Mediterranean Race - Early Debates

Early Debates

These differentiations occurred following long-standing claims about the alleged differences between the Nordic and the Mediterranean people. Such debates arose from responses to ancient writers who had commented on differences between northern and southern Europeans. For the Greeks and Romans, Germanic and Celtic peoples were often stereotyped as wild red haired barbarians. Pseudo-Aristotle argued that the Greeks were an ideal race because they possessed a medium skin-tone, in contrast to pale northerners and dark southerners. By the nineteenth century long-standing cultural and religious differences between Protestant northwestern Europe and the Roman Catholic south were being reinterpreted in racial terms.