Mediterranean race

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The Mediterranean race was one of the three sub-categories into which the people of Europe were divided by anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, following the publication of William Z. Ripley's book "The Races of Europe" (1899). The others were "Nordic" and "Alpine".

Madison Grant's map, from 1916, charting the distribution of the "European races". Nordic race is shown in bright red; green indicates the Alpine race; yellow, the Mediterranean race.

The Mediterranean race was thought to be prevalent in southern Europe, parts of North Africa, South Asia^[1], and the Middle East, and was characterised by moderate to short stature, narrow shoulders, long skull (dolichocephalic), dark hair, dark eyes & complexion. According to some theorists of this period this was due to racial mixing with Asian and African peoples, others argued that it had an independent history and identity.

[edit] Early debates

These differentiations occurred following long-standing claims about the alleged differences between the Nordic and the Mediterranean people. Such debates arose from responses to ancient writers who had commented on differences between northern and southern Europeans. For the Greeks and Romans, Germanic and Celtic peoples were often stereotyped as wild red haired barbarians. Aristotle argued that the Greeks were an ideal race because they possessed a medium skin-tone, in contrast to pale northerners and black Africans. However Tacitus argued that the Germans were an "unmixed" people, who had preserved their ancient language and race. By the nineteenth century long-standing cultural and religious differences between Protestant northern Europe and the Catholic south were being reinterpreted in racial terms.^[2]

[edit] Racial theories

By the late nineteenth century, in Germany, Britain and the USA it was common for white supremacists to promote the merits of the blond, blue-eyed Nordic race as the most advanced of human population groups: the "master race". Southern Europeans were deemed to be inferior, an argument that dated back to Arthur de Gobineau's claims that racial mixing was responsible for the decline of the Roman Empire.^[3] However, in southern Europe itself alternative models were developed which stressed the merits of Mediterranean peoples, drawing on established traditions dating from ancient and Renaissance claims about the superiority of civilization in the south. Some of these arguments were taken up by African-American writers to counter the arguments of Nordicists who considered any deviation from "pure" whiteness to be a taint.

The fact that Mediterranean peoples were responsible for the most important of ancient western civilizations was a problem for the promoters of Nordic superiority. Giuseppe Sergi's much-debated book The Mediterranean Race (1901) argued that the Mediterranean race had in fact originated in Africa, and that it also included a number of dark-skinned African peoples, such as Ethiopians. Sergi's studies claimed that the Mediterraneans, the Africans and the Nordics all originated from an original Eurafrican Race.^[4]. According to Sergi the Mediterranean race, the "greatest race of the world", was responsible for the great civilizations of ancient times, including those of Egypt, India, Carthage, Greece, and Rome. These Mediterranean peoples were quite distinct from the peoples of northern Europe. Sergi also argued that the Mediterranean race was closely related to a Hamitic African population, which included such groups as the Tutsi.^[5] To Sergi the Semites were a branch of the Eurafricans who were closely related to the Mediterraneans.^[6].

In the USA this idea was taken up in the early twentieth century by African-American writers such as W.E.B. Dubois, who used it to attack white supremacist ideas about racial "purity". Such publications as the Journal of Negro History stressed the cross-fertilization of cultures between Africa and Europe, and adopted Sergi's view that the "civilizing" race had originated in Africa itself.^[7] This fed into the development of Afrocentrism.

The fascist dictator Mussolini was critical of some aspects of the Nordicism and Nordic racism promoted by his allies the Nazis, a fact which can be explained by his own experiences with Nordicist "racial science". Emil Ludwig recorded in his talks with Mussolini that Mussolini was arrested in 1903 in Zurich by the police and subjected to an anthropometric examination.^[8]

[edit] 20th century

Later in the 20th century the concept of a distinctive Mediterranean race was still considered useful by theorists such as Earnest Hooton in Up From the Ape (1931) and Carleton Coon in his revised edition of Ripley's Races of Europe (1939). These writers thought the Nordic race was the northern variety of Mediterraneans that lost pigmentation through natural selection due to the environment.

Hooton argued that even a skilled anthropologist would have a difficult time separating a Nordic from Mediterranean skeleton. He thought a destabilized blend of the two existed mostly in Britain that he labeled "Nordic-Mediterranean", with hazel eyes (rather than pure brown), dark hair color and dolichocephalic skull. Coon argued that smaller Mediterraneans traveled by land from the Mediterranean basin north into Europe in the Mesolithic era. Taller Mediterraneans (Atlanto-Mediterraneans) were Neolithic seafarers who sailed in reed-type boats and colonized the Mediterranean basin from a Near Eastern origin. He argued that they also colonized Britain where their descendants may be seen today, characterized by brown hair and robust features. He stressed the central role of the Mediterraneans in his works, claiming "The Mediterraneans occupy the center of the stage; their areas of greatest concentration are precisely those where civilization is the oldest. This is to be expected, since it was they who produced it and it, in a sense, that produced them". ^[9]

After the 1960s the concept of a specific Mediterranean race fell out of favor, though the distinctive features of Mediterranean populations continued to be recognized.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Racial Theories in Fascist Italy, by Aaron Gilette, 2002, Routledge, London.
• Talks with Mussolini, Emil Ludwig, Boston: Little, Brown. 1933, p.202.
• The Aryan Myth, Leon Poliakov, New York: Basic Books. 1974

[edit] External links

• Excerpt on the Mediterranean subrace from Earnest Hooton, 1946.
• Excerpt on the Mediterranean subrace from Carleton Coon, 1958.
  • Examples of Mediterraneans (plates 16-26) from Coon's The Races of Europe