BEFORE YOU USE OR READ THE PDF VERSION OF THE PARIAH SYNDROME:

 

By using or reading any part of this file, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept all the statements below relating to the etext version.

 

The PDF version was created on Open Source software in Linux.

 

The source for the text was the etext version of The Pariah Syndrome, while the illustrations were taken from the web version.

 

The PDF version is designed to be printed out on A4 paper -- it should print OK on US letter, but as letter has been obsolete in the UK for over 20 years, I have no way of trying it.

 

Pagination is for convenience only and bears no relation to that in the original (1987) edition of this book.

 

This PDF version (v.1.00) was produced by John Hinsley, email <johnhinsley@blueyonder.co.uk>

in October 2003. Please feel free to contact me with regard to any issues specific to the pdf version.

 

 

Posted: 26 September 1999

filename: hancock.txt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The Pariah Syndrome:

An account of Gypsy slavery and persecution

                                  

by Ian Hancock

 

 

                                                                    

Table of Contents

 

            Notes about the Web version of this text                                                                    p.3

Acknowledgments                                                                                                      p.4

            Foreword                                                                                                                   p.5

Foreword to the Web edition                                                                                       p.8

            Introduction                                                                                                                p.9

I           Out of India                                                                                                                p.12

II         Reception in Europe                                                                                                   p.14

III        Conditions Under Slavery                                                                                            p.17

IV        Towards Abolition                                                                                                      p.24

V         The Post-Emancipation Situation                                                                                  p.30

VI        Treatment Elsewhere in Europe: Transylvania, Hungary and Russia                               p.37

VII       Treatment Elsewhere in Europe: Spain, Portugal and France                                         p.40

VIII     Treatment Elsewhere in Europe: Germany                                                                   p.44

IX        German Treatment of Gypsies in the Twentieth Century                                                           p.47

X         German and Dutch Transportations to America                                                            p.67

XI        Treatment Elsewhere in Europe: England and Scotland                                                 p.69

XII       British Shipments to the Americas                                                                               p.71

XIII      The Contemporary Situation of Gypsies in Europe                                                         p.76

XIV     The Contemporary Situation of Gypsies in North America                                             p.80

XV       Antigypsyism                                                                                                              p.87

XVI     Afterword                                                                                                                  p.95

XVII    Appendix: Definition of Terms                                                                                     p.98

XIX      List of Works Consulted                                                                                              p.103

                                  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes about the web version of The Pariah Syndrome:

           

The web version of this book includes a few new passages by the author not found in the original printed version. The original edition of this book (1987) uses diacritics for Romanian and Romani (Rromanes), and includes texts in the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets. When possible, care has been taken to reproduce these diacritics, or their phonological equivalents. This has not been entirely possible because of HTML limitations. For a faithful rendition of all diacritics and texts, it is recommended that the printed version of The Pariah Syndrome be consulted.

 

Throughout, except in quotes from other works, the spelling Rumania(n), rather than the more widely-accepted Romania(n) has been preferred in order to distinguish it more readily from Romani.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*******

 

Original Copyright (c) 1987 by Karoma Publishers, Inc.,

 Ann Arbor, Michigan. ISBN 0897200799.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgments

 

            This is a corrected and expanded version of a monograph called Land of Pain which I wrote and circulated among a number of colleagues in 1982. It is based upon a collection of texts which in most cases I have had to translate, or have translated. I should very much like to acknowledge the help given me in the preparation of this study by those friends and colleagues, who include Thomas Acton, Sascha Bley-Vroman, Harry Bryer, Madeleine Kabore, Donald Kenrick, Barbara Lalla, Ronald Lee, Joseph Miller, David Smith and, in particular, Victor Friedman. My thanks to each of them.

            I also wish to thank the very excellent Patrin Web Journal for making this text available; it should still be consulted at http://www.geocities.com/Paris/5121/patrin.htm for the full version of this book, including the illustrations, most of which are not reproduced here.

 

 

 

 

“On reading The Pariah Syndrome I underwent a radical change.  I understood the history behind my problems and realized it was time to live my life as I was—a Rom.  Being equipped with this knowledge I am now able to fight both my fears and the fears of the non-Gypsies as well.”

Gregory Dufunia Kwiek

Romani Movement Entertainment

New York City

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Foreword

by Dr. T.A. Acton

Professor of Romani Studies

University of Greenwich

 

an Hancock is a marginal man. Like all Romani intellectuals, he has had to live torn between the pariah status of his people and the embrace of a dominant culture which can hardly conceive of such a monster as an educated Gypsy.

            Some Gypsies in this position accept this, and pass as non-Gypsies, keeping at a distance all their Romani relatives, and keeping silence at who knows what cost, to them and their own children, on all of their family’s past. But a sprinkling of such people find a personal liberation by joining Romani organizations where intellectuals can make a political contribution to winning a better place in society for their people. They have to face incomprehension by non-Gypsies, and often rejection by assimilated relatives, and the constant accusation that they are not “true Gypsies.” Face to face with the divided reality of their identity, they are like the man in Yevtushenko’s poem, strung out on a high-wire “between the city of yes and the city of no.”

            There are many ethnic groups among the Gypsies, with a great variety of dialect, culture and occupation. In Europe and the West, however, two brute historical facts have shaped their history from the 15th century on: enslavement (particularly in eastern Europe), and attempted genocide (especially in western Europe), from which have emerged the commercial nomadism of Gypsies in western Europe and the artisan sub-proletariat of Gypsies in eastern Europe. Although the variety of Gypsy economy is, and always has been, enormous, there are perhaps three core fields in which both nomads and slaves were involved: metalwork, transport animals and vehicles, and entertainment.

            Ian Hancock’s family belongs very much within the entertainment tradition; arguably, as a university professor, he is still in it. His forebears were among those Hungarian Gypsies from both the Romungri and the Lovari ethnic groups who were involved with circuses and show business and who came to England in small numbers in the nineteenth century and intermarried with English Gypsies in the same line of work. Then, as now, the British circus and fairground world and its trade association, the Showmen’s Guild, were dominated by the large, non-Gypsy, circus and fairground magnates, who repudiated any idea of association with Gypsy ethnicity for their organization, in order to make it politically more acceptable. The small Romani showmen, whether originating in Britain or overseas, have become in this century a distinct population in their own right. As the fairground world has contracted, many have settled, especially in west and south London. Redevelopment of areas of Battersea and Wandsworth, with their settled Romani populations, has in turn more recently led some of these families to return to a nomadic life. Some of Hancock’s relatives have now married non-showmen English Romani Travellers. It was this milieu from which Hancock’s family emigrated to Canada when he was in his early teens, and to which he returned as a young man, when I made his acquaintance. He has begun to document his own family background in the journal Lacio Drom.

Plucked by the London School of Oriental and African Studies in the mid-1960s from life as a spray-painter for Bush Rank and sometime road manager for the English band The Outlaws, he has since become a distinguished academic with an international reputation in the field of Creole linguistics, and some 160 publications to his name.

            One might think that such an established reputation would make it easier for him to intervene in the field of Romani Studies. This has not been the case: there exist today non-Gypsy experts on Gypsy affairs who, by and large, have the field neatly sewn up among themselves. The questions to which these experts address themselves - and I write as one such myself - are determined by academic and policy schema external to the Gypsies’ own realities. If they are anthropologists, they are concerned with matters like kinship terminology; if they are linguists, with, say, the genitive construction, and if they are social workers, with school attendance. They are not concerned with acknowledging the crimes of society against this people. They usually concentrate on the “problems” of the present, and either ignore history or present a stylized and inaccurate account of it. Despite the wealth of documentation to which Hancock refers, both popular and scholarly accounts of Gypsies still tend to maunder on about their “mysterious history.” The very fact of slavery can be almost suppressed. Anthropologists have tended to present the Rom as primordially nomadic, building their theories around this, ignoring the fact that many of their “subjects” are only four generations from slavery.

            Nor have Gypsies in general been able to challenge these perceptions. At the time of liberation, the freed slaves had, as Hancock shows, the lowest social status of any group, while runaway and rebel slaves were considered as criminals. Ex-slaves tried to make out as free craftsmen, or like their nomadic kin, or else tried to assimilate: to be anything but an ex-slave. It took a period of detachment and reassessment before anyone could turn round and say “No! These rebel slaves were heroes.”

            This was the message of a remarkable novel, Le Prix de la Liberté, (1955) by a French Rom, Matéo Maximoff, whose own grandfather was born in slavery in Rumania. This novel deals with the dying days of Romani slavery when, as Panaitescu (1941) and Stahl (1980) have shown, slavery and serfdom were no longer economic propositions in a society that was being drawn into the capitalist world system. But as the prices in the slave markets tumbled, and French-educated Rumanian liberals called for emancipation, many slave-owners increased rather than abated their cruelties to their declining assets. Maximoff’s novel follows one small group, which flees from an estate to join the rebels in the mountains. He confronts the Kalderash Rom people with their own historical shame as ex-slaves, and seeks to replace that shame by justified indignation, and by pride in the resistance that did occur. The leading figure in this novel, Isvan, is loosely based on Maximoff’s own grandfather. Isvan is educated by his master and becomes his librarian-cum-secretary, and has to face the dilemma between remaining in this comfortable and privileged position, or joining the revolt of his people. He is, in fact, the prototype of the modern civil rights Gypsy activist-and perhaps of anti-colonialist politicians in general. He is also a marginal man, a liberal intellectual amongst an illiterate tribal people. After being educated with his master’s children, he has to endure his own family’s suspicions, and being thought a traitor; yet without his knowledge of his master’s world, no revolt could hope to succeed.

            Maximoff, the novelist and preacher, used his moral imagination to recreate this world for the reader. Hancock, the scholar, has used his academic talents to establish, beyond any question, by wilfully blind gajé, its documentary reality. The earlier title of this study was Land of Pain, and the pain in question was partly their own, in coming to terms with this bitter past.

            Both Hancock and Maximoff are latter-day Isvans. The market for Le Prix de la Liberté and Land of Pain has been hard for publishers to comprehend. Le Prix de la Liberté was hacked to pieces by its first editors, and though it has remained in print in German, was out of print in French for many years, and Romani and English versions have yet to be published. The Pariah Syndrome, as Land of Pain appeared in a roughly mimeographed form which soon became unavailable, and was thereafter passed from hand to hand in ever more roughly Xeroxed copies across Europe. Their very unavailability has seemed to increase the demand for them from the slowly gathering numbers of literate Gypsies across the world. Together with The Destiny of Europe’s Gypsies by Kenrick and Puxon (1972), which deals with the Nazi genocide dealt with in the present work, and due to appear in a UNESCO-sponsored Romani-language edition in 1987, these books form the foundation of a prose literature which will actually serve the needs of the emergent Romani nation. Whether it is the past, or the future, of the Romani peoples that one wishes to understand, the publication of this edition of The Pariah Syndrome could not be more timely.

 

    

     London,1986

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Foreword to the Web edition

 

This book was the first in English to deal with the enslavement of the Romani people in Romania. When it first appeared in 1987, no one expected that massive political and social changes would begin to take place in Eastern Europe just two years later.  With the death of Ceauşescu in 1989 and the shift to democracy in Romania, many more documents concerning those more than five terrible centuries have come to light, and our knowledge of the nature of Gypsy slavery, and the implications it has for our understanding of the world view and character of those descended from it -- the Vlax Romanies -- are just now beginning to be understood.

            Together with the Porrajmos (the Holocaust), the period of slavery stands as the single most tragic event in the European experience of my people. Together they must form an integral part of the textbooks in the schools, for not only must we not forget our history, but those who are responsible for these crimes against humanity must also not be allowed to forget; for if such things fade into oblivion, they can too easily happen again.

