Aryan once meant people who performed the right rituals, not a race
In the Rigveda and the Avesta, being Arya was about language and worship: sacrifice to the proper gods with the proper hymns and you belonged. The notion of an Aryan race was a nineteenth-century European invention, and its path from a French aristocrat's theory to Nazi law explains why scholars now avoid the word.
The term comes from a reconstructed Proto-Indo-Iranian stem, arya, which the prehistoric Indo-Iranians probably used for themselves. Vedic Indians spoke of Aryavarta, the land of the Aryans, and set themselves apart from outsiders called an-arya. Ancient Iranians likewise called themselves airya and imagined a mythical homeland, Airyanem Vaejah. The same root sits behind the place names Iran and Alania. By the Buddha's time, around the fifth to fourth century BCE, the Sanskrit word had come to mean noble. There is no evidence the wider Proto-Indo-European family used it as a name for itself.
Europe met the word through scholarship. Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron rendered it in French in 1771, correctly linking Greek, Avestan and the name Iran, and a German translation introduced Arier five years later. William Jones translated the Sanskrit as noble in 1794. English acquired Aryan as an adjective in 1839 and a noun a decade later, and for a century its scope wavered between all Indo-Europeans and just the Indo-Iranians.
The racial turn came in the 1850s, when Arthur de Gobineau claimed the ancient Indo-Europeans were a superior breed whose descendants formed a distinct race. Followers such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain spread the idea among European supremacists, and in 1887 a new German usage cast Aryan as a white, non-Jewish northern European. Hitler built on loose notions that ancient Aryans in India had been taller and paler than their neighbours and carried Europe's creativity with them.
Under Nazi rule people classified as Aryan were treated as a master race while Jews, Roma and Slavs faced legal discrimination. Jews, cast as the chief enemy, were targeted in the Holocaust, and the Roma, themselves of Indo-Aryan descent, in the Porajmos. Because of that history, Western scholars now prefer Indo-Iranian, keeping Indo-Aryan only for the Indic branch, while far-right groups still use the older word.
Source: Aryan
