Nordic race

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Meyers Blitz-Lexikon (Leipzig, 1932) shows famous German war hero (Karl von Müller) as an example of the Nordic type

The Nordic race or Xanthocroic race is one of the putative sub-races into which some late 19th to mid 20th century anthropologists consisted of the Caucasian race. People of the Nordic type were described as having light-coloured (typically blond) hair, light-coloured (typically blue) eyes, fair skin, and tall stature, and they were empirically considered to predominate in the countries of Central and Northern Europe.

Nordicism, also "Nordic theory," is an ideology of racial supremacy that claims that a Nordic race, within the greater Caucasian race, constituted a master race.[1][2] This ideology was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in some Central and Northern European countries as well as in North America, and it achieved some further degree of mainstream acceptance throughout Germany via Nazism.


In the mid 19th century, scientific racism developed the theory of Aryanism, holding that Europeans ("Aryans") are an innately superior branch of humanity, responsible for most of its greatest achievements. Aryanism was derived from the idea that the original speakers of the Indo-European languages constitute a distinctive race or subrace of the larger Caucasian race.

Its principal proponent was Arthur de Gobineau in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1855). Though Gobineau did not equate Nordic peoples with Aryans, he argued that Germanic people were the best modern representatives of the Aryan race. Adapting the comments of Tacitus and other Roman writers, he argued that "pure" Northerners regenerated Europe after the Roman empire declined due to racial "dilution" of its leadership.

By the 1880s a number of linguists and anthropologists argued that the Aryans themselves had originated somewhere in northern Europe. Theodor Poesche proposed that the Aryans originated in the vast Rokitno, or Pinsk Marshes, then in the Russian Empire, now covering much of the southern part of Belarus and the north-west of the Ukraine, but it was Karl Penka who popularized the idea that the Aryans had emerged in Scandinavia and could be identified by the distinctive Nordic characteristics of blond hair and blue eyes.

The biologist Thomas Henry Huxley agreed with him, coining the term "Xanthochroi" to refer to fair-skinned Europeans, as opposed to darker Mediterranean peoples, whom Huxley called "Melanochroi".[3][4] It was Huxley who also concluded that the Melanochroi (Peoples of the Mediterranean race), who he described as "dark whites", are of a mixture of the Xanthochroi and Australioids.[5]

This distinction was repeated by Charles Morris in his book The Aryan Race (1888), which argued that the original Aryans could be identified by their blond hair and other Nordic features, such as dolichocephaly (long skull). The argument was given extra impetus by the French anthropologist Vacher de Lapouge in his book L’Aryen, in which he argued that the "dolichocephalic-blond" peoples were natural leaders, destined to rule over more brachycephalic (short-skulled) peoples.[6]

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche also referred in his writings to "blond beasts": amoral adventurers who were supposed to be the progenitors of creative cultures.[7] In On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), he wrote, "In Latin malus ... could indicate the vulgar man as the dark one, especially as the black-haired one, as the pre-Aryan dweller of the Italian soil which distinguished itself most clearly through his colour from the blonds who became their masters, namely the Aryan conquering race."[8]

Defining characteristics[edit]

Henry Keane's Man, Past and Present (1899) shows a Dane as an example of the Nordic type

It was the Russian-born French anthropologist Joseph Deniker that initially proposed "nordique" (meaning simply "northern") as an "ethnic group" (a term that he coined). He defined nordique by a set of physical characteristics: The concurrence of fair, somewhat wavy hair, light eyes, reddish skin, tall stature and a dolichocephalic skull.[9] Of six 'Caucasian' groups Deniker accommodated four into secondary ethnic groups, all of which he considered intermediate to the Nordic: Northwestern, Sub-Nordic, Vistula and Sub-Adriatic, respectively.[10][11]

American economist William Z. Ripley purported to define scientifically a "Teutonic race" in his book The Races of Europe (1899).[12] He divided Europeans into three main subcategories: Teutonic (teutonisch), Alpine and Mediterranean. According to Ripley the "Teutonic race" resided in Scandinavia, north Germany, Baltic states and East Prussia, north Poland, north Russia, Britain, Ireland, parts of Central Europe and was typified by light hair, light skin, blue eyes, tall stature, a narrow nose, and slender body type. Georges Vacher de Lapouge had called this race "Homo Europaeus".