 

     Ian Hancock

     Buda, Texas, 1999

 

                 

A note on the word Gypsy

 

When I wrote this book in the early 1970s I used the words Gypsy (Gypsies) and Romani(es) throughout interchangeably.  Although I have left the original wording here, I have moved away from use of Gypsy/-ies in my more recent writings because of the growing objection to its use.  My own arguments for the preferred use of Romani(es) as the general ethnonym are given in my more recent book We Are the Romani People (http://www.herts.ac.uk/UHPress/romanipeople.html) on pages xviij-xxij.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

The enslavement of Gypsies came to an end something over a century ago. It may be fairly estimated that well over half of the entire Romani population of Europe at the time of its institution in the 14th century were thus subjugated and, during the following five hundred years, were the mainstay of the economy which oppressed them. While this situation endured in eastern Europe, western European nations were transporting people to India, Africa and the Americas as an unpaid labor force, for no other reason than that they were Gypsies. Despite these facts, the Gypsy presence is not acknowledged in a single treatment of the Atlantic slave trade - over one hundred were examined in the preparation of this work - and not one of the principal sources for Balkan history, such as the works of Scherill, Stavrianos or Wolff, deals with the subject at all.

            It is understandable, though not particularly admirable, that there should be deliberate suppression in modern Rumania of this shameful period in their history. I have been told by two scholars from that country, one of them an historian, that this topic is not dealt with in the Rumanian school system, nor is likely to be in the foreseeable future.  Attempts to obtain any kind of official statement in this connection from Rumanian governmental sources remain consistently unacknowledged. In Rumania itself, Beck encountered prejudice against the Tsigani (Gypsy) population at all levels, a situation he has described in a recently-published paper in which he concludes that

  

     Romanians who are in administrative government and political positions of authority, explain the Tsigani situation by referring to America. “You know,” they say, “The Tsigani are like your Negroes”: foreign, lazy, shiftless, untrustworthy and black (1985:105).

     

            The reluctance to recognise this by agencies outside of eastern Europe is less easy to understand, however. For example, the Slavic and East European Journal, the East European Quarterly, the Slavonic and East European Review and the Slavic Review: American Quarterly of Soviet and East European Studies all declined to publish an article based upon this study, the latter giving the reason that it was not an appropriate submission ... [since] the focus is specifically on the Rom.” The North American Chapter of the Gypsy Lore Society did acknowledge in one of their own anthologies, after receiving a copy of the same article, that in the course of the Romani diaspora into Europe some groups remained in the Balkans, some possibly in servitude” (Salo, 1982:263).

            The world does not yet appear ready to believe that the enslavement of Gypsies ever happened, or that it was significant enough to warrant being brought to the attention of the larger community. In Romani, there is the saying that kon mangel te kerel tumendar rroburen chi shoxa phenela tumen o chachimos pa tumare perintonde, “he who wants to enslave you will never tell you the truth about your forefathers.” We cannot wait for others to document this truth; our forefathers’ history must be told by ourselves.

            While the enslavement of Gypsies has been abolished for over a century, equally inhumane forms of oppression continue to be perpetuated into the present day. I have tried to incorporate examples of some of these into the picture here too. The situation which led eventually to Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the entire Gypsy people is dealt with, not as something separate or unique, but as just one other episode in the roster of persecution which has followed Gypsies through history. In many ways, little has changed since the end of the Second World War; the persecutions continue, but are simply not centralized in the same way. Official statements calling for the sterilization, deportation and even extermination of Gypsies are still being released today in both eastern and western European countries. In the United States, history books exclude any references to Gypsy American history; the several hundred thousand Romani Americans are the only ethnic minority in the country against whom laws are still in effect, and who are portrayed negatively in school textbooks. The responses from governmental and educational sources are that the Gypsies referred to in the laws or in children’s literature are not real people, and have nothing to do with the ethnic  population of the same name. And yet this Gypsy has been created out of the Romani population by the gajé, and become institutionalized in Euro-American folklore, and it is real Gypsies who suffer because of it. I have tried to account for this by an assumption that there has been a tacit manipulation of the Romani population by the establishment which, for its own purposes, sustains the “mythical” identity it has created, and resists efforts on the part of those thus defined to adjust such an image. Sibley has addressed this most clearly:

   

It is notable that myth contributes in a significant way to the shaping of images of groups that do not fit the dominant social model. The possibility that the characterization of social groups like ... Gypsies may be based on myth is rarely considered, particularly in governmental circles, probably because these myths are functional-they serve to define the boundaries of the dominant system. Accounts of non-conforming behaviour assume the form of a romantic myth, or they involve amputations of deviancy, which are also largely mythical; the romantic image, located at a distance or in the past, necessarily puts the minority on the outside (1981:195-196).

     

            Only cursory acknowledgement of the five centuries of slavery endured by the Balkan Gypsies has yet been made; no detailed treatments at all have appeared in English. Potra’s 376-page collection of documents relating to Gypsy slavery, written entirely in Rumanian, is the only substantial study to have appeared to date, and the only reviewer to my knowledge who has discussed this work in English, Frederick Ackerley, maintained that reading it was a “pleasure” and a “delight” because it gave him a chance to practice his Rumanian. His review dealt with the Romani words the book contained rather than with the awful facts of Gypsy history it revealed (1942:69-71).

            Hardly much more is available on the fate of Gypsies in the Holocaust, and only one full-length book in English has been published on that. While their ex-owners were compensated to the sum of 96 francs per slave at the time of abolition (Blaramberg, 1885:802), nothing was forthcoming from the Rumanian government for the freed slaves themselves, no orientation programs set up to integrate the newly-liberated into society, no assistance with housing or health care. Gypsies were left to fend for themselves in a hostile environment, totally unequipped to deal with the anti-Gypsy laws in effect everywhere throughout Europe and, when they came here, North America.  And in the same way, nothing was done to help Gypsies after the war.  None were called to testify at the Nuremberg Trials or any of the subsequent war crime hearings, and no reparation has ever been forthcoming. No Gypsies were invited to participate in the formation of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, established by President Carter in 1979 to honor the memory of all who perished in the Third Reich and, despite three years lobbying in Washington on the part of a number of American Romani organizations to protest against this, the Office of Presidential Appointments voted in 1986 to exclude once again any Gypsy representation on the 65-member council.

            A people which have been denied access to the means by which other persecuted groups have been able to fight back - schooling, settled housing, opportunities for civil and political organization - remain at the mercy of the popular press, and herein lies one of the biggest problems of all. Journalists invariably tend to exploit the fictitious image of Gypsies, catering to a public familiar only with the Borrovian stereotype they help sustain, and fail to investigate in their reports the real problems which Gypsies must deal with on a day-to-day basis. When such issues have occasionally been covered, it has been in terms not usually sympathetic to the Gypsies’ own situation.

            If this is not a cause for concern among the non-Gypsy population, if that population is reluctant to be reminded about what it has done, and what it continues to do, then the Romani voice must be louder. But one way or another, it will be heard.

 

Dedzhava zumavas te haljaras anda soste si kachi but bisicharimata anda le gadzhende te prindzharen amaro rrevdimos thaj amari dukh. Ba fal-ame ke vorta mangen le gadzhe te garaven kakala prami; ande kodole dzhes ferdi ‘l Rroma achen, kaj si narado etniko amerikano potriva kaste si zakonurja. Pashchi pandzh shel miji amare phralenge thaj phenjange mudardiline ande’l bov le Hitleroske, kana zumadjas tistara te prepedil amaro njamo (Hancock, 1980a) and’o Baro Porrajmos, numa akhardilo manaj jekh korkoro Rrom ka e Kris Nurembergaki. Arakhle pashchi kodo numero lengo slobodo el dzhutestar le rrobimaske, ’kh cirra maj katar shel bersh anglal, ande 1864; vushoro shaj gichisaras ke maj katar dopash anda o narodo integro ankerdile telal, tela el tiraxande le gadzhende balkanutne. Anda kodole pandzh shel bersh o berand samas la cexrake kaj sas e zor lenge themenge: kodzhja zor kaj pharejadja p’amende.

Antunch tradine amen le gadzhe sar rroburja thaj chora, k’e Afrika, th’e Amerika aj vi k’e Indija, phuv amare rruduchinenge. Manaj nishte klishki kaj den kachja shtirja. Mashkar le klishke le maj dzhangle pa e istorija evropjani vorka balkanutni, chi arakhena tume dazhi jekh korkoro svato. Bilengo apojde musaj te mothos e lumja. Kam-prindzhardjuvas; kamashundjuvas!

 

     Ian Hancock

     Buda, Texas, 1986

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I.  Out of India

                                  

 

The Romani people (Romanies, or “Gypsies”) are of northern Indian origin, having moved out of that area in the first quarter-century of the second millennium, moving westwards into Europe and arriving there some time after AD 1280. According to Sampson (1923), linguistic evidence suggests that the ancestors of all Gypsy populations, whom we may refer to as the Domba, following Kaufman (1984), left India at the same time. He believed them to have constituted a single race speaking the same language, which subsequently diverged into two linguistic branches: the Nawar, Kurbat, Karachi and Helebi now found throughout Egypt and the Middle East on the one hand, and the Boga in Armenia and eastern Turkey, and the Rom or Romanies in Europe, on the other. On the basis of more recent scholarship, however, there is some reason to believe that the three populations usually thought to comprise the descendants of the Domba may in fact have each left India at different times and under different circumstances (Hancock, 1986a); though each exhibits considerable lexical adoption from Persian, for example, there are no items shared by all three branches, and the same is true for the Armenian items in Central and Western Gypsy. If the same people had passed through the same areas at the same time, we would expect to find that at least some of the same words had been adopted. A further argument suggesting that these last may also have left India later than Eastern Gypsy, resides in the fact that their language retains traces of a third grammatical gender, which had become lost in the Central and North-Western Indic dialects by the beginning of the Mediaeval period. Presumably the European and Armenian branches separated after this loss was completed, since there is no evidence of a three-gender system in either, though vestiges are to be found in Domari.

            The reasons for this exodus of thousands of miles over a period of as many years are not well understood. It is possible that those who first left India did so as prisoners of war, or else as captive entertainers, and as marginals were carried further and further westwards on the crest of a succession of Middle Eastern wars. An alternative and more recent hypothesis suggests that the original population was a mixed one, consisting of Rajasthani-speaking Rajput cavalry together with their camp-followers who, coming from various different linguistic groups within the Shudra caste, moved westwards into Iran some time during the 10th century and were unable to find their way back into India again. As an isolated population in foreign territory it remained intact, social barriers slowly giving way as their commonly-shared Indian backgrounds increasingly became a unifying factor. While this might account for the diverse Indic content of the Romani lexicon and for the name Rom, and perhaps even for the traditional association of Gypsies with horses as a means of travel and an item of trade (and, through their racing and care, a source of income), concrete evidence to support this explanation is lacking. In any case, the boundaries separating language and caste in India were less rigid than the traditional studies have indicated, and the presence of both Central and North-Western features which Turner (1927) believed to be evidence of the routes of the first Gypsy migrations, is not a characteristic limited solely to Romani.

            There is no real evidence of why the move was made from Iran into Armenia. In the late 19th century the Dutch historian De Goeje suggested that the ancestors of those Gypsies were the 27,000 Zott captured by the Byzantines in AD 855 and taken north-westwards into Syria; but there is no evidence to show that these were the Domba, and the language of their descendants, Jakati, is a dialect of Arabic, not Indian. Reasons for the move from Armenia into the western Byzantine Empire are perhaps better understood, and was the result of yet another invasion: that of the Seljuks from the East, who ousted Orthodox Christianity and instituted Islam. Soulis tells us

     

...we must conclude that the appearance of the Gypsies in Byzantine lands is undoubtedly connected with the Seljuk raids in Armenia where the Gypsies, who subsequently appeared in Europe, had stayed for a long time, as the great number of Armenian loan-words in their vocabulary testifies.  These continuous raids, which caused the dislocation of the Armenian people and resulted at the end of the eleventh century in the creation of Little Armenia in Sicilia, must have been responsible also for the westward movement of the Gypsies and their invasion of Byzantine Anatolia (1961:163).

 

          

            Estimates of the dates of arrival of Gypsies in Europe differ from scholar to scholar, though Bercovici’s claim that “Gypsies were already on the banks of the Danube when the Roman legions appeared” is surely an example of the kind of overstatement for which he is well known. The Rumanian scholar Bogdan Petreceicu Haêdeu has analysed a number of documents, first referred to by Bataillard (1849:50-51) indicating that Gypsies were in the Balkans, and had started to be enslaved, some time prior to AD 1300; the dates and the validity of these have been discussed by Soulis (1961:161).

            With Mohammed II’s successful defeat of Constantine, emperor of what remained of Byzantium in 1453, the Byzantine Empire and the Middle Ages came to an end; scholars and artists fleeing to the West helped lay the foundations for the European Renaissance.

