Turanid race

Turanid race is a now obsolete term, originally intended to cover populations of Central Asia associated with the spread of the Turanian languages, which are the combination of the Uralic and Altaic families, hence also referred to as the Ural–Altaic race.

The latter usage implies the existence of a Turanid racial type or "minor race", subtype of the Europid (Caucasian) race with Mongoloid admixtures, situated at the boundary of the distribution of the Mongoloid and Europid "great races". The idea of a Turanid race came to play a role of some significance in Pan-Turkism or "Turanism" in the late 19th to 20th century. A "Turkish race" was proposed as a Europid subtype in European literature of the period.

This literature was absorbed by the Ottoman elite, and was partly even translated into Ottoman Turkish, contributing to the idea of an essence of "Turkishness" (Türklük) the honour of which came to be protected under Turkish law until the revision of article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code in April 2008. The most influential of these sources were Histoire Générale des Huns, des Turcs, des Mongoles, et autres Tartares Occidenteaux (1756–1758) by Joseph de Guignes (1721–1800), and Sketches of Central Asia (1867) by Ármin Vámbéry (1832–1913), which was on the common origins of Turkic groups as belonging to one race, but subdivided according to physical traits and customs, and l’histoire de l’Asie (1896) by Leon Cahun (1841–1900), which stressed the role of Turks in "carrying civilization to Europe", as a part of the greater "Turanid race" that included the Uralic and Altaic speaking peoples more generally. There was also an ideology of Hungarian Turanism in Hungarian fascism.

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