NON-ARYAN NORDICS
Professor Griffith Taylor's answer is that it has moved away. Taking the main races of the world as five—the Negroes and Negritos of Africa and the Pacific, the Australoids of Dravidian India, Australia, and Brazil, the Mediterranean race, the Alpine-Mongolian race, and the Nordics—he admits the reality of the race-barrier against the first two. But as between the other three— who cover nearly all the Euro-Asiatic land-mass and include such outliers as Japanese, Amerinds, and Poly- nesians—he denies it. " Racial differences exactly like those separating them " have, on his reading of the ethnological past, " been smoothed away in Europe it- self," where " their component stocks came into con- tact with each other long ago in Neolithic times."
One of the newer developments influencing these conclusions is his " migration-zone " theory. According to it the region where a given type is now found purest, is not that where it originated—its centre—but the limit to which. its migration flowed—its " margin." To take a simple illustration, if you want to hear the dialect of Cromwellian England or to recover its folk-song, you should visit, as Cecil Sharp did, the Appalachian Moun- tains. It used to be assumed that Africa was the original hoine of the negroes. It is now held that it is only one of the terminals in their outward march from the original human homeland in south-eastern Asia, other terminals being in Papua and Melanesia. Collating the geological, geographical, and ethnological evidence we get a tolerably clear picture of how the different types of mankind spread outward in successive waves along routes varied by periodic changes in geography and climate. The spread of languages is a different thing. A large proportion of the world's peoples speak languages imposed on them by conquering invaders—a process that may be repeated several times in the same place. Thus, to take the example of Ireland, we all know that the English language was brought there by conquerors within historic times. But Gaelic, in the view of most scholars, had been simi- larly imposed. The majority of Irishmen are of Medi- terranean race, and it is now widely held that the western peoples of that race spoke a Hamitic language, like the Berber which survives in the Atlas Mountains, a variety of the Hamitic-Semitic language-group, which still covers the habitats of the race in North Africa and Arabia up to the borders of Iran.
The term " Aryan," with which German Anti-semitism makes such play, is strictly, as all should know, not a race-description at all, but a language-description. But the Nazis tend to equate it with " Nordic," or at any rate to regard Nordics as the highest manifestation of " Aryan man." Now " Nordic " really is a race-descrip- tion ; yet the Nordic race, according to Professor Griffith Taylor, probably did not speak an Aryan language ! He thinks their tongue was Altaic, pointing to the well- recognised resemblances which Teutonic presents to Finnish and Ostiak, as well as to the Nordic race-charac- ters of Ostiaks and many Finns. It would seem, there- fore, as if the most race-conscious clement in Nazidom is probably non-Aryan. Signor Mussolini's Italians are in no better plight. The Italian nation contains two main races—Mediterranean and Alpine. The Medi- terraneans, as we have seen, are by origin Hamite- Semites ; the Alpines were probably not Aryans either. Of the Aryan language, Latin, which eventually imposed itself on the peninsula, we may note that, like Gaelic, it belongs to the most primitive Aryan groups—more primitive, e.g., than Greek or Teutonic.
And what of the Jews ? Neither race nor language defines a Jew. The Jewish community consists mainly of two races. About a quarter of it—the ex-Spanish Jews—are Mediterraneans ; the other three-quarters— the Ashkenazim of Germany, Poland, the Ukraine, Hungary, and Rumania—are Alpines. How these nor- thern Jews, the greater bulk of the community, have so largely lost their Mediterranean characters, is an inter- esting point ; but the simplest and commonest explana- tion is probably the right one, viz., large-scale proselytism. The essential thing about the Jews has always been, not race, but religion and culture. As such their community may present social, political, or economic problems to a European State, within whose borders its members dwell ; but it is impossible to suppose that it presents racial ones. Its races are simply two out of the three major races of Christian Europe.
Moreover, as has been said, Europe has already digested much more alien elements. On the margins fairly pure types may still be found. But between them and the original centre the successive- tides of migrants and re- migrants have left masses of hybrids. By atavism almost any human type may turn up in a Continental village ; and the broad identification of certain types (e.g., Alpine) with certain areas covers a great amount of variation in detail. To talk of " racial purity " inside a nation like the German is, scientifically, nonsense. It is enabled to " go down " by causes and motives with which valid science has nothing to do. Yet in the long run a house founded on a negation of knowledge is founded on sand. The countries where race-fanaticism dominates must eventually find that out. The astonishing thing is that one of them should be Germany, whose boast it had been in pre-Nazi days to incarnate the modern scientific spirit.
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