            In the Byzantine Empire, which lasted for eleven centuries, Gypsies constituted an oppressed caste, although perhaps not as slaves. This was due in part to their having been regarded as Muslims in a Christian empire (and later as Christians, when the Ottomans occupied the region). Relationships with non-Gypsies appear in fact to have been more cordial during this period than they were to become later in Europe. Others were confused with members of the heretic sect of Athiganoi, hence the later names Cigane, Zigeuner, Tsigane, &c., current in various European languages meaning ‘Gypsy’ (discussed e.g. in Groome, 1899:xxii-xxiii, and Starr, 1936). Occupying this social position, they were forbidden to enter churches, or to intermarry with whites, and were permitted to follow certain occupations only.

Conservative Romani dialects remain two thirds or more Indian in their basic lexicon and grammar, retaining in fact features which have become lost in their neo-Indic cognates. Romani contains a high proportion of Byzantine Greek vocabulary also, acquired during the period spent in Byzantium, and which above all reflects their position as domestics and artisans in that society. The fact that Gypsies were artisans was significant, in light of what was to follow in Europe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     

II.  Reception in Europe

                                 

 

            The documents which Hashdeu translated and analysed (1867, 1877) were found among papers in the archives of a monastery in Tismana, in a part of Little Wallachia called Oltenia. One of these, bearing the date 1387 and signed by Mircea (Mirsha) the Great, indicates that Gypsies had been in Wallachia for almost a century before that. Another of the documents was in the form of a receipt for forty families of Gypsy slaves presented as a gift; another was a receipt for some slaves given to the monastery at Prizren by the King of Serbia, Emperor Dushan, dated 1348, although Miklosich (1875, vol. iii, pp.6-7) questioned whether the wording in fact refers to Gypsies, an interpretation first given it by Shafarik (n.d., p.56). Miklosich’s reservations were supported in a later study by Novakovich (1911:383), who makes a case for the reference being to cobblers rather than to Gypsies. Still another was a bill of sale for three Gypsies, the cost of whom was forty horseshoes. The original language of these references, two of which are reproduced here, appears to be Church Slavic. They were published first in Hashdeu (1867:191), and later in Miklosich (loc. cit.) and Serboianu (1930:45-46), though in the latter they are reproduced very inaccurately. In Miklosich are found

 

His Majesty confirms the receipt of the gifts made by my late uncle, Vladislav, voivod at Saint Anthony of Voditsa, namely the village of Zhidovishtitsa, the orchards of Bahnino, the grain mills along the Bistritsa River, and forty families of Gypsies. There are also some Gypsies: the first, the chief artisan Raiko, then Bojko, son of Zlatar, Basil, son of Sukjas, for whom he is to give forty horseshoes each year.

     

            The reasons for the institution of slavery in the Balkans were economic as much as anything else; at the beginning of the Middle Ages, eastern Europe in particular was profiting from its trade with the Orient. When the Muslims moved westwards into the Byzantine Empire, then a Greek-speaking, Christian nation, they cut off European access to the East, and consequently to the Holy Land as well. The maritime  expansion and resulting settlement of the Americas were a direct outcome of this: an attempt to find alternative trade routes to the Indies.

            Also resulting from the Islamic encroachment were the Crusades, a series of holy wars which lasted from 1099 to 1212. There were two routes which the Crusaders took from Europe to Jerusalem, one across northern Europe through Holland, Germany and Poland, thence south along the Danube, and the other through Hungary and Wallachia, both of these routes leading to ports on the Black Sea.  Because of the constant military traffic through southern Europe, and the prosperity that feeding and equipping an army brings to a society in time of war, the Balkans flourished, while western Europe entered a period of slow decline. Balkan trade also prospered, since the flow of soldiers made the trade routes safer. Because of the losses of war, there was a gradual depletion of manpower throughout south-eastern Europe. The peasantry moved up in the social system to become the new middle class in Moldavia, Transylvania and Wallachia (Panaitescu, 1941).

            While this was happening, the Tatars were invading Europe in a succession of attacks between 1241 and the mid-1400s. Because of the decline, and eventual fall, of Byzantium in the middle of the 15th century,  and because of the Mongol invasions further north in Europe, and the Moorish domination in the southwest, a strong anti-Islamic sentiment had become very firmly established. This was the situation which Gypsies met upon their arrival in Europe.

At first, the virtual absence of a working class made welcome the skills which Gypsies brought with them from Byzantium and beyond. Two of these skills were smelting and the manufacture of firearms and shot, probably learnt in Armenia and the Byzantine Empire: the words in Armenian for both ‘furnace’ and ‘tin’, and the Greek words for ‘lead’, ‘copper’, ‘nails’ and ‘horseshoes’ have become a part of Romani vocabulary everywhere throughout Europe. But this attitude was not to last. Because of their strange language and appearance, and their dark skin, they were believed in Christian areas to be Tatars, intruders from the lands now occupied by the Muslims. This was especially true in areas remote from Islamic contact, where the local population had no first-hand idea of what actual Tatars looked like. Even today, two of the words for ‘Gypsy’ in the German language are Tatar and Heiden (i.e. ‘Heathen’, ‘non-Christian’). There is indication that in Muslim-held areas, Gypsies were regarded as Christians, or at least as non-Muslims, and treated accordingly in terms of taxation and status. They may well have begun to acquire some aspects of  Christianity in Armenia: the Romani word for ‘Easter’, for example, is derived from Armenian, although an earlier religion, which survives only in fragments today, appears to have its roots in Zoroastrianism, which could have been acquired in either India or Iran, or Manichaeanism, which existed in both Iran and Syria at the time of the exodus through those lands (Hancock, 1987).

            Kenrick and Puxon believe that the present-day hatred of Gypsies in Europe is a folk-memory of this first encounter, stemming from “the conviction that blackness denotes inferiority and evil [which] was well rooted in the western mind. The nearly black skins of many Gypsies marked them out to be victims of this prejudice” (1972:19). European folklore contains a number of references to the Gypsies’ complexion: a Greek proverb says “Go to the Gypsy children and choose the whitest,” and in Yiddish, “The same sun that whitens the linen darkens the Gypsy,” and “No washing ever whitens the black Gypsy.” One word in Romani which Gypsies in some countries use as a name for themselves means ‘black’, and is an Indian word of ultimately Dravidian origin: Caló, among the Spanish Gypsies, and Kalo in Finland. Caucasian non-Gypsies are called Parné or Panorré “whites” in some Romani dialects, even by fair-skinned Gypsies. Hoyland repeats the Elizabethan belief that this dark skin was acquired: “Gypsies would long ago have been divested of their swarthy complexions, had they discontinued their filthy mode of living” (1816:39-40).

            The closing-off of the trade routes, and the continuing necessity of feeding the soldiers and the rest of the population, began to strain the economy severely, and the establishment of a large, unpaid labor force to produce food and goods more cheaply was slowly becoming a reality. Measures soon began to be taken to keep Gypsies in southern Europe by force, so necessary had they become to the economy.  Gypsies, in turn, made efforts to get away from this situation, and many successfully managed to move on into northern and western Europe. In some places, however, such as Germany and Poland, they met with such cruelty, since they were believed to be Muslims (Hancock, 1980a), that they turned back to seek refuge in the mountains and forests of southern Europe, as a result finding themselves once again in the situation from which they had previously fled. Gypsies, then, were quickly incorporated, by legislation and by force, into the system which came totally to rely upon them during the five centuries which followed.

 

* * *

 

Some writers, such as Jirechek (1919), Potra (1939) and Chelcea (1944) have suggested not only that slavery was an inherent condition of the Gypsies, originating in their pariah status in the Sudra caste in India, but that they were slaves from the very time of their arrival in south-eastern Europe, since they were brought in as such by the conquering Tatars. This was challenged by Soulis (1961:162), who cites documentation indicating the presence of Gypsies in the Balkans prior to the arrival in the same area of the Turks. This has been upheld more recently by Gheorghe (1983), who believes that part of the Romani population migrated into Europe through the Caucasus and Crimea, turning south into the Balkans. He further believes that Gypsies were allowed to move freely and work unmolested for a century or more before social and economic factors drew them into a situation of enslavement.

            According to Gheorghe, it was the practice of the Rumanians to use prisoners taken in war as slaves. Citing Grigoras (1966) as his source, he gives an example of this involving Gypsies:

     

It is recorded ... that the Moldavian prince, Stephan the Great, after a victorious was with his Wallachian neighbours (1471), transported into Moldavia 17,000 Tsigani (Gypsies) in order to use their labour force. These figures are, maybe, exaggerated; nevertheless, they suggest the high economic value attached to Gypsies (op. cit., p.16).

     

            He goes on to demonstrate that Gypsies so taken could accordingly be given, along with other property, as tribute or taxes by the barons to the princes, and that slavery as a national institution developed gradually through such means.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

III.  Conditions Under Slavery

                                  

 

Once human beings are made the possessions of others, they become stripped of their identity as people and are seen simply as objects. The psychology underlying this is, among other things, probably guilt; it is easier to live with a situation such as slavery if the victims are dehumanized. Article I(37) of the Moldavian Civil Code for 1833 admitted, but dismissed, the moral wrong of slavery:

     

Although slavery goes against the natural law of man, it has nevertheless been practiced in this principality since antiquity ...

 

            Gypsies were seen as “debased creatures, inferior even to the animals” by at least one observer, Wickenhauer, whose rationale for such a statement was that if they had had any redeeming qualities at all, Gypsies would not have been slaves (Potra, 1935:296).

            The earliest legal documentation referring to Gypsies as slaves date back to the reigns of Rudolph IV and Stephan Dushan (Urosh IV), 1331-1355, who made one fifth of their number the property of the monasteries and landowners (Ozanne, 1878:65, Kinder and Hilgemann, 1964:205). They are referred to variously as sclavi, scindromi or robie in the documents, Rumanian and Slavic terms meaning “slave.”

            Throughout the Balkan principalities, Gypsies were distributed in the following way: the overall population was divided into house slaves (tsigani de casatsi) and field slaves (tsigani de ogor). The former were divided further into three categories of Slaves of the Crown or State, namely the sclavi domneshti (noblemen), sclavi curte (court) and sclavi gospod (householders), and one category of Slaves of the Church (sclavi monastiveshti). The field slaves were likewise divided into two categories, those of the boyars or barons, who were known as the sclavi coevestsi, and those of the small landowners, known as the sclavi de mosii. There were three principal occupations among the Slaves of the Crown:  that of rudari (or aurari) or goldwasher, that of ursari or bear-trainer, and that of lingurari or carver of wooden spoons. In addition there was a class of laborers known as laieshi, individuals who were allowed to move with some freedom over the estates, and who did a variety of jobs. In this group were also included the lautari or musicians (properly ‘fiddlers’). Slaves of the Church included the vatrashi, who were grooms, coachmen, cooks and Petty merchants, and numbers of laieshi. The different occupations followed by the laieshi have supplied the names of some of the vici, or clans, found among the contemporary Vlax (i.e. “Wallachian” or Danubian”)[1] Gypsies: kirpachi ‘basket-makers’, kovachi ‘blacksmiths’, zlatari ‘goldwashers’, churari sieve-makers’, chivute ‘whitewashers’ and so on. One characteristic of Balkan slavery was that the slaves themselves were required to give tribute to the State or, in the case of the laieshi, to their owners, so that a proportion of what they were able to find for themselves was then taken from them.

            The job of those involved in goldwashing has been remarked upon by a number of travelers through the region, and descriptions may be found in several sources (such as Dembsher, 1777, Grellmann, 1807, Hoyland, 1816, Clarke, 1818, Groome, 1899, and in particular, Wilsdorf, 1984). Grellmann’s account from the late 18th century indicates that, unpleasant as their job was, gold washers were seen as a privileged group, and distinct from the slaves:

     

Goldwashing, in the rivers, is another occupation, by which many thousand Gipseys, of both sexes, procure a livelihood, in the Banat, Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia ... In Wallachia and Moldavia, none of the bojars’ slaves, thence called bojaresk (bojar Gipseys), are suffered to meddle with goldwashing; that being a liberty granted only to those who, like other subjects, are immediately under the prince, denominated domnesk (princely Gipseys): which are also subdivided into three classes; the first named Rudar; the second Ursar; and the third Lajaschen. The Rudars alone have the licence above mentioned; the others are obliged to seek a different means of obtaining support. Each person is forced to pay a certain tribute to government (op. cit., pp. 51-52).