Madison Grant, in his book The Passing of the Great Race, took up Ripley's classification. He described a "Nordic" or "Baltic" type:

"long skulled, very tall, fair skinned, with blond or brown hair and light colored eyes. The Nordics inhabit the countries around the North and Baltic Seas and include not only the great Scandinavian and Teutonic groups, but also other early peoples who first appear in southern Europe and in Asia as representatives of Aryan language and culture."[13]

According to Grant, the "Alpine race", shorter in stature, darker in colouring, with a rounder head, predominated in Central and Eastern Europe through to Turkey and the Eurasian steppes of Central Asia and Southern Russia. The "Mediterranean race", with dark hair and eyes, aquiline nose, swarthy complexion, moderate-to-short stature, and moderate or long skull was said to be prevalent in Southern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.[14][15]

20th century[edit]

"Expansion of the Pre-Teutonic Nordics"—From Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History (1916); Grant's conception of Nordic influence spreading over Europe in ancient times.
"Expansion of the Teutonic Nordics and Slavic Alpines". Further Nordic expansion, as well as the Alpines. NB: Anthropological studies consistently identified Early Slavs to be actually dolicocephalic and fair haired, i.e. "Nordic".[16][17]
Madison Grant's map, from 1916, charting the "present distribution of European races", with the Nordic race shown in bright red; green indicates the Alpine race; yellow, the Mediterranean race.

By 1902 the German archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna identified the original Aryans (Proto-Indo-Europeans) with the north German Corded Ware culture, an argument that gained in currency over the following two decades. He placed the Indo-European Urheimat in Schleswig-Holstein, arguing that they had expanded across Europe from there.[18] By the early 20th century this theory was well established, though far from universally accepted. Sociologists were soon using the concept of a "blond race" to model the migrations of the supposedly more entrepreneurial and innovative components of European populations. As late as 1939 Carleton Coon wrote that "The Poles who came to the United States during the 19th century, and the early decades of the 20th, did not represent a cross-section of the Polish population, but a taller, blonder, longer-headed group than the Poles as a whole."[19] The "high brow"/"low brow" distinction, derived from such theories, also became enshrined in language.

It was the already mentioned work of sociologist/economist William Z. Ripley which popularized the idea of three biological European races. Ripley borrowed Deniker's terminology of Nordic (he had previously used the term "Teuton"); his division of the European races relied on a variety of anthropometric measurements, but focused especially on their cephalic index and stature.

Compared to Deniker, Ripley advocated a simplified racial view and proposed a single Teutonic race linked to geographic areas where Nordic-like characteristics predominate, and contrasted these areas to the boundaries of two other types, Alpine and Mediterranean, thus reducing the 'caucasoid branch of humanity' to three distinct groups.[20]

By the early 20th century, Ripley's tripartite Nordic/Alpine/Mediterranean model was well established. Most nineteenth-century race-theorists like Arthur de Gobineau, Otto Ammon, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain preferred to speak of "Aryans," "Teutons," and "Indo-Europeans" instead of "Nordic Race". The British German racialist Houston Stewart Chamberlain considered the Nordic race to be made up of Celtic and Germanic peoples, as well as some Slavs. Chamberlain called those people Celt-Germanic peoples, and his ideas would influence Adolf Hitler's Nazi ideology.

