The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe is a brilliant and unsettling exploration of the origins of European racism. Léon Poliakov, a pioneering historian of the Holocaust, traces the long intellectual journey that led to the devastating racial ideologies of the 20th century. Rather than focusing solely on the Nazi era, Poliakov digs deeper into the centuries-old myths of origin that European nations used to define themselves.
The book examines how the discovery of the Indo-European (Aryan) language family was distorted into a biological and social hierarchy. Poliakov masterfully demonstrates how Enlightenment thinkers, scientists, and romantic nationalists replaced traditional religious identities with "scientific" racial lineages, creating a divide between the "noble" Aryan and the "debased" Semite.