 

            Those engaged to entertain their owners with music have also been described by their visitors; one such account, which contains a description of the naju or Pan-pipe, appeared in a work published in 1777:

     

Even though the music is just as monotonous and miserable as the dance, it is the Gypsies who are charged with tickling their [owners’] ears.  The violin, the German guitar, and a pipe of eight reeds into which they blow while passing it back and forth non-stop across the lips, are the local instruments (Carra, 1777:176).

 

            There were restrictions on the Gypsies’ playing music for their own enjoyment, however; a set of instructions for dealing with one’s slaves issued by the Exchequer of the Hapsburg Empire at about the same time, ruled that “the Gypsies’ new masters were to beat them if they worked badly, and [they] were instructed to take particular care that they ‘wasted no time on music”‘ (Guy, in Koudelka, 1975). Maria Theresa’s list of rules ended with the direction that “They shall be permitted to amuse themselves with music, or other things, only when there is no field work for them to do” (Hoyland, 1816:74).

            Slaves belonging to private landowners were not subject to any laws higher than those of whoever owned them, and although the churches and monasteries were governed by the law of the land, it was their slaves who were treated most cruelly of all. The boyars were also quite ruthless, although they usually left matters of discipline to their overseer (called a ciocoi or a vatave). In one lurid account, Bercovici describes how

     

The boyars had a special penal code for Gypsies; beating on the soles of the feet until the flesh hung in shreds ... when a runaway was caught, his neck was placed in an iron band lined with sharp points so that he could neither move his head nor lie down to rest. The boyars had no right to kill their slaves, but there was nothing said about slowly torturing them to death. No law forbade the boyar to take the most beautiful girls as his mistresses, or to separate wives from husbands, and children from parents (1928:81).

     

            Although, as Bercovici states, the laws of both Moldavia and Wallachia granted no right to the slave owners to kill their slaves, it is recorded in the diary of a French journalist, one Félix Colson, writing about a visit to the Balkans in 1839 that despite its common occurrence, not one boyar had ever been prosecuted for the murder of a Gypsy. One account tells us that “A Gypsy postillion or courier is often shot through the head or flogged to death upon any cause or no cause, without the murder being noticed, for ‘he is only a zigeuner”‘ (Chamber’s Journal, 1856:274). Colson, whose diary served as the basis of an excellent article by Roleine, described a typical visit to the home of one of these boyars:

    

When our traveller arrives, he is led to a couch, whereupon six young women appear. Discreetly, and with care, they wash his hands, while others serve him with refreshments. Their skins are hardly brown; some of them are blonde and beautiful. Handsome too are the boys who, in groups of three, will light his pipe. No, the domestics do not work themselves to death; it’s not unusual some times to find a hundred or more working in the same household ... could this kind of life be Heaven on Earth for them?

 

Let’s rejoin Colson at the dinner table: “Misery is so clearly painted on the faces of these slaves that, if you happened to glance at one, you’d lose your appetite.”

 

The Gypsy slaves are addressed by Christian names. Basil seems to be the most common, but they are also given house-names, such as Pharoah, Bronze, Dusky, Dopey or Toad, or for the women, Witch, Camel, Dishrag or Whore.

Never does a group revolt. In the evening, the master makes his choice among the beautiful girls - maybe he will offer some of them to the guest - whence these light-skinned, blonde-haired Gypsies. The next morning at dawn, the Frenchman is awakened by piercing shrieks: it is punishment time. The current penalty is a hundred lashes for a broken plate or a badly-curled lock of hair ... it is at this time that the abominable falagueis finally outlawed: this was when the slaves were hung up in the air and the soles of their feet were shredded with whips made of bull-sinews (Roleine, 1979:111).

 

            The offspring from these unwelcome sexual unions automatically became slaves. It was this exploitation, as Colson noted, which was largely responsible for the fact that many Gypsies are now fair-skinned; Cohn (1973:63) estimates the mean percentage of white genetic mixture as 60 percent. The mixing of white and Romani blood was not able to take place among the Netoci or runaway slaves (discussed at pp. 38-39), who lived as fugitives in the forests and mountains away from settled habitation; Ozanne comments on the distinct physical types amongst Gypsies in Rumania, which he visited in the 19th century:

     

There are two distinct types of Gypsies in Roumania. One set have crisp hair and thick lips, with a very dark complexion. The others have a fine profile, regular features, good hair and an olive complexion (1878:62).

     

            Ozanne wrongly attributed this difference to two separate waves of Romani migration into the area: the first, descendants of the original Gypsies, and the second, refugees from India as a result of the invasions of the ‘Tatars’ Ghengis Khan and Tamerlane in the Middle Ages, though it is clear that the lighter-skinned individuals, nearly all house-slaves, could in fact attribute their complexions to interbreeding with Europeans. While Romani women were thus used by their white owners, Romani men were evidently seen as a sexual threat to Rumanian womanhood. Among the sclavi domneshti, there was a category called the skopici, Gypsy males who had been castrated as boys and whose job it was to drive the coaches of the women of the aristocracy without their being in fear of molestation.

 

            Another account from a much earlier period describes the peculiar cruelty of Vlad Tepov V, better remembered as Vlad the Impaler, who came to the Wallachian throne in 1476. He disposed of some scindromes, or Gypsy slaves, presumably for sport, thus:

     

He invited them to a festival, made them all drunk, and threw them into the fire. Another amusement of his was the construction of an enormous cauldron, into which he thrust his victims. Then, filling it with water, he made it boil, and took pleasure in the anguish of the sufferers.  When the people whom he impaled writhed in agony, he had their hands and feet nailed to the posts. Some ... were compelled to eat [a] man roasted (Ozanne, 1878:189-190).

 

            Seventeenth-century laws relating to Gypsies are found in the forty-article Code of Basil the Wolf, Hospodar of Moldavia (1634-1654). Examples include

     

Section 8    If the Gypsy slave of a boyard or any other proprietor, his woman or one of their children steal once, twice or thrice a chicken, a goose or any other trifle, they shall be pardoned; but if they steal something more valuable, they shall be punished like robbers.

 

Section 14   He who may discover a treasure by means of sorcery, shall not be allowed to touch it, the whole belonging to the hospodar.

 

Section 28   A slave who rapes a woman shall be condemned to be burnt alive.

 

Section 39   [The free man] who, yielding to love, meets a girl in the road and embraces her, shall not be punished at all.

 

            Those who have written about the treatment of the slaves have believed, probably as a salve to their own consciences, that Gypsies were actually well-disposed to this barbarity: “Once they were made slaves ... it seems that they preferred this state” (Lecca, 1908:181).  Paspati wondered whether Gypsies did in fact “subject themselves voluntarily to bondage “because of the “mild[er) treatment” from their owners (1861:149, emphasis added), and Emerit believed that

     

Despite clubbings which the slave-owners meted out at random, the former did not altogether hate this tyrannical regime, which once in a while took on a paternal quality ... (1930:132).

 

Paternalism certainly was evident; Lecca tells us that

     

Gypsy slaves were almost the only artisans ... the Gypsy women helped the mistress of the house with her  work, and they were on such good terms that they were even allowed to assist in the beautiful embroidery done by the young Rumanian women which is admired throughout the world (ibid., 192),

 

while Colson was able to report that, “always involved in the games and childhood life of their masters,” Gypsies owned by the boyars had “developed a familiar relationship with the children of the nobility” (Vaux de Foletier, 1973:26).

 

            The rustling of legally-owned slaves was not unknown, and was probably common practice despite the low cost of the slaves. A document dated 1560 tells of the abduction of Gypsies from Wallachian estates who were brought into the towns for re-sale by their kidnappers, and warning of penalties against this (Furnica, 1931). In the 16th century, a Gypsy child could be bought for about 48 cents, though people were usually sold not individually but in lots, called either cete, salash or shatre, the latter term also referring to the communities in which Gypsies lived. Roleine’s novel, Prince of One Summer, deals with 19th century Gypsy slavery in the Balkans, also the central theme of The Price of Freedom by the Gypsy author Matéo Maximoff:

   

The slave market was in full swing. The auctioneer, with his Turk-like appearance, athletic shoulders and sweeping moustache, held a whip in his right hand and eyed his prospective customers. Gentlemen! I have the honor once more to offer for sale to you the finest slaves to be found in any market in the world! ... tears flowed in silence, for a Gypsy was not supposed to cry for the miserable destiny of the brothers of his race ... (1947:7-8).

 

            Other impassioned reflections of life under slavery in the Europe of the past century are found in the poems of César Bolliac.

 

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Gypsy slaves could not marry without permission. Members of the same family were sold separately, and children often taken away. In 1757, however, the law involving the disposal of children was changed, and they could no longer be sold without their parents - a short-lived reprieve in the overall condition of the Gypsy slaves: by the middle of the following century, the definition of slavery had been revised, and had perhaps become even stricter.

            On January 25th, 1766, Grigore-Alexandru Ghica modified the law as it applied to marriages between Gypsies and whites. Both partners would henceforth be regarded as free, but the man, and any of their children over seven years of age, would have to continue to work for their previous owner. Rather than separate a husband and wife, the husband would be substituted for by another man of equal age and skill. The pronouncement regarding mixed marriages, however, only applied to those unions already in existence; all further such marriages were to be illegal, and any priest discovered performing them was to be excommunicated. This did not prevent these relationships from developing, however, which required that a further anti-miscegenation proclamation be issued in 1776 by Constantin, Prince of Moldavia, against such an

 

evil and wicked deed, [since ...] in some parts Gypsies have married Moldavian women, and also Moldavian men have taken in marriage Gypsy girls, which is entirely against the Christian faith, for not only have these people bound themselves to spend all their life with the Gypsies, but especially that their children remain forever in unchanged slavery ... such a deed being hateful to God, and contrary to human nature ... any priest who has had the audacity to perform such marriages, which is a great and everlasting wicked act ... will be removed from his post [and] severely punished (Ghibanescu, 1921:119-120).

     

            Just nine years after that, in 1785, a law was passed yet again forbidding such unions between Gypsies and whites, the justification this time being that it was causing individuals with Rumanian blood to become slaves. It was not considered, until the following century, that the same blood could alternatively have made the same children free. Eighty-five years later, Paspati reported that

     

the Turks, who are not particularly punctilious in the choice of their wives, often marry Gypsy women. Not so with the Christians, who have kept themselves aloof from family connections with the Gypsies, and willrarely have any intercourse with them. No Gypsy is ever permitted to enter into any of the sacerdotal offices of the Greek church (1861:148).

 

            Unions between Gypsies themselves were arranged by their owners on occasion, in order to produce better stock. During his visit in the 1830s, Colson was invited to one such wedding, to which the man and the woman were brought struggling and in chains, to have the marriage blessed by a priest. So shocked by thehypocrisy of this was Colson, that he fled “in disgust, as though I’d assisted at a human sacrifice” (Roleine, 1979:111).

 

            Gypsies crossing into Moldavia and Wallachia from other countries were captured and automatically made slaves; indeed, this was a specific article of the Civil Code until as late as the 19^th entury. On the other hand, many of the semi-nomadic Netoci (singular Netoto) referred to above, were able to escape and form maroon communities in the Carpathians, where their descendants, feared by other Gypsies and by non-Gypsies alike, still live today. Again we can report from Paspati, who says

     

The Netotsi, half savage, half naked, living by theft and rapine, feeding in times of want upon cats, dogs and mice ... are the most degraded and debased of all the Gypsy population (loc. cit.).

 

            Although the European observer saw them as the “most degraded and debased” of all Gypsies, the Netoci were the true heroes of an enslaved race, escaping subjugation and living under extremely adverse conditions in order to maintain their freedom and dignity.  Ozanne, probably drawing upon Paspati for his description, also refers to the same people as

     

... the most savage and wild of all the Gipsy race. Half naked, and living only by theft and plunder, they feed on the flesh of cats and dogs, sleep on the bare ground or in some ruin or barn, and possess absolutely no property of any kind. They have a strong resemblance to the negro physiognomy and character (1878:65).