Only in the 1920s did a strong partiality for "Nordic" begin to reveal itself, and for a while the term was used almost interchangeably with Aryan.[21] Later, however, Nordic would not be co-terminous with Aryan, Indo-European or Germanic.[22] For example, the later Nazi minister for Food, Richard Walther Darré, who had developed a concept of the German peasantry as Nordic race, used the term 'Aryan' to refer to the tribes of the Iranian plains.[22]

The notion of a distinct northern European race was also rejected by several anthropologists on craniometric grounds. Rudolf Virchow attacked the claim following a study of craniometry, which gave surprising results according to contemporary scientific racist theories on the "Aryan race." During the 1885 Anthropology Congress in Karlsruhe, Virchow denounced the "Nordic mysticism," while Josef Kollmann, a collaborator of Virchow, stated that the people of Europe, be they German, Italian, English or French, belonged to a "mixture of various races," furthermore declaring that the "results of craniology" led to "struggle against any theory concerning the superiority of this or that European race".[23]

Coon (1939)[edit]

Carleton Coon in his book of 1939 The Races of Europe subdivided the Nordic race into three main types, "Corded", "Danubian" and "Keltic", besides a "Neo-Danubian" type[24] and a variety of Nordic types altered by Upper Palaeolithic or Alpine admixture.[25][26][27] "Exotic Nordics" are morphologically Nordic types that occur in places distant from the northwestern European center of Nordic concentration.[28]

Coon takes the Nordics to be a partially depigmented branch of the greater Mediterranean racial stock. He suggests that the Nordic type emerged as a result of a mixture of "the Danubian Mediterranean strain with the later Corded element". Hence his two main Nordic types show Corded and Danubian predominance, respectively .[29] The third "Keltic" or "Hallstatt" type Coon takes to have emerged in the European Iron Age, in Central Europe, where it was subsequently mostly replaced, but "found a refuge in Sweden and in the eastern valleys of southern Norway."[30]

Coon further recognizes the following terminology of earlier authors:[31]

  • Fenno-Nordic, "a hypothetical eastern branch of the Nordic race"
  • Noric, "a blond, Dinaricized Nordic"
  • Osterdal type, "the classic Iron Age Nordic, as found today in the eastern valleys of Norway"
  • Sub-Nordic, "a racial group which would fall partly in the East Baltic and partly in the Neo-Danubian categories"
  • Trønderlagen type or Trønder type, "a variety of Nordic with an excessive Corded element and Upper Palaeolithic mixture"
  • Anglo-Saxon type, "a sub-type of Nordic which contains unreduced Upper Palaeolithic mixture"

Depigmentation theory[edit]

Coon's (1939) theory that the Nordic race was a depigmentated variation of the greater Mediterranean racial stock was also supported by his mentor Earnest Albert Hooton who in the same year published Twilight of Man, which notes: "The Nordic race is certainly a depigmented offshoot from the basic long-headed Mediterranean stock. It deserves separate racial classification only because its blond hair (ash or golden), its pure blue or gray eyes".[32][33] A 1990s study by Ulrich Mueller found that depigmentation of Nordic peoples around the Baltic Sea likely occurred due to vitamin D deficiency amongst peoples living there 10,000-30,000 years ago who had a lack of access to vitamin D foods such as dairy products at the time. Depigmentation allowed greater amount of ultraviolet B light to be absorbed through the skin to synthesize to produce vitamin D.[34]


Further information: Master race and Racial supremacy

By the early twentieth century the concept of a "masterly" Nordic race had become familiar enough that the British psychologist William McDougall, writing in 1920, stated:

Among all the disputes and uncertainties of the ethnographers about the races of Europe, one fact stands out clearly—namely, that we can distinguish a race of northerly distribution and origin, characterized physically by fair colour of hair and skin and eyes, by tall stature and dolichocephaly (i.e. long shape of head), and mentally by great independence of character, individual initiative, and tenacity of will. Many names have been used to denote this type, ... . It is also called the Nordic type.[35]

Nordicists claimed that Nordics had formed upper tiers of ancient civilizations, even in the Mediterranean civilizations of antiquity, which had declined once this dominant race had been assimilated. Thus they argued that ancient evidence suggested that leading Romans like Nero, Sulla, and Cato were blond or red-haired.[36][37][38][39]

Some Nordicists admitted the Mediterranean race was superior to the Nordic in terms of artistic ability. However, the Nordic race was regarded as superior on the basis that, although Mediterranean peoples were culturally sophisticated, it was the Nordics who were alleged to be the innovators and conquerors, having an adventurous spirit that no other race could match.

