The sometimes interwoven traditions that have dominated the postwar period-personified by Dumezil and Gimbutas—have generally been considered to repr… - Stefan Arvidsson

After the fall of Nazi Germany, the term “Aryan” was replaced more and more frequently by “Indo-European." One contributing factor to this—aside from the most obvious one—was the fact that postwar scholarship was domi­nated by Georges Dumézil, who never (with one exception) spoke about "Ary­ans" or “Aryan religion". 22

The discourse about the Indo-Europeans was also dependent on the most powerful movement of the nineteenth century, imperialism. To an even greater extent than concerned the view of Semites, racism was present in the scholars' depictions of how the Indo-European colonizers in ancient times conquered a dark, primitive original population. The Indo-Europeans were presented as humanity's cultural heroes, who, undefeated throughout history, spread knowledge and ruled over lower peoples, and who therefore seemed predestined to remain rulers even in the future. The “Aryan” colony of India came to have a special place in this context. The scholars' racist at­titude made them seek evidence in the Vedic texts that the ancient Aryan immigrants (aryas) had had a racial consciousness, and that the caste society was a kind of apartheid system from the very beginning. But reference to the higher castes as “Aryan brothers" could also be used for humanitar­ian aims. By referring to the relationship between Europeans and Indians, people imagined that they could more easily reform the Hindu culture and modernize or “Indo-Europeanize" Indian society. (310-11)

Muller and Schmidt shared the view that an original monotheism had survived beneath the surface o f the Indo-European mythologies. The main evidence for this was the reconstruction of the name of the highest god of the Indo-Europeans: *Diéus phater, “Heavenly Father." Scholars with Chris­tian faith and a preference for “Aryan ancestors" liked to present the Indo- Europeans as caretakers o f a religion that resembled true Christianity. A more radical researcher like Ernest Renan, on the other hand, idealized the polytheism of the Indo-Europeans. Along with Müller, Christian Lassen, Adolphe Pictet, and others, Renan constructed an ideologically very effective and long-lived opposition between Indo-European, or Aryan, and Semitic. They connected Shem's family line with monotheism, intolerance, egotism, conservatism, otherworldliness, irrational rituals, and a lack of feeling for art and nature. On the other hand, the Indo-European peoples were seen as spiritual, imaginative, humanistic, philosophical, sincere, and freedom loving. With the establishment of this dichotomy, the discourse about the Indo-Europeans became intimately connected with anti-Semitism during the second half of the nineteenth century. It is important to realize, however, that the exaltation of the Indo-Europeans or the Aryans—especially during the nineteenth century, but also later, for example, for the socialist Gordon Childe—was a song of praise for the modern citizen with a scientific out­ look, liberal values, and humanistic ideals. In the nineteenth century, the Indo-Europeans were mainly models for a progressive bourgeois ideology, and the attacks on Jewish and Semitic religiosity (which sometimes included Christianity) aimed to form a worldview that fitted modern society and was not necessarily connected to any racial ideology. (310)