchestra. At university, he had studied Hungarian, Finnish, and French, but in the aftermath of the First World War he developed an interest in politics. Soon after Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles, Günther published a book lambasting modern liberalism and urging the Weimar government to pay greater heed to matters of race and racial improvement. The book greatly interested a prominent German ultranationalist, publisher Julius Lehmann, who was searching for someone to write a popular book on the races of Germany. Lehmann decided to test Günther’s ability to discern race. He took him on a two-day hike through the Alps, asking him to identify the racial origins of the people they met on their journey. So impressed was Lehmann with Günther’s eye for “racial differences” that he handed the scholar a contract for the book.29
Günther set to work with a passion. To parse the population of Germany, and later of Europe itself, into what he considered to be its original bloodlines, he proudly employed his own intuition, his personal observations, and odd bits of data he gleaned from a host of fields. He studied facial features carved on ancient Persian statuary and scrutinized the death mask of Frederick the Great. He collected photographs of ordinary people from across Europe and examined their head shapes and proportions. He read psychological and ethnological studies of Europeans from different regions. From all this unscientific hodgepodge, he drew up his own taxonomy of race—a masterpiece of racial stereotyping and racism.
Günther eventually classified five races in Europe. He employed not only visible physical traits for his criteria, but also far more nebulous characteristics, such as intellectual abilities and emotional states. He paid no attention whatsoever to the role of environment in forming human beings, focusing instead on the idea that humans were solely products of their biological nature—their race. Among the five races that he identified, none could hold a candle to the Nordic race, which Günther described with an almost erotic intensity:
The Nordic race is tall, slender. The long legs contribute towards the stately height, which for the man averages about 1.74 meters. The form both of the whole body and of each of the limbs, as also that of the neck, hands and feet, is one of strength combined with slenderness. The Nordic race is long-headed and narrow-faced … The skin of the Nordic race is rosy and fair: it allows the blood to glimmer through, and so it looks alive, often lustrous, and always rather cool or fresh, ‘like milk and blood.’ The veins shine through (at least in youth) and show ‘the blue blood.’ The hair is smooth and sleek or wavy in texture, in childhood it may be curly. Each hair is thin and soft and often ‘like silk.’ In color it is fair, and, whether light or dark blond, always shows a touch of gold, or a reddish undertone.… The Nordic eye, that is, its iris, is blue, blue-grey, or grey.… Nordic eyes often have something shining, something radiant about them.30
This striking physical appearance was matched, according to Günther, by a long list of mental and emotional traits found in the Nordic race. These included boldness, a natural aptitude for great undertakings, self-reliance, sound judgment, a love of justice, a deep well of energy and creativity, a broad range of intellectual interests, a gift for storytelling and musicianship, and a talent for warfare.31 Virtually all were characteristics that German nationalists ascribed to the ancient Aryans.
Günther’s racial books became best sellers in Germany, flying off bookstore shelves.32 Under their powerful spell, German nationalists began to graft the physical characteristics of the imagined Nordic race onto the increasingly popular idea of the ancient Aryans. They began to use words like Aryan, Nordic, Indo-Germanic, and Germanic interchangeably.33 What had started out in the eighteenth century in Britain as a harmless, purely linguistic investigation into the distant origins of the Europeans had become a deadly racial powderkeg by the early twentieth century in Germany.