The Alpine race was usually regarded as inferior to both the Nordic and Mediterranean races, making up the traditional peasant class of Europe while Nordics occupied the aristocracy and led the world in technology, and Mediterraneans were regarded as more imaginative.[40]

Opponents of Nordicism rejected these arguments. The anti-Nordicist writer Giuseppe Sergi argued in his influential book The Mediterranean Race (1901) that there was no evidence that the upper tiers of ancient societies were Nordic, insisting that historical and anthropological evidence contradicted such claims. Sergi argued that Mediterraneans constituted "the greatest race in the world", with a creative edge absent in the Nordic race. According to him, they were the creators of all the major ancient civilizations, from Mesopotamia to Rome.

This argument was later repeated by C.G. Seligman, who wrote that "it must, I think, be recognized that the Mediterranean race has actually more achievement to its credit than any other".[41] Even Carleton Coon insisted that among Greeks "the Nordic element is weak, as it probably has been since the days of Homer ... It is my personal reaction to the living Greeks that their continuity with their ancestors of the ancient world is remarkable, rather than the opposite."[42]

In the USA[edit]

President Coolidge signs the 1924 immigration act, restricting non Northern European immigration. John J. Pershing is on the President's right.



Grant argued the Nordic race had been responsible for most of humanity's great achievements, and admixture was "race suicide" and unless eugenic policies were enacted, the Nordic race would be supplanted by inferior races. Future president Calvin Coolidge agreed, stating "Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides."[44]

The Immigration Act of 1924 was signed into law by President Coolidge. This was designed to reduce the number of immigrants from Southern Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia, exclude Asian immigrants altogether, and favor immigration from the British Isles, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

The spread of these ideas also affected popular culture. F. Scott Fitzgerald invokes Grant's ideas through a character in part of The Great Gatsby, and Hilaire Belloc jokingly rhapsodied the "Nordic man" in a poem and essay in which he satirised the stereotypes of Nordics, Alpines and Mediterraneans.[45]

Nordicist thought in Germany[edit]

Hans F. K. Günther (1891–1968), prominent German racial theorist who helped to popularize Nordicism in his country.

In Germany, however, the influence of Nordicism remained powerful. There it was known under the term "Nordischer Gedanke" (Nordic thought).

This phrase was coined by the German eugenicists Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz. It appeared in their 1921 work Human Heredity, which insisted on the innate superiority of the Nordic race.[46]

Adapting the arguments of Arthur Schopenhauer and others to Darwinian theory, they argued that the qualities of initiative and will-power identified by earlier writers had arisen from natural selection, because of the tough landscape in which Nordic peoples evolved. This had ensured that weaker individuals had not survived.

This argument was derived from earlier eugenicist and Social Darwinist ideas. According to the authors, the Nordic race arose in the ice age, from:

quite a small group which, under stress of rapidly changing conditions (climate, beasts of the chase) was exposed to exceptionally rigorous selection and was persistently inbred, thus acquiring the peculiar characteristics which persist today as the exclusive heritage of the Nordic race ... Philological, archaeological and anthropological researches combine to indicate that the primal home of the Indo-Germanic [i.e. Aryan] languages must have been in Northern Europe.[47]

They went on to argue that "the original Indo-Germanic civilization" was carried by Nordic migrants down to India, and that the physiognomy of upper-caste Indians "disclose a Nordic origin".[48][49][50]

By this time, Germany was well-accustomed to theories of race and racial superiority due to the long presence of the Völkish movement, the philosophy that Germans constituted a unique people, or volk, linked by common blood. While Volkism was popular mainly among Germany's lower classes and was more a romanticized version of ethnic nationalism, Nordicism attracted German anthropologists and eugenicists.

Hans F. K. Günther, one of Fischer's students, first defined "Nordic thought" in his programmatic book Der Nordische Gedanke unter den Deutschen.[51] He became the most influential German in this field. His Short Ethnology of the German People (1929) was very widely circulated.