 

Serboianu is rather more graphic:

     

The Netotsi are terribly cruel, while other Gypsies have much more moderate customs. One could therefore suppose that the Netotsi were the tribe that led theway, while the others were merely slaves, who yielded unconditionally to their owners, with whom the power resided in the whips and knives they always carried about them.

Of all Gypsies, only the Netotsi continue to wander, hated by all other Gypsies, since it is on their account, because of their wretched ways, that the whole world persecutes Gypsies ... From my own observations, together with what came to light at the trial [in May, 1929], I am convinced that the Netoci were, and today still are, cannibals (1930:36-37).

 

            His own observations were made at the scene of fighting following the end of the First World War, between Rumanians and Hungarians, at Szechalom in 1920. He remarked that some of the severed limbs of  those slain in battle, which he had noticed earlier, were missing. His conclusion was that they had been removed by some Gypsies in the area to be cooked and eaten (ibid.). The idea of cannibalism among Gypsies was not new; a number of newspaper articles reporting this from the late 1700s are reproduced by Grellmann, who devotes several pages to it himself in a chapter entitled “On their food and beverage” (1807:15-20). Another, more humanely-disposed commentary on the Netoci is found, not unexpectedly, in Colson’s journal:

     

These are the descendants of people who managed to slip through the barriers and who kept their freedom by fleeing into the forest and uncultivated lands. Contact with non-Gypsies means capture ... they live, therefore, like primitives, by hunting and gathering, collecting plants and the like, and by poaching. Sometimes they will rob a passing traveler. Unarmed, without carts or tents, pagan, black and naked, they are perhaps more disturbing than alarming.

 

            When Paul Kisseleff revised the slavery laws in the Penal Code of 1833, he also ruled that the Netoci were to be recaptured and distributed between the landowners and the state. This initiated a period of guerilla warfare in the Transylvanian Alps which was to last until abolition a quarter of a century later, and during which both Netoci and white brigands fought side by side against the Prince’s troops. Although by the first half of the 19^th century, laws pertaining to slavery became less well-defined, according to Gaster “there seems to have been a fixed, or at any rate normal, price at which slaves were sold. For, when the Bucharest papers in 1845 announced the sale of 200 families of Gypsies, they added that they would be sold at a ducat less than usual” (1923:68), a ducat being worth 14 gold francs or four and a half piastres. A selection of statutes pertaining to Gypsies, taken from the Wallachian Penal Code of 1818, includes the following:

     

Section 2     Gypsies are born slaves.

 

Section 3      Anyone born of a mother who is a slave, is also a slave.

 

Section 5      Any owner has the right to sell or give away his slaves.

 

Section 6      Any Gypsy without an owner is the property of the Prince.

     

Those from the Moldavian Penal Code of 1833 include:

     

Section II:154    Legal unions cannot take place between free persons and slaves.

 

Section II:162    Marriage between slaves cannot take place without their owner’s consent.

 

Section II: 174   The price of a slave must be fixed by the Tribunal, according to his age, condition and profession.

 

Section II: 176   If anyone has taken a female slave as a concubine...she will become free after his death.  If he has had children by her, they will also become free.

 

IV.  Towards Abolition

                                  

 

The old state laws instituted by Basil the Wolf in the mid 17^th century had become forgotten, and efforts at legal administration were becoming increasingly disorganized. By the time of the terms of office of the hospodars (i.e. lords appointed by the Ottoman court) Caragea and Calimachi in the early 1800s, specific policies regarding slavery, as well as many other aspects of Moldavian and Wallachian law, were only vaguely understood; slave-owners meted outjustice as they saw it, with little fear of reprisal, and with increasing cruelty. Caragea and Calimachi made efforts to incorporate statutes then current in the neighboring Austrian Empire into their own jurisdiction, a move which might have ultimately been effective except that in 1826, Russia invaded the two principalities and a new governor, Paul Kisseleff, was appointed, in 1829. He was a dogmatic and stern leader, instituting extensive, conservative revisions in 1833 in the Civil Code; he too, drew upon that of the Austrian Empire for his model.

            Kisseleff was sickened by the concept of slavery on moral grounds, and was initially quite determined to see it abolished, despite adverse pressure from the boyars. He was also determined to stamp out bribery and corruption within his domain. Word of his anti-slavery sentiments reached the slaves themselves, some of whom, according to Colson (op. cit.) sought an audience with him at which they promised him as much gold as a horse could carry if he would abolish slavery. Kisseleff, however, reacted with anger; He accused the Gypsies not only of trying to bribe him, but of stealing some of the gold they had washed from the rivers. Because of this, he said, they would have to remain as slaves forever. He made it illegal, furthermore, for a Gypsy to move out of his district without a pass obtained from his owner.

 

* * *

 

Bucharest, 1834. A square. There’s no crowd, just a group of people in front of a waggon pulled there by buffaloes. The passersby quicken their steps and lower their eyes so that they don’t have to look at the men and women tearing at their rags in anguish. Dishevilled, dark-skinned, these are Gypsies. You can’t escape the entreaties of the mothers whose children are being torn from them, nor their sobs and screams of fear, nor their curses; you can’t escape the cracking of the whips breaking down their stubborn resistance to the separations inevitably to come.

Although this scene is commonplace, and has already been described a hundred times, it has suddenly shocked the inhabitants of Bucharest because of the immensity of the sale. The same thing has been going on for several days now; so why this huge auction? Because Barbu Shtirbei, a Wallachian hospodar, wants to renovate his palace and needs money, and is therefore selling all of his slaves. For liquidating the stock, his banker Oprano will keep 20,000 ducats for himself. One male is worth 15 ducats, and a female 12 ducats, and children under sixteen half those amounts. This will total about 3000 slaves belonging to Shtirbei-public opinion is therefore beginning to mount (Roleine, 1979:108).

 

* * *

 

 

 

            Under influence from the western European nations, these Balkan countries were beginning to develop a conscience about slavery, especially because they were coming to rely upon the West more and more for their economy. The slave auction conducted by the hospodar Barbu Shtirbei, described above by Colson, caused such widespread indignation that he hurriedly suggested abolition as a means of regaining face - but this was at once overridden by the boyars. In 1837, however, Shtirbei’s successor, Alexandru Ghica, freed the slaves on the estates under his jurisdiction, and granted them equal status with the white peasants who worked for him. He also allowed them the right to practice their customs and to speak Romani. Ghica was probably influenced by the writings of a number of journalists of his day. Mihail Kogalniceanu in particular, writing in the same year, stirred public conscience with his firsthand descriptions of what he had seen as a boy growing up in Wallachia:

     

 

On the streets of the Jassy of my youth, I saw human beings wearing chains on their arms and legs, others with iron clamps around their foreheads, and still others with metal collars about their necks. Cruel beatings, and other punishments such as starvation, being hung over smoking fires, solitary imprisonment and being thrown naked into the snow or the frozen rivers, such was the fate of the wretched Gypsy. The sacred institution of the family was likewise made a mockery: women were wrested from their men, and daughters from their parents. Children were torn from the breasts of those who brought them into this world, separated from their mothers and fathers and from each other, and sold to different buyers from the four corners of Rumania, like cattle. Neither humanity nor religious sentiment, nor even civil law, offered protection for these beings. It was a terrible sight, and one which cried out to Heaven (1837:16-17).

   

            A similarly moving description, written some twenty years later, is found in Vaillant’s history of the Romani people:

     

What are those animals I can make out over there, through the haze of the evening? They’re coming and going, sometimes on all fours, like rats, and sometimes on two feet, like monkeys ... certainly they’re not men; they’re animals. My God-they are men! Gypsies! There are six of them, and an overseer too, keeping an eye on them. Can you see? They’re as naked as Adam, and their bodies are smeared all over with a thick coating of tar. There are shackles on their feet and yokes on their necks, and they are removing sand from the riverbed. They are wearing cangues, those vile, triangular yokes they put on pigs to stop them from breaking through the hedges, but whose three long  spikes prevent the Gypsies from being able to rest their heads . . . Since morning, they had been sweating blood, with nothing to drink but river water, and nothing to eat but bits of bread baked there in the ashes, with some boiled leeks and a little salt. At the risk of its being taken away from them by the guard, I gave them each a coin, and went on my way ... (1857:409-412).

 

     

           

 

In his small book, Kogalniceanu compared slavery in his own country with that in the Americas:

     

The Europeans are organizing philanthropical societies for the abolition of slavery in America, yet in the bosom of their own continent of Europe, there are 400,000 Gypsies who are slaves, and 200,000 more equally victim to barbarousness (1837:iv).

 

            Protests were heard from further afield, too; the French publication Magasin Pittoresque ended an article on Balkan slavery by an anonymous writer with the following, which surely helped in bringing the attention of western Europe to the situation:

     

In Rumania, Gypsy is always synonymous with “filthy animal.” These Rumanians, who so often have words of humanity and justice on their lips!  To work towards easing the degradation of these poor beings, beaten down by pain, to render them born again into the great family of mankind, to free their souls, would not only be a humanitarian act, it would be an act of justice. Where these victimized souls are concerned, the sons should be considered no less guilty than their fathers.

     

            Ghica’s move in 1837 affected only a fraction of the total: just 5,582 families out of a Romani population of nearly half a million. Nevertheless, it began a succession of similar decisions; Mihai Sturdza freed his slaves in Moldavia in 1842, and two years later, the Moldavian church liberated its slaves, followed by the same decision from the Wallachian church in 1847. The boyars, however, stubbornly refused to capitulate, despite the entreaties of the Church and the public.

 

            In 1848, a revolution led by a group of radicals returning from studying in France replaced Bibescu in the central government in Bucharest with a provisional joint leadership, which immediately proclaimed that

     

The Rumanian people reject the inhuman and barbaric practice of owning slaves, and announce the immediate freedom of all Gypsies who belong to individual owners.

 

            It seemed that Desrrobireja - Emancipation - was at last being achieved. But in December that same year, the principalities were overrun by Russians and Turks, who reinstituted many of the old laws, including those supporting slavery. The boyars, with little difficulty, repossessed their slaves, many of whom had remained unaware of their short-lived freedom. For those who knew what was happening, this turn of events must have been a bitter blow.

 

            The Russian-Turkish Convention appointed Alexandru Ghica (grandson of Grigore-Alexandru Ghica), and Barbu Shtirbei to their Council, where they served from 1849 until 1855, in which year Grigore Ghica, a cousin of Alexandru, was made Prince of Moldavia, and Shtirbei was given control of Wallachia. But Grigore was not a strong leader, and while he claimed to deplore slavery, he hesitated to take any action. He made a show of concern by passing a law forbidding children to be sold separately from their parents, but it was nearly seven years before he finally capitulated. As a result of repeated urgings from his advisor, Edward Grenier, and in particular from his eldest daughter, Natalia Balsch, who had already liberated her own slaves and who had persuaded eight other households to follow her example, however, he finally brought the matter before the General Assembly, declaring that

     

For many years, slavery has been abolished in all the civilized states of the Old World; only the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia retain this humiliating vestige of a barbaric society. It is a social disgrace.

 

            His proposal to abolish slavery met with unanimous approval, and on December 23rd, 1855, it became illegal in Moldavia. Shtirbei followed his lead, and the Wallachian slaves were freed a few weeks later, on February 8th, 1856.

            Complete legal freedom, however -- such as it was -- known as Slobuzenja and still cherished in the minds of eastern European Rom today, came in 1864. In this year, Prince Ioan Alexandru Couza, ruler of the now-united principalities (renamed Rumania in 1861) restored the liberated Gypsy slaves and the non-Romani serfs to the estates. In 1864, following a coup d’état, the government of the new Rumanian state, led by Mihail Koglniceanu who represented the progressive wing of the emerging middle class, passed a law abolishing serfdom and which provided for the redistribution of land to the peasants.

            This agrarian reform law created conditions favoring the development of capitalism, since it left most of the land still in the hands of the boyars, who did everything they could to limit its effects. In February, 1866, leaders from among the landowners, together with allies from the conservative middle class who were opposed to the peasants’ growing power, conspired to force the abdication of Prince Couza, and replaced him on the Rumanian throne by the Prussian King Charles I of the House of Hohenzollern (Daicoviciu et al., 1959:120-122).

