Émile-Louis Burnouf

Émile-Louis Burnouf (French: [emil.lwi byʁnuf]; 26 August 1821, in Valognes – January 1907, in Paris) was a leading nineteenth-century Orientalist and racialist whose ideas influenced the development of theosophy and Aryanism. He was a professor at the faculté de lettres at Nancy University, then principal of the French School at Athens from 1867 to 1875. He was also the author of a Sanskrit-French dictionary.

Émile was the nephew of Jean-Louis Burnouf, a famous philologist, and cousin of Eugène Burnouf, the founder of Buddhist studies in the West. Following in their footsteps, Émile sought to connect Buddhist and Hindu thought to Western European classical culture. In so doing, he claimed to have rediscovered the early Aryan belief-system.

Burnouf believed that only Aryan and Semitic peoples were truly religious in temperament.

Science has proved that the original tendency of the Aryan peoples is pantheism, while monotheism proper is the constant doctrine of Semitic populations. These are surely the two great beds in which flow the sacred stream of humanity. But the facts show is, in the West, peoples of Aryan origin in some sort Semiticised in Christianity. The whole of Europe is at once Aryan and Christian; that is to say pantheistic by its origin and natural dispositions, but accustomed to admit the dogma of creation from a Semitic influence.

Burnouf's work takes for granted a racial hierarchy that places Aryans at the top as a master race. His writings are also full of prejudicial and often deeply antisemitic statements. He believed that "real Semites" have smaller brains than Aryans:

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