Mediterranean race

Irishman of Mediterranean type, from Augustus Henry Keane's Man, Past and Present (1899).

Racial 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. The Greek and Roman people considered the Germanic and Celtic peoples to be wild, red haired barbarians. Aristotle contended that the Greeks were an ideal people because they possessed a medium skin-tone, in contrast to pale northerners. By the 19th century, long-standing cultural and religious differences between Protestant northwestern Europe and the Catholic south were being reinterpreted in racial terms.[11]

An Englishman from Devon given as an example of the Mediterranean type of the Caucasoid race by 19th century race theorist William Z. Ripley's The Races of Europe (1899).

In the 19th century, the division of humanity into distinct races became a matter for scientific debate. In 1870, Thomas Huxley argued that there were four basic racial categories (Xanthochroic, Mongoloid, Australioid and Negroid). The Xanthochroic race were the "fair whites" of north and central Europe. According to Huxley,

On the south and west this type comes into contact and mixes with the "Melanochroi," or "dark whites" … In these regions are found, more or less mixed with Xanthochroi and Mongoloids, and extending to a greater or less distance into the conterminous Xanthochroic, Mongoloid, Negroid and Australioid areas, the men whom I have termed Melanochroi, or dark whites. Under its best form this type is exhibited by many Irishmen, Welshmen and Bretons, by Spaniards, South Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Arabs and high-caste Brahmins … I am much disposed to think that the Melanochroi are the result of an intermixture between the Xanthochroi and the Australoids. It is to the Xanthochroi and Melanochroi, taken together, that the absurd denomination of "Caucasian" is usually applied.[12]

By the late 19th century, Huxley's Xanthochroi group had been redefined as the "Nordic" race, whereas his Melanochroi became the Mediterranean race. As such, Huxley's Melanochroi eventually also comprised various other dark Caucasoid populations, including the Hamites (e.g. Berbers, Somalis, northern Sudanese, ancient Egyptians) and Moors.[13]

William Z. Ripley's The Races of Europe (1899) created a tripartite model, which was later popularised by Madison Grant. It divided Europeans into three main subcategories: Teutonic, Alpine and Mediterranean.[14] Ripley noted that although the European Caucasoid populations largely spoke (Indo-European) languages, the oldest extant language in Europe was Basque. He also acknowledged the existence of non-European Caucasoids, including various populations that did not speak Indo-European or Indo-Iranian languages, such as Hamito-Semitic and Turkish groups.[15]

Distribution of European racial types, from Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Mediterranean race is shown in yellow; green indicates the Alpine race; bright red is the Nordic race.

During the 20th century, white supremacists and Nordicists in Europe and the United States promoted the merits of the Nordic race as the most "advanced" of all the human population groups, designating them as the "master race". Southern/Eastern 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.[17][18] 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 civilisation in the south.

Giuseppe Sergi's much-debated book The Mediterranean Race (1901) argued that the Mediterranean race had likely originated from a common ancestral stock that evolved in the Sahara region or the Eastern part of Africa, in the region of the great lakes, near the sources of the Nile, including Somaliland, and which later spread from there to populate North Africa, and the circum-Mediterranean region.[19] Sergi added that the Mediterranean race "in its external characters is a brown human variety, neither white nor negroid, but pure in its elements, that is to say not a product of the mixture of Whites with Negroes or negroid peoples."[20] He explained this taxonomy as inspired by an understanding of "the morphology of the skull as revealing those internal physical characters of human stocks which remain constant through long ages and at far remote spots[...] As a zoologist can recognise the character of an animal species or variety belonging to any region of the globe or any period of time, so also should an anthropologist if he follows the same method of investigating the morphological characters of the skull[...] This method has guided me in my investigations into the present problem and has given me unexpected results which were often afterwards confirmed by archaeology or history."[21]

According to Sergi, the Mediterranean race was the "greatest race of the world" and was singularly responsible for the most accomplished civilizations of antiquity, including those of Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Persia, Ancient Rome, Carthage, Hittite Anatolia, Land of Punt, Mesopotamia and Phoenicia. The four great branches of the Mediterranean stock were the Libyans, the Ligurians, the Pelasgians and the Iberians.[22] Ancient Egyptians, Ethiopians and Somalis were considered by Sergi as Hamites, themselves constituting a Mediterranean variety and one situated close to the cradle of the stock.[23] To Sergi, the Semites were a branch of the Eurafricans who were closely related to the Mediterraneans.[24] He also asserted that the light-skinned Nordic race descended from the Eurafricans.[25]

According to Robert Ranulph Marett, "it is in North Africa that we must probably place the original hotbed of that Mediterranean race".[26]

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 S. Coon in his revised edition of Ripley's Races of Europe (1939). These writers subscribed to Sergi's depigmentation theory that the Nordic race was the northern variety of Mediterraneans that lost pigmentation through natural selection due to the environment.[27]

According to Coon, the "homeland and cradle" of the Mediterranean race was in North Africa and Southwest Asia, in the area from Morocco to Afghanistan. He further stated that Mediterraneans formed the major population element in Pakistan and North India.[8] Coon also argued that smaller Mediterraneans had travelled 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 colonised the Mediterranean basin from a Near Eastern origin. He argued that they also colonised Britain & Ireland where their descendants may be seen today, characterized by dark brown hair, dark eyes 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 civilisation is the oldest. This is to be expected, since it was they who produced it and it, in a sense, that produced them".[8]

C. G. Seligman also asserted that "it must, I think, be recognized that the Mediterranean race has actually more achievement to its credit than any other, since it is responsible for by far the greater part of Mediterranean civilization, certainly before 1000 B.C. (and probably much later), and so shaped not only the Aegean cultures, but those of Western as well as the greater part of Eastern Mediterranean lands, while the culture of their near relatives, the Hamitic pre-dynastic Egyptians, formed the basis of that of Egypt."[28]

In the U.S., the idea that the Mediterranean race included certain populations on the African continent was taken up in the early 20th century by African-American writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, 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.[29]

H. G. Wells referred to the Mediterranean race as the Iberian race.[30]

While the close relationship between people living on both sides of the Mediterranean has been confirmed by modern genetics,[31][32][33][34] the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense is rejected by modern scientific consensus. In 2019, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists stated: "The belief in 'races' as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past."[35]