Indo-Europeans, language and the myth of the "Aryan" race

Guido von List (1848-1919)

Earlier this year I spent some time looking at the relation between what was once commonly called the ancient Aryan language and the 19th- and 20th-century concepts of the "Aryan race" that the Nazis made so infamous.

This article, Arier, from the Glossar Rechextremismus of the German state of Brandenburg gives a very good summary (in German) of the concept of "Aryan" as it came to be used by the Nazis.

As they employed the term, "Aryan" actually meant little other than "not Jewish". Although the Nazis considered Germans a superior race to Slavs and others, as well. But my focus in this post is not the Nazi concept but the much older history that racist thinkers and propagandists have claimed as a background for the so-called Aryan race.

As the Glossar Rechtsextremismus notes, the Nazis so discredited the word "Aryan" that the ancient langauge that was once described neutrally as Aryan is now called "Indo-European."

The Indo-European languages are many, extant and otherwise: the proto-Indo-European language gave birth to the following languages, in alphabetical order: Afrikaans, Albanian, Armenian, Avestan, Bengali, Celtic, Czech, English, Faliscan, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Hindi, Hittite, Illyrian, Italian, Lithuanian, Latin, Latvian, Luvian, Messapic, Oscan, Persian, Phrygian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Spanish, Swedish, Thracian, Tocharian, Romany, Welsh, and Yiddish.

J.P. Mallory in his text In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth (1989) argues that the most plausible location of the original Indo-European "homeland" is in the steppes of the "Pontic-Caspian" area, very roughly the area north and northeast of the Black Sea. The primary evidence for this reconstruction of prehistory is linguistic and archaeological, but primarily linguistic. He dates the development of the original Proto-Indo-European language as no latter than 2500 BCE and with evidence of an existing "cultural vocabulary consistent with a date of roughly the fourth millennium BC." Language and archaeology are related in examining the evidence. He describes, for instance, how the Proto-Indo-European word for horse, *ek'wos, correlates with the archaeological evidence of the spread of horses in Central Europe and the types of terrains which would have been most congenial for them.

Mallory writes:

Proto-Indo-European probably evolved out of the languages spoken by hunter-fishing communities in the Pontic-Caspian region. It is impossible to select which languages and what areas, though a linguistic continuum from the Dnieper east to the Volga would be possible. Settlement would have been confined primarily to the major river valleys and their tributaries, and this may have resulted in considerable linguistic ramification. But the introduction of stockbreeding, and the domestication of the horse, permitted the exploitation of the open steppe. With the subsequent development of wheeled vehicles in this area, highly mobile communities would have interacted regularly with the more sedentary river valley and forest-steppe communities. During the period to which we notionally assign Proto-Indo-European (4500-2500 BC), most of the Pontic-Caspian served as a vast interaction sphere. ... Words would have passed freely between different dialects, and the later isoglosses which seem to leap geographical boundaries, such as Greek or German and Tocharian, may have been the result of these interactions. In addition, higher versus lower variants of Indo-European languages may have been spoken, which would further account for why some linguistic groups preserve certain words and others lack such reflexes. In the east, both Proto-Indo-Europeans and later ancestors of the Indo-Iranians were in contact with Finno-Ugric speakers. In the west, the shared agricultural vocabulary of the European languages may have developed along the middle Dnieper or in contact with the numerous Tripolyean settlements of the western Ukraine.

This common linguistic background reflects a cultural background. But it can't be considered a "race" in any meaningful sense of the word. Much less a group of pure descent from some original proto-Indo-European speakers 4500 years ago. Whatever their distinctive physical characteristics may have been in 2500 BCE, their genes have been widely shared since then, and other genes widely shared with theirs.

Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954)

The racial theories of the 19th century were largely pseudo-science, or just plain bad science. The late Stephen Jay Gould did a fascinating book called The Mismeasure of Man (1981) describing how white scientific researchers on race who appeared to be seriously trying to ground their work solidly in evidence were nevertheless heavily influenced in their interpretations by their cultural assumptions on race. He does so by re-examining the original data from which they were drawing there conclusions.

But pseudoscientific theories of race like those elaborated by Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) cannot be assumed to have been based on scientific good intentions. Those influences heavily formed the Nazi brand of racism and anti-Semitism. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes Chamberlain's view in its article on Race:

The apogee of post-Darwinian race-thinking was arguably reached in the book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), the son-in-law of German opera composer Richard Wagner. Chamberlain argued in the evolutionary terms of sexual selection that distinct races emerged through geographical and historical conditions which create inbreeding among certain individuals with similar traits ... Moving from this initial specification, Chamberlain then argued that the key strands of western civilization - Christianity and ancient Greek philosophy and art – emerged from the Aryan race. Jesus, for instance, was held to be of Aryan stock, despite his Jewish religion, since the territory of Galilee was populated by peoples descended from Aryan Phonecians as well as by Semitic Jews. Similarly, Aristotle's distinction between Greeks and Barbarians was reinterpreted as a racial distinction between Aryans and non-Aryans. These Greek and Christian strands became united in Europe, particularly during the Reformation, which allowed the highest, Teutonic strain of the Aryan race to be freed from constraining Roman Catholic cultural fetters. But while Roman institutions and practices may have constrained the Teutonic Germans, their diametric opposite was the Jew, the highest manifestation of the Semitic Race. The European religious tensions between Christian and Jew were thus transformed into racial conflicts, for which conversion or ecumenical tolerance would have no healing effect. Chamberlain's writings, not surprisingly, have come to be seen as some of the key intellectual foundations for twentieth century German anti-Semitism, of which Adolf Hitler was simply its most extreme manifestation.

This wasn't science or good-faith inquiry. It was crass anti-Semitism and racism cooked up to meet the prejudices to which Chamberlain wished to pander.

But pseudoscience isn't the only source of misinformation about the fictional "Aryan race". Esoteric groups also promoted racist notions about the "Aryans", particularly the theosophists. The Austrian cranks Guido von List (1848-1919) und Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954) were two esoteric racial theorists whose work influenced Hitler's thinking and the racial/historical writing in his book Mein Kampf.

Tags: indo-european language, national socialism, nazism, racism