In his Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Race-Lore of the German Volk), published 1922, Günther identified five principal European races instead of three, adding the East Baltic race and Dinaric race to Ripley's categories.[21] He used the term Ostic instead of Alpine.[21] He focused on their supposedly distinct mental attributes.

Günther criticised the Völkish idea, stating that the Germans were not racially unified, but were actually one of the most racially diverse peoples in Europe. Despite this, many Völkists who merged Völkism and Nordicism embraced Günther's ideas, most notably the Nazis.[52][53]

Nazi Nordicism[edit]

Further information: Nazism and race
Adolf Hitler. Hitler was a proponent of the concept of the Aryan race and Aryanism. He viewed the Nordic racial subtype as being at the top of the racial hierarchy within the Aryan race.

Adolf Hitler read Human Heredity shortly before he wrote Mein Kampf, and called it scientific proof of the racial basis of civilization.[54] Its arguments were also repeated by the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, in his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930).

Nazi racial theories, such as those of Julius Evola, held the Atlanteans to be a race of Nordic supermen, and Alfred Rosenberg wrote of a "Nordic-Atlantean" master race whose civilization was lost through inward corruption and betrayal. The Occult and Nazism Re-Examined. According to Rosenberg, the Nordic race had evolved in a now-lost landmass off the coast of Europe, perhaps mythical Atlantis, migrated through northern Europe and expanded further south to Iran and India where it founded the Aryan cultures of Zoroastrianism and Hinduism. Like Grant and others, he argued that the entrepreneurial energy of the Nordics had "degenerated" when they mixed with "inferior" peoples.

With the rise of Hitler, Nordic theory became the norm within German culture. In some cases the "Nordic" concept became an almost abstract ideal rather than a mere racial category. For example Hermann Gauch wrote in 1933 (in a book which was banned in the Third Reich[55]) that the fact that "birds can be taught to talk better than other animals is explained by the fact that their mouths are Nordic in structure." He further claimed that in humans, "the shape of the Nordic gum allows a superior movement of the tongue, which is the reason why Nordic talking and singing are richer."[56]

Such views were extreme, but more mainstream Nordic theory was institutionalized. Hans F. K. Günther, who joined the Nazi Party in 1932, was praised as a pioneer in racial thinking, a shining light of Nordic theory. Most official Nazi comments on the Nordic Race were based on Günther's works, and Alfred Rosenberg presented Günther with a medal for his work in anthropology.

Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz were also appointed to senior positions overseeing the policy of Racial Hygiene. Madison Grant's book was the first non-German book to be translated and published by the Nazi Reich press, and Grant proudly displayed to his friends a letter from Hitler claiming that the book was "his Bible."[57][58]

The Nazi state used such ideas about the differences between European races as part of their various discriminatory and coercive policies which culminated in the Holocaust. Ironically, in Grant's first edition of his popular book, he classified the Germans as being primarily Nordic, but in his second edition, published after the USA had entered World War I, he had re-classified the now enemy power as being dominated by "inferior" Alpines.

Günther's work agreed with Grant's, and the German anthropologist frequently stated that the Germans are definitely not a fully Nordic people. Hitler himself was later to downplay the importance of Nordicism in public for this very reason. The standard tripartite model placed most of the population of Hitler's Germany in the Alpine category, especially after the Anschluss.