            While the land reforms were meant in theory to benefit both the freed Rumanian serfs and the liberated Gypsy slaves, they had little effect on the latter. Despite its new status, Rumania was still heavily dependent upon the Ottoman Empire, which had instituted feudalism in the first place, and which “cloaked and facilitated the economic subservience of the country to the capitalists of western Europe” (op. cit., p. 122). in particular were kept in conditions hardly different from those they had endured as slaves. Writing at this time, Paspati (op. cit.) predicted optimistically that

 

This people, so long oppressed, enslaved in body and mind, will probably, in a short time, as they rise in wealth and learning, under the fostering hand of freedom attain to some yet higher consideration,

 

and Vaillant, in the introduction to his book which he dedicated to Alexandru and Grigore Ghica for their noble action, proclaimed that those who

 

shed tears of compassion for the Negroes of Africa, of whom the American Republic makes its slaves, should give a kind thought to this short history of the Gypsies of India, of whom the European monarchies make their Negroes. These men, wanderers from Asia, will never again be itinerant; these slaves shall be free (1857:7).

 

            Events in Hitler’s Germany eighty years later were to make sad mockery of Paspati’s and Vaillant’s visions of freedom.  Like Paspati, Clark believed that freedom would bring changes for the liberated Romanies; he believed too that ultimately being assimilated out of existence would be the best thing for them. Such changes had still not made much impact by the end of the century, however, when Clark, who was probably the only American writer of the time to acknowledge Gypsy slavery, published his observations:

 

... until the accession of Prince Charles, the Roumanian Gypsies were more terribly oppressed, sunk to a lower depth of poverty, wretchedness and degradation than any other part of their race, in any other region of the world. The great majority of the Roumanian Gypsies were slaves, held in a rigor of bondage which has never been surpassed; slaves with no rights, no protection and no hope; mere human cattle of whom their cruel, selfish owners would suffer no census to be taken. So long and relentless had this servitude been, that many of the Gypsy slaves had forgotten their own language ... The social condition of the free Gypsies of Wallachia and Moldavia was hardly to be preferred to that of the Gypsy slaves. They were living, many of them, in an utter squalidness of wretchedness and poverty, of nakedness and filth ... With the happiest of results, however, the Wallachian Gypsies have been emancipated, and all taxpayers among them are allowed to vote. What hope or promise there is in the future for such a race as this is difficult to say ... It may be that, rising from their low estate, under the genial influence of freedom of good government, Gypsies and Wallachs may rise together to the enjoyment of a common citizenship in a free and prosperous country. It may be that this is the beginning of a movement which will gradually extend into other lands, until the great body of the Gypsies throughout the civilized world, subsiding gradually into a quiet and settled life, will at length become merged and lost in the mass of the common people. Let us hope at least, that so it may be (1898:505-506).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

V.  The Post-Emancipation Situation

                                  

 

            After emancipation, Gypsies left in great numbers (discussed in more detail in Hancock, 1983 and 1987b), fearing that the old order would be re-established: it had happened once before in 1848. Families made for the nearest foreign border, and it is the time spent following this, in e.g. Serbia, Hungary, Russia and the Ukraine, which has led in part to the development of the linguistic, and to some extent social, divisions within the Vlax branch of Romani. Phonological developments in the different varieties of Vlax reflect interference from the regional dialects of Rumanian; the shift of original /t/ to /ch/ and /k/, for example. Some have as much as a third of their vocabulary adopted from that language; these linguistic features suggest that, among most of the Gypsies in Rumania, bilingualism was extensive.

            Migrations out of the Balkans went north-west from eastern Europe into Scandinavia and beyond, and through Jugoslavia into southern and western Europe. The first of these reached Paris in 1868. From Europe, considerable numbers continued on to North and South America, especially Argentina, and until their entry into the country was forbidden in the 1880s, thousands were able to make their way to the United States (see Chapter XIV). In spite of immigration policy, numbers of Vlax-speaking Rom continued to come into the U.S., especially between the two world wars. Others have settled more recently in Australia.

            Still others, after emancipation, with no money or possessions, and having nowhere to go, offered themselves for re-sale to their previous owners. Grauer indicates that until shortly before the Second World War at least, this was reflected in the patterns of distribution of the Romani population in Rumania:

     

At the time of their liberation, Gypsies stayed mainly in the areas in which they had traditionally been located. Today, the densest concentrations are still found around the monasteries, which had owned many of the slaves (1934:108).

           

            Observers such as Potra have commented on the passivity of the slaves, and have wondered why there was so little evidence of resistance, given the huge discrepancy in numbers on the estates. It was not unusual for there to be three or four hundred Gypsies working for a household of less than ten Rumanians, and yet there is no known record of any organized uprising. Grellmann (1783:13) maintains that there were such revolts, although he provides no documentation to support his claim. There is, however, a case on record from 1780 of a slave taking revenge on his master for having been tortured; the owner was overpowered and brought to the slave’s hut, where he was tied up and slowly poisoned to death over a period of several months. An intensive search by the estate staff failed to find the man, suggesting that the Gypsy quarters were not usually frequented by members of the household.

            Centuries of powerlessness and abuse are probably the cause of this destruction of the spirit; many Gypsies, having been born to it, probably saw their enslavement as part of the natural order of things. But it is evident from examples such as the above, which could not have been an isolated incident, and from the success of the fugitive Netoci, that not everyone shared this feeling of helpless resignation.

            Eyewitness accounts of the condition of the Balkan Rom during the last century were generally not sympathetic. An exception is found in the notebook of Samuel Gardner, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, who visited south-eastern Europe in 1856, one year after liberation:

     

 

The children, to the age of 10 or 12, are in a complete state of nudity, but the men and women, the latter offering frequently the most symmetrical form and feminine beauty, have a rude clothing. Their implements and carriages, of a peculiar construction, display much igenuity. They are in fact very able artisans and labourers, industrious and active, but are cruelly and barbarously treated. In the houses of their masters they are employed in the lowest offices, live in cellars, have the lash continually applied to them, and are still subjected to the iron collar and a kind of spiked iron mask or helmet which they are obliged to wear for every petty offence. They are subjected to other servile regulations ... they have the worst of reputations, as robbers, thieves, murderers even; ... for myself, I have never regarded them otherwise than a poor, outcast race, injured and ill-treated ... the force of prejudice is great, and the fears entertained of these poor helots are the strongest condemnation of their treatment.

 

            This contrasted clearly with the description given some years earlier by Bayle St. John, a British journalist who was obviously pandering to the middle-class sensibilities of the readers of Charles Dickens’ magazine Household Words:

     

The children go naked up to the age of ten or twelve, and whole swarms of girls and boys may sometimes be seen rolling about together in the dust or mud in summer, in the water or snow in winter, like so many black worms. As you pass by, a dozen heads of matted hair and a dozen pair of sharp eyes are raised towards you, and you are greeted with a mocking shout, which alone tells you that these hideous things are your fellow creatures. [Gypsies] use no plates or spoons, but dip their hardened fingers into the steaming kettle, and bring up a ball of porridge or a fragment of meat, which they cool by throwing from one palm to the other until they can venture to cast it down their throats. The women and children eat after the men who, as soon as they have wiped their hands in their hair, take again to their pipes and, if they can afford it, to drinking. They make themselves merry for an hour or two, until fatigue comes over them, and then go pell-mell to their huts, or stretch out by the embers of their fires. Nothing can be more abominably filthy than the habits of this degraded tribe ... we are sorry to be obliged to add that both men and women are, as a rule, exceedingly debauched.

 

           

            Even St. John’s description of the slaves themselves reflects a literary cliché of the period, describing in stereotypical terms (like Ozanne, p.21 above), the kind of slave his Victorian audience was more likely to have been familiar with:

     

The men are generally of lofty stature, robust and sinewy. Their skin is black or copper-coloured; their hair, thick and woolly; their lips are of negro heaviness, and their teeth white as pearls; the nose is considerably flattened, and the whole countenance is illumined, as it were, by lively, rolling eyes.

     

            Bayle St. John published his account anonymously. Another description by a writer who chose not to put his name to it, appeared in Chamber’s Journal in 1856, and contains the same mixture of fascination and revulsion:

     

 

On a heap of straw in the middle, in the full heat of the blazing sun, lay four gipsies asleep. They were all four tall, powerful men, with coal-black hair as coarse as rope, streaming over faces of African blackness; and as they lay relaxed in sleep, their figures seemed gigantic. Their dress, so to call it, was a collection of the vilest rags ... if an injury was committed on a gipsy, he had no redress . . . Rascals as the zigeuners are, and living in the greatest misery and filth-in fact, the dirtier their huts, the better they like them – they are still a very handsome race, the women especially. These bold, brown, beautiful women only make one astonished to think how such eyes, teeth and figures can exist in the stifling atmosphere of their tents.

 

            A further eyewitness account, by yet another anonymous writer, appeared in the French journal Magasin Pittoresque and adds to the picture:

     

Degraded by slavery, brutalized by ignorance and beatings, they have no material enjoyment by way of compensation. These are cattle, maintained by the boyar at the least possible cost; he feeds them with mamaliga, a kind of thick porridge made of corn meal. Their summer clothing consists of thick canvas which they wear until it rots off. Rain serves for their ablutions, and the children go completely naked. In winter, they drape themselves with rags scavenged from cast-offs: old suits, old coverlets, old carpets - all of these serve as their clothing. As for accommodation, they are not even allowed the luxury of dreaming about it. They ensconce themselves everywhere. In the morning, the vatave, or master’s overseer, carefully wrapped in furs and with his whip in hand, assembles them together in order to assign them to the day’s tasks. A distressing sight, this foul-smelling, haggard, half naked shivering group, everywhere appearing from stables, kitchens and sheds. The overseer, always hard and inflexible, beats them as much from fancy as from a desire to assert his authority.

     

            Simson, in his more moderate discussion of the Balkan Romani population, believed that “They seldom beg, and more rarely steal ... they are not an idle race; they ought rather to be described as a laborious race; and the majority honestly endeavour to earn a livelihood” (1865:74), a quotation lifted verbatim (and without acknowledgement) from Clarke (1800:592) and repeated in Hoyland (1816:261). At the same place, Simson reproduces part of a description of the Wallachian Gypsies which appeared in the 1839 Report of the Scottish Mission of Enquiry to the Jews:

     

They are almost all slaves, bought and sold at pleasure. One was lately sold for 200 piastres, but the general price is 500. Perhaps 3 pounds is the average price, and the female Gipsies are sold much cheaper. The sale is generally carried on by private bargain. The men are the best mechanics in the country; so that smiths and masons are taken from this class. The women are considered the best cooks, and therefore almost every wealthy family has a Gipsy cook. Their appearance  is similar to that of the Gipsies in other countries; being all dark, with fine black eyes, and long black hair. They have a language peculiar to themselves, and  though they seem to have no system of religion, yet are very superstitious in observing lucky and unlucky days. They are all fond of music, both vocal and instrumental, and excel in it.

 

• * *
•  

 

            There exists a number of poems dealing with slavery and emancipation, which were composed in the mid 19th century by such writers as Coradini and Bolliac; some of these are found in the pages of Colocci (1889), translated into Italian. The originals were in French, and dwell on the magnanimity of the liberators as much as they do on the liberated - an indication of their non-Gypsy origin. English and Romani translations (by the present author) of two of these are given here, together with the original versions:

 

            Accourez tous, bien-aimés frères!      

            Aujourd’hui accourez tous!                         

            Libres tous nous       

            Fait le prince roumain,                   

            Ainsi soit-il!               

                                     

            Dieu, la terre, soleil, la lune            

            L’aurore, la forêt, l’humanité,               

            En chœur célèbrant Tot

            Pour la bonté de la Moldavie                   

                                    

            Tous, les viellards, hommes faites,                       

            Jeunes hommes, agneaux de bercail,                     

            Enfants, ils ont brisé nos fers,                   

            Le prince et bon nombre de Roumains.                

                                    

            Dieu grand! Et vous astres                     

            Qui nous avez faits à la lumière,             

            Aimez tous les Roumains,               

            Ils ont brisé notre esclavage.                

                                  

 

            Come running, beloved brothers all-                              

            Today, come running all;                               

            For freed we are, by the                              

            Rumanian prince.         

            Let us cry out with full voice,                           

            So let it be!                   

