Dear Jonathan,
Aryan, in the context of National Socialist ideology, was a concept
constructed by the Nazis to define a "race", that of "White"/Nordic
people. Dictionary.com has a very interesting remark here: "It is one
of the ironies of history that Aryan, a word nowadays referring to the
blond-haired, blue-eyed physical ideal of Nazi Germany, originally
referred to a people who looked vastly different. Its history starts
with the ancient Indo-Iranians, Indo-European peoples who inhabited
parts of what are now Iran, Afghanistan, and India. Their tribal
self-designation was a word reconstructed as *arya? or *?rya?. The
first of these is the form found in Iranian, as ultimately in the name
of Iran itself (from Middle Persian ?r?n (?ahr), ?(Land) of the
Iranians,? from the genitive plural of ?r, ?Iranian?). The variant
*?rya? is found unchanged in Sanskrit, where it referred to the upper
crust of ancient Indian society. These words became known to European
scholars in the 18th century. The shifting of meaning that eventually
led to the present-day sense started in the 1830s, when Friedrich
Schlegel, a German scholar who was an important early
Indo-Europeanist, came up with a theory that linked the Indo-Iranian
words with the German word Ehre, ?honor,? and older Germanic names
containing the element ario?, such as the Swiss warrior Ariovistus who
was written about by Julius Caesar. Schlegel theorized that far from
being just a designation of the Indo-Iranians, the word *arya? had in
fact been what the Indo-Europeans called themselves, meaning something
like ?the honorable people.? (This theory has since been called into
question.) Thus ?Aryan? came to be synonymous with ?Indo-European,?
and in this sense entered the general scholarly consciousness of the
day. Not much later, it was proposed that the original homeland of the
Indo-Europeans had been in northern Europe. From this theory, it was
but a small leap to think of the Aryans as having had a northern
European physiotype. While these theories were playing themselves out,
certain anti-Semitic scholars in Germany took to viewing the Jews in
Germany as the main non-Aryan people because of their Semitic roots; a
distinction thus arose in their minds between Jews and the ?true
Aryan? Germans, a distinction that later furnished unfortunate fodder
for the racial theories of the Nazis." (SOURCE: Answers.com,
<http://www.answers.com/aryan&r=67>).
You can read more about it here:
Aruan Race
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_race>
I hope this answers your question. Please contact me if you need any
clarification on this answer before you rate it. |
