Emile Burnouf
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Émile-Louis Burnouf (1821-1907) was a leading nineteenth-century Orientalist and racialist whose ideas influenced the development of theosophy and Aryanism. He was a professor with faculté de lettres at Nancy university, then principal of the French School of Athens from 1867 to 1875. He was also the author of a Sanskrit-French dictionary (1866).
Emile was the nephew of Eugene Burnouf, the founder of Buddhist studies in the West. Following in his footsteps, Emile sought to connect Buddhist and Hindu thought to Western European classical culture. In so doing, he claimed to have rediscovered the early Aryan belief-system.
Burnouf believed that only Aryan and Semitic peoples were truly religious in temperament.
Science has proved that the original tendency of the Aryan peoples is pantheism, while monotheism proper is the constant doctrine of Semitic populations. These are surely the two great beds in which flow the sacred stream of humanity. But the facts show is, in the West, peoples of Aryan origin in some sort Semiticised in Christianity. The whole of Europe is at once Aryan and Christian; that is to say pantheistic by its origin and natural dispositions, but accustomed to admit the dogma of creation from a Semitic influence. ([The Science of Religions]).
Burnouf's work takes for granted a racial hierarchy that places Aryans at the top as a master race. His writings are also full of prejudicial and often deeply anti-Semitic statements. Burnouf believed that Semitic peoples were an inferior sub-group of the white race, and that the Hebrew peoples were divided into two races, worshippers of Elohim and worshippers of Yahweh. The latter were in fact Aryans - "their headquarters were taken up north of Jerusalem, in Galilee" - and they conflicted with the more powerful priestly faction. These ideas developed into the Nazi claim that Jesus was really an Aryan.
Burnouf was consulted by Heinrich Schliemann over his discovery of swastika motifs in the ruins of Troy. Burnouf claimed that swastika originated as a stylised depiction of a fire-altar seen from above, and was thus the essential symbol of the Aryan race. The popularisation of this idea by Schliemann and Burnouf was mainly responsible for the adoption of the swastika in the West as an Aryan symbol.
Works
La Bagavad-Gitâ, ou le Chant du Bienheureux, poème indien, Paris, 1861.Dictionnaire classique sanscrit-français (...) contenant le dêvanâgari, sa transcription européenne, l'interprétation, les racines, Nancy, 1863.
Histoire de la littérature grecque, 2 volumes, Ch. Delagrave, Paris, 1869.
Mémoires sur l'Antiquité, Maisonneuve et Cie, Paris, 1879.
La science des religions, Ch. Delagrave, Paris, 1885.
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