                                     

            God; Earth; Sun; Moon;                          

            Dawn; Forest; Humanity-                    

            In chorus they honor Tot

            For the goodness of Moldavia

                                  

            Everyone!                     

            The old, the grown,         

            young men, babes yet in arms,                       

            and children! They have                             

            broken off our irons

            The Prince, and all         

            his citizens.                   

                                     

            Great God, and all your stars                      

            which give to us the light,                              

            Love all Rumanian people,

            For breaking our bonds

            of slavery.

 

            Hajtar, prasten, kuch phralale,

            Te prasten orde akana;

            Ke slobozi kerdiljam

            le thagarestar rumunjako;

            Das baro muj

            Te gadzhja vorta si.

 

            O Del; o phuv; o kham; o tchon;

            zori, haj vosh, dzhene;

            Ekhetanes sharen el Totas

            le mishtimaske la Moldovjako

 

            Sarro! Phure, barile,

            le Romorre - ji bakre and’e mal;

            Dazhji cinorre - malade pa’ mende

            amare lancurja -

            O princo thaj but rumunicka.

 

            Bare Devla! Thaj ji’l cherxa

            kaj kerenas amen e  vedjara

            t’al Tume drazhi sa’l vlaxondar

            kaj furshosajle ‘maro rrobimos!

           

 

            2

 

            Réjouissez-vous tous, nobles enfants de Rome,                 

            Vous tous, qui dans vos seins sentez battre un cœur d’homme;                 

            Plus d’esclaves chez nous! Le grand mot est lancé.                 

            Heureux qui, le premier, chez nous l’a prononcé!             

                        “Réjouissez-vous en, Moldaves!                  

                        Nos divins autels sont lavés;                

                        Notre Eglise n’a plus d’esclaves.”       

            Honneur à qui les a sauvé!                      

            Ils avaient tous un cœur, ils avaient tous une âme,          

            Tous avaient Dieu pour maître,             

            Et pour mère une femme.                   

            Et tous au joug de fer avaient été rivés!                       

            Honneur!                  

            Honneur à vous qui les avez sauvés!

 

 

            Be glad, ye nobles sons of Rom,                 

            In all whose breasts do beat                         

            the hearts of men.         

            No longer slaves!           

            The Good Word has come down.                  

            Happy he must be who first among us said        

                        “Rejoice at this, Moldavians!

                        Our holy altars now are all washed clean!                           

                        Our Church has slaves no more!.”          

            Honor to he who freed them!                   

            For each had a heart, and each a soul,                             

            Each had God as his master,                         

            and each was born of woman-                         

            Still, each was clamped into the iron yoke.

            Honor!

            Honor to you who freed them!

 

 

            T’aves vojako, Rroma pachvalo,

            And’e kolin kaske si jilo murshano;

            Ma naj rroburja!

            Kol drazhi vorbi amenga avile.

            Vesolo kaj pervo mothodja

                        “Pa kadoleste radujsavon Moldovaja;

                        Amari svunci altarja vortosajle

                        Ma naj la khangeriake kak rrobi.”

            Pachiv das les kaj kerdo len mekhle.

            Ke svakoske sas o Del o raj pesko

            Thaj anda manushni kerdo.

            Ma svako xutilajlo ande dzhuto sastruno.

            Pachiv,

            Pachiv das les kaj kerdo mekhle.

 

            After emancipation, the freed slaves attempted to improve their condition, and safeguard against any future domination by outsiders by working together toward some kind of political unity. A pan-European congress was held in September, 1879, in Kisfalu in Hungary, with the intention of establishing civil and political rights for Gypsies throughout Europe. Little came of this. The affair was mocked in the press, who found the concepts of intellectualism and ‘Gypsiness’ incompatible - an attitude still very prevalent today. Lecca blamed the lack of achievement on the Gypsies themselves, believing that “laziness is one of the greatest obstacles to the[ir] development” (1908:183).

            In 1913, a statue of Kogalniceanu was erected at Piatri Neamts, and was reported in the western press in the Near East magazine for June 12th that year, as follows:

     

A touching episode occurred in connection with the unveiling of the statue of Mihail Kogalniceanu at Piatra Neamtz. Mihail Kogaliniceanu was a well-known reformer, and one of his principal acts had been to secure liberty for the many thousands of Roumanian gipsies, who had hitherto been in a condition approximating to servitude. Two days after the unveiling ceremony, a vast concourse of gipsies arrived at Piatra Neamtz and proceeded to the monument. Before the statue they placed a wreath of oak leaves and wild flowers, and then, to the wierd accompaniment of a gipsy band, the whole party joined in a national dance round the statue of their liberator.

     

            In 1933, another conference, widely attended and publicized, was held by the General Association of the Gypsies of Rumania in Bucharest. It sought, among other things, to erect a monument to Grigore Ghica, and to make the date of emancipation a national holiday, and to establish a library, a hospital and a university for Rom (Haley, 1934). Although he made brief reference to this in his widely-influential book Zigeuner, which appeared three years later, Martin Block (1936:210) minimized its significance, stating (op. cit., 8) that “Gypsies offer no contribution to civilization, have no history, and do themselves in no way help to elucidate the problem of their survival.” Distorted scholarship of this type, written during the time of the Nazi regime, helped justify Hitler’s later program of genocide against the Romani people.

 

Poster advertising a slave auction in Wallachia in 1852. It

reads”For sale: a prime lot of Gypsy slaves, for sale by auction

at the Monastery of St. Elias, May 8th, 1852. Consisting of

eighteen men, ten boys, seven women and three girls, in fine

condition.”

 

            The general attitude in Rumania has not improved, as Beck has shown. Two American visitors to that country some years ago reported that poisoning Gypsies has been one means of dealing with them:

     

Later that day, we came to a Gypsy camp by a stream. A small, dark-skinned boy - barefoot and dirty - ran to beg for money. Bill tried a few words of Rumanian he had learned, but the child would not come close.  Bill then offered him a piece of chocolate, whereupon the boy suddenly screamed “Moarte! Moarte! - Death! Death!” and scurried away. Many times in the past, we were told, the unwanted Gypsies were given poisoned food. One of the first lessons drummed into a Gypsy child is never to accept food from strangers (Durrancell and Knight, 1979:820).

 

            It is the almost total lack of concern for anything except the traditional, from governmental and academic bodies, which has, more than any other factor, hindered the advancement of the Romani people. The wonder is rather that, since emancipation, Gypsies have continued to fight vicious discrimination in every country they have been in, and from every government. Yet with practically no help whatsoever from any outside agency, they have gained admittance to the United Nations Organization and the Council of Europe. Since 1971, there have been three international congresses, and the World Romani Union which sponsors these, now has bureaux in 27 countries.  In March, 1982, twenty years after its founding, another Romani organization, the Comité International Rom held a ceremony commemorating the 125^th anniversary of abolition, and has made this a recurrent event.

            Kogalniceanu predicted that the abolition of slavery would herald the demise of Romani, since “in becoming civilized, they will experience new concepts, and not retain so defective a language” (1837:36). Since the end of the Second World War, however, and in particular since the Romani people obtained permanent consultative status in the UN in 1979, through Romani language journals and newsletters and its increasing use at the international congresses, the language has come to serve more and more as the principal binding factor of Jekhipe - Oneness.

 

“In these strange houses, which are more like gutters, one serves for each family, the roofs are made of branches daubed with mud, upon which grass grows. At least ten people, on average, live here. There are no furnishings, just a kettle, a pan, a water-jug, one spoon and one knife, and a few sheepskins and tattered blankets: it is a home under a hole in the roof. Lacking any wood, cow-dung is used as fuel.  Torches do for light. Rain comes through the roof, and rheumatism follows it. No clean water is available, and yet the boyars stigmatize the Gypsies for being filthy. They go in rags, even in temperatures of minus twenty degrees, their feet wrapped in rags and the skins of dogs” (Colson, in Roleine, 1979:112).

 

VI.  Treatment Elsewhere in Europe: Transylvania, Hungary and Russia

                                  

 

            The instituionalized Oppression of Gypsies existed in other places besides Moldavia and Wallachia; Wlislocki has written about the “appalling and unmentionable punishments” inflicted upon Gypsies in Transylvania (also part of greater Rumania) “not only for attempting to escape, but for such trivial offences as stealing [a piece of fruit]”; another incident, also from Transylvania and recorded in 1736, is found in the journal of a landowner who entered the details of the recapture of an escaped Gypsy slave as follows:

     

At my dear wife’s request, I had him beaten with rods on the soles of his feet until the blood ran, then made him bathe his feet in strong caustic.  Afterwards, for unbecoming language, I had his upper lip cut off and roasted, and forced him to eat it (Anon., 1912:45).

     

            The case of a free Gypsy in Transylvania selling himself for life to one General Farkas Macskasy for “fifteen florins, a horse, three and a half bushels of wheat and four cups of wine” is on record from 1755 (Ursutsiu, 1974).

            When Gypsies first reached Hungary, their experience was similar to that in Moldavia and Wallachia. King Mathias authorised the City of Harmannstadt to employ them as slave labor in 1476; since they were slaves of the Crown, they were distributed in this way throughout the land, most often employed in blacksmithing and the manufacture of weapons and implements of torture.

            In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Gypsies were also made the property of the landowners. Certain individuals were given administrative positions by them, as shown in the following document, a letter originally written in Hungarian and dated October 25th, 1776, which permitted its bearer to collect taxes from other Gypsies. The original remains in a private collection in Nashaud, in Rumania:

     

 

You are strictly enjoined by the present letter that such State Gypsies as have hitherto been under your authority, and in addition the Gypsies Dombi Stoika, Adam Stoika, Samu Stoika and Adam Cuka, shall remain under your command. It is your duty also to collect tax-money for haymaking and the quota which in virtue of the conscription list is due to His Majesty ... the holder of this document, Dimitru Borcza, Gornik ... must not impose anything on, nor exact anything from, the four guilder Gypsy tax (Lebzelter, 1933: 213-214).

 

     

 

“Imagination will easily conceive how dismal and horrid the inside of such Gipsey huts must be to civilised humanity. Air and daylight excluded, very damp, and full of filth, they have more the appearance of wild beasts’ dens, than of the habitations of intelligent beings. Rooms or separate apartments are not even thought of, all is one open space: in the middle is the fire, serving both for the purpose of cooking and warmth; the father and mother lie half naked, the children entirely so, round it. Chairs, tables, beds or bedsteads, find no place here; they sit, eat, sleep on the bare ground, or at most spread an old blanket or, in the Banat, a sheepskin, under them. Every fine day the door is set open for the sun to shine in, which they continue watching so long as it is above the horizon; when the day closes, they shut their door and consign themselves over to rest.  When the weather is cold, or the snow prevents them opening the door, they make up the fire, and sit round it till they fall asleep, without any more light than it affords. The furniture and property of the Gipseys ... consist of an earthen pot, an iron pan, a spoon, a jug and a knife; when it happens that everything is complete, they sometimes add a dish; these serve for the whole family” (Grellman, 1807:34-35).

 

            During the reign of Empress Maria Theresa (1717-1780), daughter of the Hapsburg King Charles VI, measures were taken to settle and assimilate the Gypsy population: they were conscripted into the army, and forbidden to speak Romani or call themselves Rom (they were instead referred to as Uj Magyar, “New Hungarians”). The children were sent to school, and their parents were no longer allowed to pursue any of the traditional occupations. The means of achieving this were sometimes quite cruel and ruthless; no regard was paid at all to Romani values or culture, and the forced assimilation was seen by the Gypsies themselves as an effort to exterminate them as a distinct people. Violent antigypsyism from the Hungarian people continued to be a fact of life, however, and Gypsies increasingly became scapegoats for the most insignificant of charges. The more imaginative crimes of vampirism and cannibalism were also attributed to them: In 1782 some forty were broken on the rack and cut into pieces because they were accused of roasting and eating several dozen Hungarian peasants, even though Maria Theresa’s successor, Joseph II subsequently proclaimed that the charges were baseless. The policy of assimilation was not a success.

