Nineteenth-century European scholars used the term Aryan to identify the Indo-European or Indo-Germanic peoples who settled throughout India, Persia Iran , and Europe thousands of years earlier. The classification originally described the similarities between most European languages, as well as Sanskrit and Persian Farsi.
At the same time, European scholars also identified Jews and Arabs as Semites to describe the similarities between Hebrew, Arabic, and other related languages. Later, this linguistic category was reinterpreted incorrectly as referring to ethnicity or race. Writers like the French racial theoris t Arthur de Gobineau specifically used the term Aryan as a racial category. They also posited that Aryans were superior to other peoples. This racial use of the term promoted a widespread, but false concept of the existence of an "Aryan race.
In the early twentieth century, scholars and many others continued to use the term Aryan as a racial grouping of peoples, even though the original definition was based on the study of language structure.
Some thinkers, such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain , promoted the idea that Aryans were racially and culturally superior to other groups of people. A German teacher singles out a child with " Aryan " features for special praise in class. The use of such examples taught schoolchildren to judge each other from a racial perspective. Germany, wartime. From the very beginnings of the Nazi Party in the s, Adolf Hitler and the ideologues of National Socialism promoted this concept.
They adapted, manipulated, and radicalized the unfounded belief in the existence of an "Aryan race" and its superiority to fit their ideology and policies. Nazi officials used this concept to support the idea that Germans belonged to a "master race. The term was also applied to Roma Gypsies and Black people. The first major law to revoke the rights of Jewish citizens was the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. Ironically, the Nuremberg Race Laws of September provided a much narrower legal definition of the term Jew.
