Arjalaisfilosofian kehitykseen merkittävästi vaikuttanut saksalainen filosofi Friedrich Schlegel liitti termin "arjalainen" osaksi herrarotu-käsitettä.[1]
Schlegel otti ratkaisevan askeleen samastaessaan kielen rotuun. Vaikka hän oli näin synnyttämässä arjalaisen rodun myyttiä, josta varsinkin saksalainen nuoriso villiintyi 1800-luvun alkupuolella, hän ei ollut saksalainen kiihkonationalisti. Hän kampanjoi juutalaisten emansipaation puolesta ja nai tunnetun juutalaisen filosofin Moses Mendelssohnin tyttären.[2] —Tapio Tamminen
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[1] The new anthropogeny of the gifted white European races was complete by 1819, when Friedrich Schlegel applied the term Aryan to this as yet anonymous Indic-Nordic master race. The word had been derived from Herodotus’s Arioi (an early name for the Medes and Persians) and recently used by French and German authors to designate these ancient peoples. However, Schlegel’s new usage caught on as he linked the root Ari with Ehre, the German word for honor. Again, he was philologically quite correct because one also finds the same root with a similar meaning in the Slav and Celtic languages. However, the anthropological implications of the new word for the ancestral European race were much more exciting and flattering: as Aryans, the Germans and their ancient Indian ancestors were the people of honor, the aristocracy of the various races of mankind. It should be noted that Friedrich Schlegel was neither an extreme German nationalist nor an anti-Semite. He campaigned for the emancipation of the Jews in Germany and married the daughter of the distinguished Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Nevertheless, his ideas in due course stimulated the boldest ideas about Aryan supremacy among German, French, and English scholars. —Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism, New York University Press, (1998), s. 32; Sama. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, New York University Press, (2002), s. 89-90.
[2] Tapio Tamminen, Pahan viehätys: Natsismin ja terrorin lähteillä, Otava, Keuruu, (2004), s. 28.