Nazi legislation identifying the ethnic and "racial" affinities of the Jews reflects the populationist concept of race. Discrimination was not restricted to Jews who belonged to the "Oriental-Armenoid" race, but was directed against all members of the Jewish ethnic population.[59]

The German Jewish journalist Kurt Caro (1905–1979) who emigrated to Paris in 1933 and served in the British army from 1943,[60] published a book under the pseudonym Manuel Humbert claiming to unmask Hitler's "Mein Kampf" in which he stated the following racial composition of the Jewish population of Central Europe: 23,8% Lapponid race, 21,5% Nordic race, 20,3% Armenoid race, 18,4% Mediterranean race, 16,0% Oriental race.[61]

By 1939 Hitler had abandoned Nordicist rhetoric in favour of the idea that the German people as a whole were united by distinct "spiritual" qualities. Nevertheless, Nazi eugenics policies continued to favor Nordics over Alpines and other racial groups, particularly during the war when decisions were being made about the incorporation of conquered peoples into the Reich.[62][63][64]

In 1942 Hitler stated in private,





Nordicist thought in Italy[edit]

Nordicist thought existed in Italy, and particularly amongst northern Italians.[citation needed] Nordicism was controversial in Italy because of common Nordicist perceptions of Mediterranean people, and especially southern Italians, being racially degenerate. The distinction between a superior northern Italy and a degenerate and an inferior southern Italy was promoted by Carlo Formichi, the Vice-President of the Italian Academy, who in 1921 said that Italy needed "a great revolution ..., a return to the genius of the noble Aryan race, which is after all our race, but that has been overcome by the Semitic civilization and mentality".[70]

Fascist Nordicism[edit]

Benito Mussolini. Mussolini was initially a strong proponent of Mediterraneanism, however with the rise in influence of pro-Nordicist Nazism, Mussolini promoted Aryanism and recognized Italians as having Nordic-Mediterranean heritage.

Italian Fascism's stance towards Nordicism changed from being initially hostile to being favourable.

Italian Fascism strongly rejected the common Nordicist conception of the Aryan race that idealized "pure" Aryans as having certain physical traits that were defined as Nordic such as fair skin, blond hair and light eyes.[71] The antipathy by Mussolini and other Italian Fascists to Nordicism was over the existence of what they viewed as the Mediterranean inferiority complex that they claimed had been instilled into Mediterraneans by the propagation of such theories by German and Anglo-Saxon Nordicists who viewed Mediterranean peoples as racially degenerate and thus in their view inferior.[71] However traditional Nordicist claims of Mediterraneans being degenerate due to having a darker colour of skin than Nordics had long been rebuked in anthropology through the depigmentation theory that claimed that lighter skinned peoples had been dipigmented from a darker skin, this theory has since become a widely accepted view in anthropology.[72] Anthropologist Carleton S. Coon in his work The races of Europe (1939) subscribed to depigmentation theory that claimed that Nordic race's light-coloured skin was the result of depigmentation from their ancestors of the Mediterranean race.[33] Mussolini refused to allow Italy to return again to this inferiority complex, initially rejecting Nordicism.[71]

In the early 1930s, with the rise to power of the Nazi Party in Germany with Hitler's emphasis on a Nordicist conception of the Aryan race, strong tensions arose between the Fascists and the Nazis over racial issues. In 1934, in the aftermath of Austrian Nazis killing Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, an ally of Italy, Mussolini became enraged and responded by angrily denouncing Nazism. Mussolini rebuked Nazism's Nordicism, claiming that the Nazis' emphasizing of a common Nordic "Germanic race" was absurd, saying "a Germanic race does not exist. ... We repeat. Does not exist. Scientists say so. Hitler says so."[73] That Germans were not purely Nordic was indeed acknowledged by Nazi racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther in his book Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (1922) ("Racial Science of the German People"), where Günther recognized Germans as being composed of five Aryan subtype races: Nordic, Mediterranean, Dinaric, Alpine, and East Baltic while asserting that the Nordics were the highest in a racial hierarchy of the five subtypes.[74]

