Dear Readers,
After the First World War, Persia was in turmoil. It had endured Ottoman and Russian incursions as well as British attempts at infiltration. Its economy was vulnerable to foreign manipulation, and in 1923 its Shah had abandoned the country to seek medical treatment in Europe.
The commander of the Persian Cossack Brigade, Reza Pahlavi, decided to act. The Brigade, formed in 1879, modeled on the famed Russian Cossacks and led by Russian officers, was a strange tool: it served the Shah, but its commanders were loyal to the Tsar. During the Great War, Russia effectively took over the Brigade and expanded it into a division to fight the Ottomans. After the fall of the Tsar, the Brigade sided with the White Russian counterrevolutionaries in the Russian Revolution. The British, concerned about their power in Iran, intervened and removed the Russian officers. The Persian Cossack Brigade remained the only capable fighting force in the entire country.
British Major General Edmund Ironside picked Reza Pahlavi to run the Brigade. With secret British support, Pahlavi seized power in the 1921 coup, though nominally still under the authority of the incompetent Shah Ahmad of the Qajar dynasty. Shah Ahmad had presided over a corrupt regime that had lost British respect. The government was so corrupt it could not control the borders or raise taxes. It was going bankrupt, and the British wanted a stable central government to maintain order between British India and British Mesopotamia.
Reza Pahlavi ruled behind the scenes as Minister of War until 1923, when he became Prime Minister and Shah Ahmad left for Europe for medical treatment. Pahlavi and the Majles (parliament) asked the Shah to return, but he refused. Pahlavi considered founding a republic. Since the Great War, Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Russia had all become republics; Persia would simply be the next. But it was not to be—the idea of a shahless Iran was opposed by the common people. By 1925, the Majles’ patience had run out. Pahlavi had saved the state again by crushing an uprising of the Arab nationalist minority. The Majles deposed Ahmad in absentia and elected Reza Pahlavi as the new Shahanshah (“King of Kings”).
In the 1930s, under Reza Shah Pahlavi, Persia underwent sweeping reforms aimed at modernizing the state and consolidating central authority. He aggressively curtailed the power of tribal groups by disarming and resettling them, ending their traditional autonomy. Determined to assert national sovereignty, Reza Shah abolished unequal treaties with foreign powers in 1928 and reasserted control over Iran’s finances and communications, which had been dominated by British and Russian interests. His regime invested heavily in infrastructure, notably constructing the Trans-Iranian Railway and building roads, schools, and hospitals. Educational and judicial reforms weakened clerical influence, laying the groundwork for a centralized, non-clerical bureaucratic state.
In a controversial move toward social modernization, he banned the veil in 1935 and raised the legal marriage age for girls. He also made divorce laws more equitable. Reza Shah expanded trade with Nazi Germany in the 1930s to counterbalance British and Soviet influence and pressure. His rule marked the foundation of modern Iranian statehood.
The Nazi connection was odd—a strange influence of German cultural appropriation. We called Iranians “Persians” because the Greeks called them that. An exonym is a name given to a place by outsiders, while an endonym is the name used by the people who live there. For example, we call Egypt by its Greek-derived exonym “Aigyptos” (Αἴγυπτος) rather than by its Ancient Egyptian endonym “Kemet” or its modern Arabic name “Misr” (مِصر). Likewise, “Persia” is the exonym used by Western outsiders for centuries to refer to the Iranian plateau and its people, from the ancient Greek term “Persis” (Περσίς), referring to the region of Fars—the heartland of the Achaemenid Empire and the great Iranian kings like Cyrus the Great and Xerxes. Fars → Persia → Farsi—see how that works. However, the people have always called their country “Iran.” The endonym is Ērān, meaning “land of the Iranians/Aryans.”
The Aryans. Yes, indeed—let’s talk about European racist cultural appropriation.
Historically, the term “Aryan” refers to an Indo-Iranian group of peoples—ancestors of the Iranians and northern Indians—who spoke early Indo-Iranian languages. They left their homeland thousands of years ago and conquered northern India. The word comes from the Sanskrit and Avestan root arya, meaning “noble” or “free-born.” Ancient Iranians referred to themselves as Arya, literally calling their land the “Land of the Aryans.” But in their mind, this meant “land of the Iranians”—in other words, their land. They were simply being themselves—it was the Nazis who were being bizarre.
In Nazi Germany, the terms “Aryan” and “non-Aryan” were used to define who belonged within German society and who was to be excluded. These labels, which eventually carried the weight of life and death, began as academic terms describing linguistic groupings as European scholars learned and categorized foreign languages. But over the 19th and 20th centuries, they were twisted into racial markers that served ideological and later genocidal purposes. In truth, Aryans are not a race, and the so-called “Aryan master race” never existed.
