Hungarian Turanism () is a diverse Turanist phenomenon that revolves around an identification or association of Hungarians and Hungarian history with the histories and peoples of Inner Asia and the Eurasian Steppe. It includes many different conceptions and served as the guiding principle of many political movements. It was most lively in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.
Overview As a scientific movement, Turanism was concerned with research into Asian cultures in the context of Hungarian history and culture. It was embodied and represented by many scholars who had shared premises (i.e. the Asian origin of the Hungarians, and their kinship with Asian peoples), and arrived at the same or very similar conclusions. Turanism was a driving force in the development of the Hungarian social sciences, especially in the development of linguistics and archaeology.
Political Turanism was born in the 19th century, in response to the growing influence of Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism, both of which were seen by Hungarians as very dangerous to the nation, and the state of Hungary, because the country had large ethnic German and Slavic populations. The foundations of political Turanism were influenced by the works of 19th-century linguists and ethnologists, such as Finnish nationalist and scholar Matthias Alexander Castrén, who presented a belief in the racial unity the Ural-Altaic peoples. Political Turanism was a romantic nationalist movement, which stressed the importance of the common ancestry and the cultural affinity of the Hungarians, the peoples of the Caucasus and the peoples of Inner and Central Asia, such as the Turks, Mongols, Parsis etc. It called for closer collaboration and a political alliance between them and Hungary, as a means of securing and furthering the shared interests and countering the threats which were posed by the policies of the great powers of Europe. The idea of a "Turanian brotherhood and collaboration" was borrowed from the Pan-Slavic concept of "Slavic brotherhood and collaboration".
After the First World War, political Turanism played a role in the formation of Hungarian far-right ideologies because of its ethnic nationalist nature.Traian Sandu, Vers un profil convergent des fascismes?: "Nouveau consensus" et religion politique en Europe centrale, Editions L'Harmattan,2010, p. 213"...In addition, as the cornerstone of racial nationalism, Hungarian "Turanism" came into being. This pseudoscientific ideology strove to prove the existence and superiority of a unified Hungarian "race" and it therefore inevitably incorporated an anti-Jewish aspect." in: Zoltán Vági, László Csőcs, Gábor Kádár: The Holocaust in Hungary: Evolution of a Genocide. p.XXXIV. It began to carry anti-Jewish sentiments and tried to prove the "existence and superiority of a unified Hungarian race". Nonetheless, Andrew C. Janos, a Hungarian political scientist of the University of California, Berkeley,n.d. “Andrew C. Janos.” University of California, Berkeley. Accessed 4/23/23. https://polisci.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/cv/CV-2017%20AJ.pdf. asserts that Turanism's role in the interwar development of far-right ideologies was negligible."While Turanism was and remained little more than a fringe ideology of the Right, the second orientation of the national socialists, pan-Europaism, had a number of adherents, and it was adopted as the platform of several national socialist groups." Janos, Andrew C.: The Politics of Backwardness in Hungary, 1825-1945. 1982. p.275.
In the communist era which began after the Second World War and ended in 1989, Turanism was portrayed and vilified as an exclusively fascist ideology."Magyarországon az 1944-ben uralomra jutott Nemzetszocialista Párt több tételt átvett a turanizmus eszmeköréből, aminek következtében a turanizmus népszerűsége erősen lecsökkent, majd a szocializmusban „fasisztává” minősült."/"In Hungary the Nationsocialist Party which ascended to power in 1944, took over several theses from Turanism's range of ideas, and as a result the popularity of Turanism strongly dwindled, and then in the socialist era it was labelled "fascist"."/ in: Since the fall of communism in 1989 there has been a renewal of interest in Turanism.
Background
Early history of the Hungarians
Before the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin, the Hungarians were semi-nomadicGyörffy György: István király és műve. 1983. Gondolat Könyvkiadó, Budapest, p. 252. and their culture was similar to other steppe peoples. Most scientists presume a Uralic homeland for the ancient Hungarian conquerors (mainly on genealogical linguistic grounds, and on the basis of genetic research carried out on a limited number of ancient skeletons found in graves from the age of the conquest).Kovácsné Csányi Bernadett: Honfoglalás kori, valamint magyar és székely populációk apai ági genetikai kapcsolatrendszerének vizsgálata. http://www2.sci.u-szeged.hu/fokozatok/PDF/Kovacsne_Csanyi_Bernadett/tezisfuzet_magyar_csanyiB.pdf The proto-Hungarian tribes lived in the Eurasian forest steppe zone,Hajdú Péter: Ancient culture of the Uralian peoples, Corvina, 1976, p. 134 and so these ancient ancestors of Hungarians and their relationship with other equestrian nomadic peoples has been and still is a topic for research.Zimonyi István: A magyarság korai történetének sarokpontjai. Elméletek az újabb irodalom tükrében. 2012. http://real-d.mtak.hu/597/7/dc_500_12_doktori_mu.pdf
Hungarian nobiliary historical tradition considered and rendered the eastern origin of Hungarians. This tradition was preserved in medieval chronicles (such as Gesta Hungarorum and Gesta Hunnorum et Hungarorum, the Chronicon Pictum, and Chronica Hungarorum by Johannes de Thurocz) as early as the 13th century. According to Chronica Hungarorum, the Hungarians are descendants of the Huns, and came from the Asian parts of Scythia, and Turks share this Scythian origin with them. This tradition eventually served as starting point for the scientific research of the ethnogenesis of Hungarian people, which began in the 18th century, in Hungary and abroad. Sándor Kőrösi Csoma (the writer of the first Tibetan-English dictionary) traveled to Asia in the strong belief that he could find the kindred of Magyars in somewhere in Central Asia, amongst the Uyghurs.