By 1936, the tensions between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany reduced and relations became more amicable. In 1936, Mussolini decided to launch a racial program in Italy, and was interested in the racial studies being conducted by Giulio Cogni.[75] Cogni was a Nordicist but did not equate Nordic identity with Germanic identity as was commonly done by German Nordicists.[76] Cogni had travelled to Germany where he had become impressed by Nazi racial theory and sought to create his own version of racial theory.[77] On 11 September 1936, Cogni sent Mussolini a copy of his newly published book Il Razzismo (1936).[75] Cogni declared the racial affinity of the Mediterranean and Nordic racial subtypes of the Aryan race and claimed that the intermixing of Nordic Aryans and Mediterranean Aryans in Italy produced a superior synthesis of Aryan Italians.[76] Cogni addressed the issue of racial differences between northern and southern Italians, declaring southern Italians were mixed between Aryan and non-Aryan races, that he claimed was most likely due to infiltration by Asiatic peoples in Roman times and later Arab invasions.[75] As such, Cogni viewed Southern Italian Mediterraneans as being polluted with orientalizing tendencies.[75] Initially Mussolini was not impressed with Cogni's work, however Cogni's ideas later entered into the official Fascist racial policy several years later.[75]

In 1938 Mussolini was concerned that if Italian Fascism did not recognize Nordic heritage within Italians, that the Mediterranean inferiority complex would return to Italian society.[71] Therefore in summer 1938, the Fascist government officially recognized Italians as having Nordic heritage and being of Nordic-Mediterranean descent and in a meeting with PNF members, and in June 1938 in a meeting with PNF members, Mussolini identified himself as Nordic and declared that previous policy of focus on Mediterraneanism was to be replaced by a focus on Aryanism.[71] Mussolini in July 1938 declared that Italians had strong Nordic heritage particularly through the heritage of the Germanic tribe of the Lombards who conquered Italy after the collapse of the Roman Empire and claimed that the intermixing of Mediterranean Romans with the Nordic Lombards was the last significant racial mixing that occurred in Italy and that none had occurred since.[78]

Post-Nazi re-evaluation and decline of Nordicism[edit]

Even before the rise of Nazism, Grant's concept of "race" lost favor in the USA in the polarizing political climate after World War I, including the Great Migration and the Great Depression. By the 1930s, criticism of the Nordicist model was growing in Britain and America. The British historian Arnold J. Toynbee in A Study of History (1934) argued that the most dynamic civilisations have arisen from racially mixed cultures. In southern Europe the theory understandably had less influence.

This required the abandonment of Grant's gradations of "white" in favour of the "One-drop theory"—which was embraced by white supremacists and black supremacists alike. Among the latter were Marcus Garvey, and, in part, W. E. B. Du Bois, at least in his later thought.[79]

With the rise of Nazism many critics pointed to the flaws in the theory, repeating the arguments made by Sergi and others that the evidence of ancient Nordic achievement is thin when set against the civilizations of the Mediterranean and elsewhere. The equation of Nordic and Aryan identity was also widely criticised.[80]

In 1936 M.W. Fodor, writing in The Nation, claimed that racialised Germanic nationalism arose from an inferiority complex:

No race has suffered so much from an inferiority complex as has the German. National Socialism was a kind of Coué method of converting the inferiority complex, at least temporarily, into a feeling of superiority.[81]

Some Lombard nationalists took it up in Italy, but even after the establishment of Benito Mussolini's fascist government racial theories were not prominent.[82] Mussolini stated, "Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist."[83]

After World War II, the categorization of peoples into "superior" and "inferior" groups fell even further out of political and scientific favor, eventually leading to the characterization of such theories as scientific racism. The tripartite subdivision of "Caucasians" into Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean groups persisted among some scientists into the 1960s, notably in Carleton Coon's book The Origin of Races (1962).

Already race academics such as A. James Gregor were heavily criticizing Nordicism. In 1961 Gregor called it a "philosophy of despair", on the grounds that its obsession with purity doomed it to ultimate pessimism and isolationism.[84]

As late as 1977 the Swedish author Bertil Lundman wrote a book The Races And Peoples Of Europe mentioning a "Nordid Race". The development of the Kurgan theory of Indo-European origins challenged the Nordicist equation of Aryan and Nordic identity, since it placed the earliest Indo-European speakers around central Asia and/or far-eastern Europe (although according the Kurgan hypothesis some Proto-Indo-Europeans did eventually migrate into Central and Northern Europe and become the ancestors of the Nordic peoples.)