This is a story of Europeans being weird about other peoples—playing intellectual parlor games to create mega-identity clubs to place themselves into while attaching themselves to the glory of earlier civilizations. This was especially pronounced among Northern and Germanic Europeans, who sought connections to the ancient and sophisticated civilizations of the Mediterranean and Near East—societies like Greece, Rome, Persia, and Egypt—whose achievements stood in stark contrast to the tribal and largely illiterate cultures of northern Europe in antiquity. It was a strange form of retrospective self-justification and cope. I once spoke to a Greek scholar about this tendency of Germanics to see Greco-Roman antiquity as part of their particular heritage; he was, let us say, not amused by that habit and laughed heartily when I joked that no one named Ludwig or Ragnar built the Parthenon.
So to return to the point: the original modern European use of the word “Aryan” came from linguistics, but was separate from the ancient Iranian use of the term for themselves. In the 19th century, scholars studying ancient languages discovered that Sanskrit, Persian (Farsi), Latin, Greek, and most European languages shared a common ancestry. They grouped these into what we now call the Indo-European language family and used the term “Aryan” to refer to the Indo-Iranian branch. That was all well and good—no harm, no foul. Simultaneously, scholars coined the term “Semitic” to classify languages like Hebrew, Arabic, and the Ethiopian languages like Amharic.
But as racial theories of the 19th century gained traction—especially with figures like Arthur de Gobineau, a French aristocrat who wrote on racial inequality in 1850s and thought it was a good thing—the term “Aryan” was ideologically redefined. This was happening throughout the 19th century in order to make terms sound more “scientific,” such as when Judenhass (meaning “hatred of Jews”) became Antisemitismus around 1879—because antisemitism sounded more like a scientific, analytical category of bigotry than Judenhass.
Gobineau and others recast linguistic similarity as racial kinship and then ranked those races in a hierarchy. The Aryans, they claimed, were the superior race. This fiction became widespread and helped cement the myth of an ancient “Aryan race” to which modern Europeans, especially Germans, supposedly belonged.
By the early 20th century, this distortion was entrenched. Thinkers like Houston Stewart Chamberlain expanded on Gobineau’s work and claimed Aryans were racially and culturally superior, particularly to Jews and other non-Europeans. This went so far as to rank Europeans in what we call Nordicism, whereby the late-developing Northern Europeans were recast as the superior Europeans over the ancient, advanced Latins and Greeks. These ideas were eagerly adopted by Nazi Party ideologues in the 1920s and 30s. Under Hitler’s leadership, the Aryan myth was radicalized into a tool of political identity and social control. “Aryan” was now far removed from its original use as a linguistic group—it became a symbol of blood, destiny, and national purity. Jews, Roma, and Black people were labeled “non-Aryans” and targeted as racial threats to German society.
It was the fabrication of a group identity—like saying a person from Portugal is the same as a person from Russia because they are “white.” It was always a strange claim, but it became even stranger with Darwin and the rise of eugenics. Once biological determinism and Darwinian ideas of survival were absorbed into these fabricated categories, the racialization of language terms like “Aryan” became a justification for state violence, sterilization, deportation, and mass murder.
The Nazis tapped into preexisting European thought—much of it clearly anti-Christian—held by people who still wanted to see themselves as Christians while clinging to their invented superiority and bigotry. The Nazis ruthlessly exploited this contradiction.
In 1935, the government of Iranian Shah Reza Pahlavi requested that foreign states use “Iran” instead of “Persia.” This was done to assert autonomy but also to appeal to the seemingly rising power of Adolf Hitler’s regime in Germany. The Nazis were among the first to comply. By then, Germany was a dictatorship, and Hitler was Führer of the Reich, rapidly rebuilding the military and economy. Iran saw Germany’s bizarre Aryan fixation as something they could leverage to gain freedom of action in international affairs and reduce British influence. Germany was more distant and less capable of direct control. If the Germans wanted to be Aryans, then surely they should follow the logic and reach out to the people who had called themselves Aryans long before it was trendy in the 1930s.
In 1936, the Nazi government declared that Iranians were by law Aryans like Germans and were not subject to the Nuremberg Laws—the Nazi race laws inspired by American Jim Crow—which targeted racial “inferiors” such as German Jews, who were stripped of their rights and citizenship. At the same time, while some Iranian officials used their diplomatic positions in Europe to help some Jews escape the Holocaust, the Pahlavi monarchy also cultivated a relationship with the Nazis and emphasized the Aryan connection to attract foreign investment. By the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe, nearly half of all Iranian imports came from Nazi Germany, and over 40 percent of Iranian exports went there. Germans were all over the country as developers and businessmen.
However, when the war effort was desperate in 1941, the British Empire decided to take another look at the Peacock Throne of Iran, which had grown so friendly with the Nazis. There was a price to pay for choosing the swastika over the crosses of Saint Andrew and Saint George.