Development of Finno-Ugric studies
The linguistic theories of the Dutch philosopher Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn and the German thinker Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz gave the basis of the modern scientific research of the origin of the Hungarian language and people. Boxhorn conjectured that the European and Indo-Iranian languages were all derived from a shared ancestor language, and he named this ancestor language "Scythian", after the equestrian, nomadic warriors of the Asian steppes. But linguists theorizing about ancestor languages had to deal with the common belief of the era, that, according to the Bible, Hebrew was the original language of all humans. Leibniz published material countering the Biblical theory, and supported Boxhorn's notion of a Scythian ancestor language behind most of the languages of Europe (today known as the Indo-European language family). Leibniz however also recognized that some European languages like Sami, Finnish, and Hungarian were connected to each other, but did not belong to this family.
"Information about hither-to unknown peoples and languages of Asia and the Americas came into the hands of scholars such as Gottfried Leibniz, who recognized that there was no better method “for specifying the relationship and origin of the various peoples of the earth, than the comparison of their languages”. In order to classify as many languages as possible in genealogical groupings, Leibniz proposed that similar materials be collected from each newly described language. To this end he asked that explorers either obtain translations of well-known Christian prayers such as the Pater Noster, or, better yet, “words for common things” (vocabula rerum vulgarium), a sample list of which he appended to a letter to the Turkologist D. Podesta (Leibniz 1768/1989b). The word list included numerals, kinship terms, body parts, necessitates (food, drink, weapons, domestic animals), naturalia (God, celestial and weather phenomena, topographic features, wild animals) and a dozen verbs (eat, drink, speak, see ...). Leibniz took a particular interest in the expansion of the Russian Empire southward and eastward, and lists based on his model were taken on expeditions sent by the tsars to study the territories recently brought under their control, as well as the peoples living on these and on nearby lands." Kevin Tuite: The rise and fall and revival of the Ibero-Caucasian hypothesis. 2008. in: Historiographia Linguistica, 35 #1; p. 23-82.
The Finnish-Hungarian connection was further developed by Philip Johan von Strahlenberg (in his work: "An historico-geographical description of the north and east parts of Europe and Asia") and , a German historian and language researcher, who participated in the Great Northern Expedition of 1733–1743. In his work “Qvaestiones Petropolitanae, De origine Ungrorum”, published in 1770, Fischer put Hungarian into a group of kindred peoples and languages which he called 'Scythian' (distinct from van Boxhorn's concept of Scythian). He considered the Ugric peoples (he called them 'Jugors', these are the Khanty and Mansi) the closest relatives of Hungarians, actually as 'Magyars left behind', and originated them from the Uyghurs, who live on the western frontiers of China.
Ural-Altaic and the Turanian concept By the early 19th century, connections with further languages were perceived by Rasmus Christian Rask, and Matthias Castrén, who included the Finno-Ugric languages as a part of a larger hypothesis today known as Ural-Altaic. The German linguist and Orientalist Schott was a proponent of Finn-Turk-Hungarian kinship, and considered the Hungarians a mixture of Turks and "Hyperboreans""Die Stammväter der Magyaren in Ungarn waren, wie die Geschichte leise andeutet und der Ur-Kern ihrer Sprache zu bestätigen scheint, ein Gemisch von Türken und Hyperboreern. Ihre häufigen Wanderungen hatten noch fernere Amalgamation mit Indo-Germanischen Völkern zu Folge, und so entwickelte sich der heutige Ungar, aus mancherlei Völker-Elementen eben so geläutert und männlich schön hervorgegangen, wie sein heutiger Nachbar und Ur-Verwandter, der Osmane." Schott, Wilhelm: Versuch über die Tatarischen Sprachen. 1836. p.7. (i.e. circumpolar peoples like the Saami and Samoyeds).
Friedrich Max Müller, the German Orientalist and philologist, published and proposed a grouping of the non-Aryan and non-Semitic Asian languages in 1855. In his work "The languages of the seat of war in the East. With a survey of the three families of language, Semitic, Arian, and Turanian", he called these languages "Turanian". The Hungarian language was classed by Müller as a member of a Northern Division (Ural-Altaic), in the Finnic Class (Finno-Ugric), in the Ugric Branch, with the Voguls (Mansi) and Ugro-Ostiakes (Khanty) as its closest relatives. (In the long run, his evolutionist theory about languages' structural development, tying growing grammatical refinement to socio-economic development, and grouping languages into 'antediluvian', 'familial', 'nomadic', and 'political' developmental stages proved unsound.) His theory was well known and widely discussed in international scientific circles, and was known to Hungarian scientists as well. He became an associate member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His public lectures received wide attention. His terms "Turan" and "Turanian" were originally borrowed from Persian texts like the Shahnameh, which used the term "Turan" to denote the territories of Turkestan, north of Amu Darya river, inhabited by nomadic warriors.
The role of the Habsburgs