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Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority Through Myths of Identity. By DOROTHY M. FIGUEIRA. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. viii, 205 pp. $62.50 (cloth); $20.95 (paper).
In this brilliantly argued book, University of Georgia comparative literature scholar Dorothy Figueira tackles a topic essential to understanding Indo-European history: the mythic ideal of an Aryan race. Focused on the texts mined to construct the Aryan myth from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century, the book details how a variety of Indian and European scholars used or invented the sources necessary to construct an idyllic Aryan mythic ancestry that they subsequently employed as a foil for a variety of theories of social authority.
The book is divided into two parts. The first, entitled "The Authority of an Absent Text," begins with Voltaire and the Enlightenment and describes how the earliest European Aryan myths were derived from poorly understood materials, many of dubious quality. Drawing upon a slim collection of secondary sources largely assembled by Jesuits, Voltaire, a former Jesuit himself, posited that Aryans and their religion represented a golden age from which humankind had strayed.
Romantic scholars further contributed to the Aryan myth. Identifying commonalities among Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and other European languages, Friedrich Schlegel fashioned a misguided linguistic theory that Sanskrit was the shared ancestral language of India and Europe and claimed that this heritage gave the two a foundational unity of thought and worldview. In a similar vein, Max Muller drew from the Rig Veda and other Sanskrit texts then available to derive a linguistic ideal of the Aryan as the founder of European languages, dismissing Jews and the Hebrew language as...