The original German term used by Ripley, "Theodiscus", which is translated into English as Teutonic, has fallen out of favour amongst German-speaking scholars, and is restricted to a somewhat ironical usage similar to the archaic teutsch, if used at all. While the term is still present in English, which has retained it in some contexts as a translation of the traditional Latin Teutonicus (most notably the aforementioned Teutonic Order), it should not be translated into German as "Teutonisch" except when referring to the historical Teutones.

Early criticism: depigmentation theory[edit]

Nordicism was subject to substantial criticism. Carleton Steven Coon in his work The races of Europe (1939) subscribed to depigmentation theory that claimed that Nordic race's light-coloured skin was the result of depigmentation from their ancestors of the Mediterranean race.[33] The depigmentation theory received notable support from later anthropologists, thus in 1947 Melville Jacobs noted: "To many physical anthropologists Nordic means a group with an especially high percentage of blondness, which represent a depigmentated Mediterranean".[85] In her work Races of Man (1963, 2nd Ed. 1965) Sonia Mary Cole went further to argue that the Nordic race belongs to the "brunette Mediterrenean" Caucasoid division but that it differs only in its higher percentage of blonde hair and light eyes. The Harvard anthropologist Claude Alvin Villee, Jr. also was a notable proponent of this theory, writing: "The Nordic division, a partially depigmized branch of the Mediterranean group."[86] Collier's Encyclopedia as late as 1984 contains an entry for this theory, citing anthropological support.[87] Early 21st century genetic studies have provided new insights into the origins of Irish people as well as their neighbours from other parts of the British Isles. Correspondingly, researchers in the field have suggested that migrations from Prehistoric Iberia can be viewed as the primary source for their genetic material, having demonstrated marked similarities with modern representatives of the aforementioned time period in that of the Basque people. However, the majority of Irish males fall under the R1b sub-clade L-21, which is quite rare for Basques.[88][89]

Lundman (1977)[edit]

In his work The Races and Peoples of Europe (1977) the Swedish anthropologist Bertil Lundman introduced the term "Nordid" to describe the Nordic race, described as follows:

"The Nordid race is light-eyed, mostly rather light-haired, low-skulled and long-skulled (dolichocephalic), tall and slender, with more or less narrow face and narrow nose, and low frequency of blood type gene q. The Nordid race has several subraces. The most divergent is the Faelish subrace in western Germany and also in the interior of southwestern Norway. The Faelish subrace is broader of face and form. So is the North-Atlantid subrace (the North-Occidental race of Deniker), which is like the primary type, but has much darker hair. Above all in the oceanic parts of Great Britain the North-Atlantic subrace is also very high in blood type gene r and low in blood type gene p. The major type with distribution particularly in Scandinavia is here termed the Scandid or Scando-Nordid subrace."

Forensic anthropology[edit]

Some forensic scientists, pathologists and anthropologists up to the 1990s continued to use the tripartite division of Caucasoids: Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean, based on their cranial anthropometry. The anthropologist Wilton M. Krogman for example identified Nordic racial crania in her work "The Human Skeleton in Forensic Medicine" (1986) as being "dolichochranic".[90] In his work "Forensic Pathology", published in 1991, Bernard Knight, a Professor of Forensic Pathology, also uses the tripartite model and identifies the Nordic race based on its dolichocephalic skull shape.[91] Forensic anthropologists of the 21st century however no longer continue to use the tripartite division of Caucasoids, but instead only recognise Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid through analysis of skeletal remains and not subraces of these racial groups.[92]

21st century[edit]

In the 21st century there is a prevailing view amongst many anthropologists and biologists that completely "pure" races do not and have not existed.[93]

Genetic reality[edit]

The emergence of population genetics further undermined the categorisation of Europeans into clearly defined origin groups. A 2007 study on the genetic history of Europe found that the most important genetic differentiation in Europe occurs on a line from the north to the south-east (northern Europe to the Balkans), with another east-west axis of differentiation across Europe.[94][95][96]

See also[edit]

Race and political movements:


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Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]