In the scheme of Meiners, the Caucasian race was contrasted to the Mongoloid race, and he saw races which he viewed as ugly as being Mongolized to various degrees. But Caucasians look more anti-Mongol than Northern Europeans do. For example Northern Europeans have weak body hair, which is a Mongol trait, but Meiners saw Caucasians as beautiful because of their strong body hair (
https://books.google.com/books?id=prOSAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA80):
It was Meiners who divided the human kind into two races, the Caucasian and Mongolian, in his _Sketch for a History of Mankind_ [_Grundrif, der Geschichte der Menschheit_, 1786]. He only needed two primary categories; as Susanne Zantop observes, "Meiners makes clear that the world is, in fact, constituted by only two kinds of humans: the culturally superior, 'beautiful' ones - the Europeans - and all others who are 'mongolized' [mongolisiert] to varying degrees and hence 'ugly' and inferior - Asians, Africans, Americans." [81] As Zantop points out, Meiners did proceed, in voluminous later writings, to subdivide his races, a task that included the division of Europeans into an elaborate hierarchy, elevating the German "nation" over "ugly, effeminate Latin races." [82] But as long as Meiners treated the "beautiful" Europeans as a collective, he justified their identification with the Caucasus thusly: "Almost all of the Sagas and tales of ancient nations indicate that the human race originated on the Caucasus [mountain range] and the plains to the south of it. From here, the humans spread to all ends of the world." [83] Meiners further notes:
> The Caucasians are no longer very pure and unmixed in the Caucasus. The Caucasians, however, especially their women, are the most beautiful in the world. These nations and their offspring differ from the Mongolian nations through their height and the structure of their bodies, through a more beautiful facial formation and other body parts, through stronger hair growth and through nobility of spirit and heart. [84]
[...]
Those interested in racial difference had long noted the beauty of the Caucasians. In fact, in the earliest texts identified as engaging a "racial" division of peoples, descriptions included references to the particular beauty (and the white skin) of the women of the Caucasus, particularly the Circassians and Georgians, although the observations on Circassian and Georgian beauty appears in texts to be a digression - the men writing seem to get carried away, distracted by their own descriptions.
When Francois Bernier - a century before Blumenbach, Forster, and Meiners - wrote his "New Division of the Earth According to the Different Species or Races of Men" [_Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espéces ou races qui l'habitent_, 1684], it was the first text in which "race" functioned as a dominant classification scheme for the patterns of difference among human peoples and in it the beauty of those from the Caucasus region stood out. In fact, this text is one of the earliest sources to feed what will later develop and circulate throughout Europe as the legendary figure of the "Circassian beauty":
> It cannot be said that the native and aboriginal women of Persia are beautiful, but this does not prevent the city of Isfahan from being filled with an infinity of very handsome women, as well as very handsome men, in consequence of the great number of handsome slaves who are brought there from Georgia and Circassia.
>
> The Turks have also a great number of very handsome women; besides those of the country, who are by no means ugly, they have ... an immense quantity of slaves who come to them from Mingrelia, Georgia, and Circassia, where, according to all the Levantines and all the travellers, the handsomest women of the world are to be found. [85]
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Bernier notes, after asserting that "the handsomest women of the world" are found in the Caucasus: "Thus the Christians and Jews are not allowed to buy a Circassian slave at Constantinople. They are reserved for the Turks alone." [86] The whitest and the most beautiful of women are at once identified with - and offered tantalizingly by the text as sexually off-limits to - any men but Muslims, which include the Europeans. At about the same time, Bernier's compatriot, Jean Chardin, wrote, in his Travels in Persia:
> The Complexion of the Georgians is the most beautiful in all the East; and I can safely say, That I never saw an ill-favour'd Countenance in all that Country, either of the one or other Sex: but I have seen those that have had Angels Faces; Nature having bestow'd upon the Women of that Country Graces and Geatures, which are not other where to be seen: So that 'tis impossible to behold 'em without falling in Love. [87]
[...]
The official naming of the white European's race as "Caucasian" is credited to Blumenbach, who first used the term in the 1795 edition of _De generis humani varietate nativa_. Blumenbach defended his nomenclature thus:
> I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighbourhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones of mankind. [...] It is white in color, which we may fairly assume to have been the primitive colour of mankind, since ... it is very easy for that to degenerate into brown, but very much more difficult for dark to become white. [88]
While Blumenbach referred here generically to the Georgian "race of men," most narratives that were constructed and condensed and repeated by writers of all ilk attest specifically to the beauty of the women - these women who belonged to "wild, barbarian, heathen" tribes before their capture and conversion into Muslim harems. Even Blumenbach, when arguing that the "racial face" is mingled in instances of mixed-race breeding, offered as a typical example the blending of extremes, "the offspring of the Nogay Tartars is rendered more beautiful through unions with the Georgians." Similarly, in demonstrating that all humans belong to a single species based upon their ability to produce fertile offspring, he writes: "Take ... a man and a woman most widely different from each other; let the one be a most beautiful Circassian woman and the other an African born in Guinea, as black and ugly as possible." The point that he draws in each case - and that many other writers, including Chardin, also note with a striking matter-of-factness - is that the Caucasian women (specifically, the Circassians and Georgians) may be used (both actually and rhetorically) to "improve" less beautiful peoples.
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