The Racial Makeup of the Turks

by Andrew Hamilton

ISLAMIC TURKEY, which may yet be incorporated into Europe by the “West’s” totalitarian leadership class, has recently fallen out of favor with elites because of a perceived lack of servility toward Israel — a departure from the historic norm.

Turkey recognized Israel shortly after its formation, and the Mossad, with Turkey’s cooperation, deeply penetrated the Turkish National Security Service. Manipulation of Turkey was part of Israel’s “periphery” or “triangular” strategy, which included similar relationships with Kurds (scattered across Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Armenia and Russia) and Iranians up to 1979. (Israelis trained the personnel of SAVAK, the Shah of Iran’s secret police.)

Apparently because all of these people were more or less racially Indo-European they were easily exploited by the Jews in their endless bloody schemes against the Arabs.

The Turks

The name Turk was first employed by the Chinese to designate the nomadic people who controlled the vast area from Mongolia to the Black Sea until 924 AD.

Turks are today found in Turkey, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, and Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang). Their cultures and racial makeup vary considerably due to ethnic admixture. The only similarities among them are religious and linguistic: virtually all Turks are Muslim, and Turkic languages belong to the (non-Indo-European) Altaic language family spoken in western and central Asia. In 1980 Turks numbered about 73 million.

After Turkey, Germany hosts the largest Turkish population in the world. Bulgaria, France, Britain, the United States, Holland, and Austria also rank among the top ten countries with the largest Turkish populations.

In Race (1974), John R. Baker classified the Turks (“Turanids”) of Central Asia — the people who occupy the “huge territory extending from the shores of the Caspian Sea to the borders of Mongolia” — as a hybrid race created initially by the admixture of two geographic races (the Europid and Mongolid) followed by intermarriage within itself generation after generation. Since Europid influence predominates in the physical characters of the Turks, presumably because the original population intermarried with Europids more often than with Mongolids, Baker classified even Central Asian Turanids as a subrace of Europids. He wrote that “The Mongolid element in their features becomes progressively less towards the western limit of their territory.”

The Population of Turkey

Turkey has served as a bridge for the movement of peoples between Asia and Europe throughout history.

The base historical population was composed of Indo-European-speaking Hittites, who invaded the region around 1900 BC. They conquered earlier inhabitants speaking a non-Indo-European agglutinative language.

Subsequently, ancient Greeks settled along the Aegean coasts of Anatolia. The peninsula later fell to the Indo-European Persians and Romans. Present day Turkey ultimately formed the core of the thousand-year Byzantine, or Eastern Roman, Empire (395–1453).

The Battle of Manzikert (August 1071) was pivotal in the history of the Eastern Roman Empire. Following the Byzantine defeat, invading Seljuk Turks swiftly established hegemony over much of Asia Minor. The Seljuk empire split into independent states in the 1100s. During the next century these states were overrun by the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan.

After the Mongol wave receded, Osmanli Turks completed the overthrow of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, establishing the Ottoman Empire in its stead. The Ottoman Empire was finally dissolved in 1918, following the end of World War I. At the height of its power, Ottoman territory encompassed much of the Middle East, large areas of Eastern Europe, and most of North Africa.

The Turks who conquered Anatolia were nomadic pastoralists. Although their arrival placed the distinctive stamp of Turkish language, religion and culture on the region, their numbers were insufficient to fundamentally alter the genetic makeup of the conquered peoples.

An interesting series of forced population transfers occurred after 1900, raising the percentage of ethnic Turks in Turkey from fifty-five to eighty percent. The transfers involved the expulsion of formerly large Armenian and Greek minorities from Anatolia and the importation of Turkic and non-Turkic Muslim populations. In the decade from 1989 to 2000, for example, 300,000 such Muslims were absorbed. The alleged genocide of 1.5 million Armenians by Turkey in 1915 also figures into the population shift.

In his Anthropological Glossary (1985), Roger Pearson wrote that Turks are “today absorbed into the Caucasoid population of Anatolia.” By Caucasoid he meant the Europid geographical race “customarily subdivided into Nordic, or Northwestern European, East Baltic or Northeastern European, Mediterranean, Atlanto-Mediterranean, Alpine, Dinaric, Armenoid, Iranic and Indic. Caucasoids are generally characterized by light skin, narrow to medium-broad faces, high bridged noses, and an absence of prognathism.”

Carleton Coon on the Turks

Physical anthropologist Carleton Coon, writing in the 1960s, used the Turks as an illustration of the principle that “races and cultures can change places.”

According to Coon, the Turks were virtually indistinguishable, physically, from the Greeks, except for having less body fat and slightly larger faces. Clinal variations were evident moving west to east: the lightest skins were seen along Turkey’s Aegean coast, and the percentage of mixed and light eyes among western Turks was as high as 85 percent.

At the time of their arrival in Asia Minor in the 1200s, the Ottoman Turks were “a small band of horsemen numbering between 400 and 2,000, the remnants of a nomadic tribe expelled from Central Asia by the Mongols.” They arrived without women, and intermarried with the comparatively numerous Caucasoid Greeks, Armenians, Kurds and the few Seljuk Turks and Turkomans who then populated Anatolia.

Coon concluded, “The Turkomans today are primarily Caucasoid. In body measurements, physical appearance, and in the ABO blood groups, the living Turks of Turkey show little visible trace of their Mongoloid origin.”

L. L. Cavalli-Sforza on the Turks

Utilizing population genetics, Cavalli-Sforza and co-authors came to the same conclusion in The History and Geography of Human Genes (1994): “On the basis of present knowledge, Turks seem to have been relatively unsuccessful in making their genetic presence felt, even when they occupied modern Turkey, coming from the East.”

The reason for this is that recent historical migrations — at least prior to the advent of contemporary formal policies of White population destruction and replacement — could have undetectable genetic impacts when the local population density of the earlier inhabitants was high and armies of invaders were small:

When mobility [of pastoral nomadic peoples] became very high, the chance of influencing the local gene pools of the invaded countries decreased considerably. Small and efficient armies could rapidly conquer large countries, and there was no time for invaders to multiply fast enough for their contribution to the local gene pool to be easily discernible, especially if the invaded countries were highly developed agriculturally and had a high population density. The chance of influencing culture and language, however, is much greater than that of influencing genes. A powerful elite of conquerors can — even if an absolute minority — impose its rule and, with it, its language and customs, but is much more limited in extending its genes.

A parallel was drawn with Hungary: “Even in the case of the invasion of Hungary by the Magyars [nomadic, part-Turkic Finno-Ugric speakers], which was certainly of greater relative demographic weight than the Turkish expansion and was certainly followed by settlement, it has been laborious to find specific genetic traces, which turn out to be at the limit of detectability.”

In sum, the Turkish language and Islamic religion were imposed on a predominantly Indo-European-speaking people — Greek being the official language of the Byzantine Empire. Racially and genetically, Anatolian Turks are similar to other Caucasoid populations. Differences are largely cultural, linguistic, and religious. A caveat is that the region has a complex population history extending back several millennia, and deserves further genetic scrutiny. At present, however, the biological picture is as indicated.

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Source: Author and Counter-Currents