You're either Aryan or a Jew

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1 Thus Jacolliot sought a version of the Mānavadharmaçāstra from the south of India, because it would be farther away from the Arabs, and thus, in his opinion, “purer.” It is 13 indeed odd that Jacolliot, such a fervent participant in the racial ideologies of late nineteenth century Europe, would descend into southern India to seek such a manuscript, as the south has the highest concentration of non-Aryan aboriginal Dravidians, who would be seen, in the race conscious paradigm of that era, as even more removed from Indo-Europeans than the Arabs who were threatening the north. In a volley of inductive leaps based on the most minimal of correspondences, Jacolliot then tries to show that all civilization as we know it has its source in India, has been inherited by Aryans, and either copied or corrupted by Semites. In his annotations on the figure of Narayana, “or he who moves on the waters,”32 he says, “Unconscious copyist; all the author of Genesis did was copy the Hindu and Chaldean traditions.”33 In the figure of Naya, the spirit that is divided into separate male and female parts, he sees the source of “the legend of woman from the side of man.”34 On the Hindu tradition of anointing with holy oil, he says, “The texts of these ceremonies were copied by Christianity.”35 He has a similar view on the origin of the practice of shaving the head: “All priests of the far east had tonsures already at a young age … this sign of the sacerdotal caste, preserved over the ages, became a Christian symbol.”36 On the custom of facing east while eating, he says, “Mohammed was inspired by these principles.”37 On the practice of wiping the mouth with the thumb, he says, “Catholicism has preserved these practices in certain ceremonies.”38 For Jacolliot, the Bible is simply a “code of pillage and debauchery.”39 Jacolliot’s free associations have linguistic correlates as well: “All the castes of India spoke and still speak agglutinating languages, and we know equally well that this was the distinctive trait of the original Chaldean-Babylonian idioms.”40 This is a wonderful paralogism: Indians speak agglutinating languages; Chaldean and Babylonian are agglutinating languages; therefore, Chaldeans and Babylonians are Indians. On the general customs of India, he says, 14 “How far removed we are from the Semitic customs, stupid and gross, customs of nomadic thugs.”41 These were nomads who were expelled from the garden of India: “The emigrations of the disinherited, the Hindu Chandala, … their habits of writing from right to left, imposed circumcision, which ended up passing into custom, their nomadic practices … this is the veritable source of the nations that we call Semitic.”42 It is important to note that the significant image of circumcision, which facilitates the connection between the candāla and Jews, is produced by Jacolliot’s misreading a Sanskrit word as referring to circumcision. The word that he misreads is dauçcarmayam, which Bühler translates as “diseased skin.”43 According to Jacolliot, the law of Manu says, “Those who have been circumcised, and who thus are rejected into the impure class of the Chandala … those who can only read from right to left, are excluded from funeral rites.”44 Thus he concludes that “the so-called Semites would only be the descendants of the Hindu Chandala,”45 and that “Chaldeans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Syrians, Phoenicians, and Arabs owe their origin to the various tribes of Chandala who emigrated from Hindustan at different epochs … in turn, the Hebrews were then to become the product of Chaldean emigration.”46 It is interesting to note that here, Jacolliot reveals himself as an antiSemite in the broadest linguistic sense of the term, disdaining not only Arabic and Hebrew speakers, but also an associative assortment of north Africans and southwest Asians