The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist & Nationalistic Ideas in Europe

by Léon Poliakov

In Nazi Germany between the years 1940 & '44, proof of your Aryan or Semitic roots meant the difference between life & death. How this inhuman & intrinsically absurd theory of racial superiority originated & how it took hold of the German imagination makes for a fascinating, scholarly study. Tracing the origins of the Aryan Myth in the West, the author shows how in the heyday of nationalism most European people developed legends glorifying their high born ancestry. He shows how these legends developed into pseudoscientific theories, which treated Europeans as the norm & other peoples as inferior--until in 19th-century Germany they culminated in the invention of a superior Germanic race in contrast to the inferior Jewish race. This cultural study sheds horrifying new light on the philosophy that justified the mass extermination of millions of "subhumans" during WWII.

Genres: History, Race, European History, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Germany, China

400 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Léon Poliakov (Russian: Лев Поляков) was a French historian, cofounder of the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, and director of research at the National Centre for Scientific Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique).

Reviews

[John Jacobi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Might stand as one of my favorite books, less because of its own merits as because of how many questions of mine it answered at the right time. It is hardly the kind of book I would usually read. It's chief upside is how it puts into view so clearly the power of the race idea *in the sciences.* He explores the racial ideas of Comte, Engels, Marx, a number of philologists, etc. making clear that this was no obscure part of European history. A quote from his introduction sums up the approach:

“Anti-racism has been promoted to the rank of a dogmatic orthodoxy which the present state of anthropological knowledge [1971] is unable to corroborate, but which will brook no criticism, and which is an impediment to sober thinking. This has produced a self censorship, to a great extent retroactive, by authors of all kinds, but particularly historians who, often without knowing it, try to reinterpret the history of modern though under this influence. It begins to look as if, through shame or fear of being racist, the West will not admit to having been so at any time, and therefore assigns to minor characters only (like Gobineau, H.S. Chamberlain, etc.) the role of scapegoats. A racist chapter of western thought is thus made to disappear by sleight of hand, and this conjuring trick corresponds, on the psychological or psycho-historical level, to the collective suppression of troubling memories and embarrassing truths.”

“The doctrine of the unity of the human race, about which people always had secret misgivings, was directly attacked by a number of leading philosophers of the Enlightenment… Before its final degradation, in the course of less than a century, to such depths of infamy, the Aryan theory was in the main current of scientific progress and appeared to be corroborated by linguistic discoveries… So the Aryan theory does indeed belong to the tradition of anti-clericalism and anti-obscurantism; it is a product of the first gropings of the sciences of man as they tried to model themselves on the exact sciences and so strayed into a mechanistic and deterministic blind-alley where they remained for a century.”

Its chief downside, however, is that Poliakov mostly only assembles quotations. He rarely delves into the *reasons* why, for example, the indologist thought civilization might have sprouted in the east, he merely says that they do, and gives on or two racist quotes. Nevertheless, the quotations are definitely the heart of the book, and are extremely enlightening. One of the most interesting from me came from Comte, the founder of positivism:

“The founder of positivism also took it for granted that the leadership of humanity belonged to the white race and especially the peoples of Western Europe… Apart from this he recognized only three great races — the white, the yellow and the black, ‘the only ones between which a distinction can positively be made.’ To the first of these he attributed the quality of intelligence; to the second, industry, and to the third, emotion. However, he prophesied an age of universal harmony in which these differences would disappear, since, ‘the complete harmony of the Great Being requires the closest support of these three races, the speculative, the active, and the affective.’ All the nations and all the races would, therefore, be represented in the Supreme Council envisaged by Comte’s ‘religion of humanity: even the black race, although our pride assumes that the latter is condemned to irreversible stagnation.’”

Definitely recommend, along with: Race and State by Eric Voegelin; and Hitler as Philosophe by Lawrence Birken.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

John McGough purchased this book as a gift while I was oogling it while we were together recently at the Amarinth Bookstore in Evanston, Illinois. Contrary to its description, it isn't just about German race theories. It's much broader than that, covering all of Europe and the United States from the Middle Ages until about the end of WWI. No holds are barred. The racial theories of such luminaries as Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Theodore Roosevelt, Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung are discussed along with those of such now-taboo figures as Chamberlain. The focus is on anti-Semitism, but the book ranges much more widely than that into global race theories, the eugenics movements in the USA, the UK and Germany etc. Nazi race theory is only mentioned glancingly. This is more about the intellectual-scientific historical setting for such later developments.

The fact, amply demonstrated, that "science" and scientists of the greatest repute in their own times and, so far as the book goes, into living memory wrote so often, so confidently about the races, their origins, character and relations, gives one pause about contemporary science and scientists. With the mapping of the genome one fears the politically-driven consequences.

[Devin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not very well written book on the history of National chauvinism in each European country.

[Petrishke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Érudition impressionnante, mais les références freudiennes ont vieilli.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The death of six million Jews between 1941 to 1945 was the result of an evolution in the enquiry into the origins of peoples and nations that began during the Middle Ages passing from theological viewpoints to scientific ones and finally—unfortunately—to political viewpoints. The Aryan Myth: The History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe by Leon Poliakov traces how this myth originated and progressed until it became so accepted as to warrant the attempted destruction of an entire people.

Poliakov’s extensive research covers the whole of the Europe from the Spain’s “tainted blood” mindset after the Reconquista, to England’s belief of their connection to ancient Israel, to France’s back and forth between their Gallic/Celtic inhabitants and Frankish/German namesakes, Russia’s multiple origin tales, and finally Germany’s use of a fourth son of Noah to create a basis for the Germanic peoples. Yet while all these origins were in someway connected with the Bible, once the Enlightenment brought criticism and skepticism into the fore these any Biblical origins were dismissed and something new had to take their place which meant 18th-century social scientists and philosophers and others had to come up answers which resulted in the beginnings of the racial hierarchies and stereotypes that became into vague and still permeate society today. Throughout the 19th century, the division of Europe into being inhabited by two races—the Aryan and Semitic—steadily evolved towards the point that led to the eventual murder of two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. Through 310 pages the reader is bombarded with a lot of information in rapid succession as well as Poliakov’s give context to quotes and brief information on the authors, while it is very informative there is a sense that Poliakov wanted to say more but either through original publisher or self-imposed page limit.

The Aryan Myth by Leon Poliakov reveals how through the centuries the search for national origins within different cultural prisms slowly lead towards myths of race and superiority.

[Jay D]

Good academic approach from a Jewish perspective.