survey of historical references attempting to demonstrate that the
Aryans were light-skinned blue-eyed blonds.[103] The use of Arier to
mean 'non-Jewish' seems to have first occurred in 1887, when a
Viennese physical-fitness society decided to allow as members only
"Germans of Aryan descent" ( Deutsche arischer Abkunft ).[85] In The
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), which Stefan
Arvidsson notes is identified as "one of the most important proto-Nazi
texts",[107] British-German writer Houston Chamberlain theorized an
existential struggle to the death between a superior German-Aryan
race and a destructive Jewish-Semitic race.[108] The best-seller The
Passing of the Great Race , published by American writer Madison
Grant in 1916, warns of a danger of miscegenation with the immigrant
"inferior races" – including speakers of Indo-European languages (such
as Slavs, Italians, and Yiddish-speaking Jews) – allegedly faced by the
"racially superior" Germanic Aryans (that is: Americans
of English, German, and Scandinavian descent).[12]
Led by Guido von List (1848–1919) and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874–
1954), Ariosophists founded an ideological system
combining Völkisch nationalism with esoterism. Prophesying a coming
era of German (Aryan) world rule, they argued that a conspiracy against
Germans – said to have been instigated by the non-Aryan races, by the
Jews, or by the early Church – had "sought to ruin this ideal Germanic
world by emancipating the non-German inferiors in the name of a
spurious egalitarianism".[109]