            The government of Catherine the Great of Russia during this same period (1729-1796) passed laws to make Gypsies Slaves of the Crown (Clébert, 1963:74)[2]. The earliest, and most complete firsthand account of Gypsies in Europe two hundred years ago is found in the works of Edward Daniel Clarke, who describes the Gypsies in Russia thus:

     

 

In their dress, they lavish all their finery upon their heads. Their costume in Russia is very different to  that of the natives. The Russians hold them in great contempt; never speaking of them without abuse; and feel themselves contaminated by their touch, unless it be to have their fortunes told. Formerly they were more scattered over Russia, and paid no tribute; but now they are collected, and all belong to one nobleman, to whom they pay a certain tribute, and work among the number of his slaves (1800:208).

 

     

            The circumstances of the post-abolition migration of the Russian Gypsies to the Americas is discussed in Chapter XIV.

            While the eastern European states were enslaving and otherwise making use of Gypsies as a source of labor within their own territories, countries in western Europe were attempting to rid their soil of Gypsies altogether.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VII.  Treatment Elsewhere in Europe: Spain, Portugal and France

                                   

 

In 1568, Pope Pius V attempted to drive all Gypsies from the domain of the Roman Catholic Church; similar expulsion orders were already in effect in individual countries, resulting in an ongoing shuffling back and forth of Gypsy populations between them. With the maritime expansion, and the establishment of a colonial plantation economy, however, a way was finally found to clear Gypsies out of western Europe more efficiently.

            The Spanish were the first Europeans to convey Gypsies to the Americas, although a reference dated February 11th, 1581, indicates that the earliest made their way there on their own. Referring to Charcas Province in Peru (corresponding to part of present-day Bolivia), it tells of Gypsies who had “passed secretly to some parts of our Indies [and ...] who go about with their native dress and language...among the Indians, whom they dupe easily, on account of their simplicity” (“pasado a algunas partes de las Nuestras Yndias xitanos ... que andan en su traxe y lengua ... entre los yndios, a los quales por su simplicad engañan con facilidad”). (Colección, 1872:138-139). Ironically, this early document asked that those Gypsies be rounded up and returned to Spain, although that country had begun ordering their expulsion as early as 1499. Before that, it had briefly considered attempting their assimilation into the Spanish population, possibly because a labor force was needed to replace the expelled Moors and Jews (Alfaro, 1982).

            Evidence that Gypsies could be made the property, for perpetuity, of Spanish citizens in the sixteenth century is found in a document published in Valladolid in 1538:

     

Gypsies are not to move about these kingdoms, and those that may be there, are to leave them, or take trades, or live with their overlords under penalty of a hundred lashes for the first time, and for the second time that their ears be cut off, and that they be chained for sixty days, and that for the third time that they remain captive forever to them who take them. Decree of their Highnesses given in the year 1499, and Law No.104 in the Decrees; confirmed and ordered to be observed in the court which was celebrated in Toledo in the year 1525, Law No.58, in spite of any clause which may have been given to the contrary (de Celso, 1538).

 

     

            Moraes (1886), Coelho (1892) and more recently Couto (1973) and Locatelli (1981) have all documented the shipment of Gypsies out of Portugal. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Ciganos were being sent to work in the Portuguese colonies in South America, Africa and India. One can only imagine how the latter individuals must have reacted upon finding themselves in the land of their ancestors. Boxer mentions briefly the victimization of

     

entire communities of Gypsies, against whom King John V seems to have conceived an obsessive hatred, for no reason that I can discover. These unfortunates of all ages, and both sexes were shipped off in successive levies to Brazil and Angola, without any specific charge being brought against them, in a (largely futile) attempt to banish the Romany race from Portugal altogether (1969:314).

 

            It was in this particular respect that the trans-Atlantic shipment of the Africans differed from that of Gypsies: the former were transported for economic reasons; the latter, for reasons of hate.

            A decree which came into effect in August, 1685, redirected the shipments from the African settlements at Cabinda, Quicombo and Mossamedes to Maranhão, a vast colony to the north of Brazil. In 1718, the Brazilian city of Bahia became the central offloading point for Gypsies from Portugal. The governor was ordered at that time to make it illegal for Gypsies to speak Romani or to teach it to their children, in order that it should quickly become extinct:

   

Foram degrados os ciganos do reino para a praça da cidade da Bahia, ordinando-se ao governador que ponha cobro a cuidado na prohibição do uso da sua lingua e giria, não permitindo que se ensine a seus filhos, a fim de obter-se a sua extincção (Moraes, 1886:24).

     

            Expulsion orders in France go back to 1427, but were applied only sporadically at that early date. By 1560, Gypsies were being ordered to leave that country at once, or be committed to the galleys, a practice which was also in effect in Spain at that time. In 1682, Louis XIV ordered bailiffs throughout France to

    

arrest, and cause to be arrested, all those who are called Bohemians or Egyptians ... to secure the men to the convicts’ chain to be led to our galleys and to serve there in perpetuity, [and as for the women, they were to be] flogged and banished out of the kingdom; all this without any other form of trial (de Fréminville, 1775:305).

 

            Gypsies were probably reaching North America within two or three decades after this order was effected; Jones, writing of these transportees from France, says that

     

There is a colony of ‘Gypsies’ on Biloxi Bay in Louisiana [now in Mississippi] who were brought over and colonized by the French at a very early period of the first settlement of the state [i.e., ca.1700]. They are French ‘Gypsies’ and speak the French language, they call themselves ‘Egyptians’ or ‘Gypsies’ (1834:189).

     

            Olmsted provides a further interesting account of Gypsies in French North America, in the form of a conversation with a local planter while he was visiting Louisiana:

     

I afterwards spent the night at the house of a white planter, who told me that, when he was a boy, he had lived at Alexandria. It was then under the Spanish rule, and ‘the people they was all sorts. They was French and Spanish, and Egyptian and Indian, and Mulattoes and Niggers’. ‘Egyptians?’. ‘Yes, there was some of the real old Egyptians there then’. ‘Where did they come from?. ‘From some of the Northern islands’. ‘What language did they speak?. ‘Well, they had a language of their own, which some of ‘em used among themselves, Egyptian, I suppose it was, but they could talk in French and Spanish too’. ‘What color were  they?. ‘They was black, but not very black. Oh! They was citizens, as good as any. They passed for white folks’. ‘Did they keep close by themselves, or did they intermarry with white folks?. ‘They married mulattoes mostly, I believe. There was heaps of Mulattoes in Alexandria then-free niggers-their fathers was French and Spanish men, and their mothers right black niggers. Good many of them had Egyptian blood in ‘em too ...’ The Egyptians were probably Spanish Gypsies; though I have never heard of any of them being in America in any other way (1861:638).

 

            The population Olmsted refers to were probably from France rather than Spain as he suggests, and related to the earlier transportees mentioned by Jones. Spanish shipments to Louisiana, their solución americana, part of a proclamation issued in 1749, is discussed by Alfaro (1982:318,329).

            Romanies had already been transported out of Spain with Columbus on his third voyage in 1498 (Wilford, 1984:C1,3; Lyon, 1986:604), and were similarly expelled during the time of the Inquisition (Ortega, 1985). A mixed Afro-Romani community lives near Atchefalaya in St. Martin Parish, some seventy-five miles south-east of Alexandria, though it shuns social intercourse with the surrounding black, white and American Indian populations, as well as with the Vlax and Romanichal Gypsies who live in the state.

            A further account from the same region from about 1780 of another mixed Romani population, though here with the local Indians, is found in Milfort (1802:39):

     

On leaving Mobile, I went to Paskagola. The inhabitants of this village are very lazy; but, since they have little ambition, they are happy, and lead a  completely tranquil life. They are for the most part Gypsy men who married Indian women; there are a few French Creole men among them. They are all carpenters and build schooners with which they engage in coasting trade in Mobile Bay, at New Orleans, and at Pantsakole.

     

            Cuban anthropologist Dr. Beatrice Morales-Cozier of Georgia State University in Atlanta is working with another mixed African-Romani community which lives in the interior of her own country.

            On July 30th, 1749, King Ferdinand VI ordered the wholesale redada or arrest of all Romanies throughout Spain, in order to “extinguish once and for all” this population which had “infected (his domains) for so many years.”  Many where imprisoned; others were sent by sea to La Coruña on English and Swedish vessels “with the loss of many people” (Alfaro, 1993:103).

            On November 22nd, 1802, the Prefect of the department of Basses Pyrenees, M. de Castellane, issued an order calling for measures to be taken “to purge the country of Gypsies”; subsequently, ... on the night of December 6th, the date set by the Prefect, all of the Gypsies throughout the Basque Country were rounded up, as though in a net, and were taken via various depots to ships which put them off on the coast of Africa. “This vigorous measure which, on being put into effect, brought all the approval which humanity and justice could muster,” said a writer of the time, and “was a veritable kindness to the Department” (Michel, 1857:136).

            In an unsigned article which appeared in the first issue of the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society (1888:54), it was suggested that the Lowbey people of the Senegambia may be the descendants of these transportees; they are said never to marry out of their community, are reputed to have come from somewhere far away, and to be cursed to keep on the move for stealing. They make a living from carving wooden utensils for sale, and in an earlier article in the Archaeological Review (Hartland, 1888:15), they are referred to as “the Gypsies of the Gambia.” Michel’s report does not give the destination of the French ships, but it seems unlikely that they would have traveled as far south along the African coast as the Gambia before disembarking their human cargo. There is a town on the Senegambian coast, however, called Ziguinchor (pronounced “ziganshor”) whose name, it has been suggested, may derive from Tzigane. Lespinasse (1863:42) had earlier suggested that those vessels may not in fact have left European waters, but might instead have been waylaid off the French coast by a British naval blockade and returned to shore.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VIII. Treatment Elsewhere in Europe: Germany

                                  

 

In the Hanseatic townships of mediaeval Germany, Gypsies were subject to the extremely rigid laws which affected all the inhabitants during that period. Many were imprisoned, for example, for not being on the taxpayer’s register, or for not having a fixed address or steady employment. Because of their circumstances, Gypsies were especially vulnerable, and many sought refuge in the forests to escape these penalties. The difficulty of maintaining a livelihood under such conditions, and the harshness of the northern European winters, together with the steadily increasing harassment of Gypsies in particular, reduced their numbers in Germany drastically within the first few years.

            Those who remained were subject to growing persecution; in the museum in the Ancient Free City of Nördlingen may be seen many of the implements of torture used against the Gypsies in Germany, and a placard showing a Gypsy, whose flesh had been whipped from his body before being taken to the gallows, bearing the words “Punishment for Gypsies and their women found in this country.” In 1726, Charles VI passed a law that any male Gypsy found in the country was to be killed instantly, while Gypsy women and children had their ears cut off, and were whipped all the way to the border. Gypsy hunting was a common sport; in 1826, Freiherr von Lenchen displayed his trophies publicly: the severed heads of a Gypsy woman and her child. In 1835, a Rheinish aristocrat entered into his list of kills “A Gypsy woman and her suckling babe.”

            The first academic treatment of Gypsies was written by the German ethnographer Heinrich Grellmann in 1783, upon whose research all later scholarship was built. With few exceptions, 19th century studies  reflected the distaste and prejudices of their authors; Grellmann himself admitted to feeling “an evident repugnancy, like a biologist dissecting some nauseating, crawling thing in the interests of science” while doing his fieldwork (“ein offensichtlicher Widerwille wie der eines Naturwissenschaftlers, der ein ekelerregendes Kriechtier im Interesse der Wissenschaft seziert”; 1783:7). His contemporary, the Lithuanian minister M.Zippel, wrote that “Gypsies in a well-ordered state in the present day are like vermin on an animal’s body” (“Zigeuner in einem guten geordneten Staat während der gegenwärtigen Zeit, sind wie Schädlinge an der Körper eines Tieres”1793:148). In the 20^th century, Martin Block exhibited much the same attitude. He could not help experiencing “an involuntary feeling of mistrust, or repulsion, in their presence” (“ein unfreiwilliges Gefühl des Misstrauens oder des Widerwillens in ihrer Gegenwart”; 1936:16).

 

 

            This detached attitude is not unusual among those who specialize in Gypsy Studies; in his foreword to the 1963 reprint of Groome’s Gypsy Folk Tales, the late Walter Starkie drew attention to this:

     

[Groome’s] experiences with the majority of Gypsiologists in Germany and elsewhere left him dissatisfied, for he discovered that they were not interested in frequenting the Gypsy camps or talking to the Romanichals; all their interest was concentrated upon Romani, as though it were a dead language like ancient Greek (Groome, 1963:v).

     

            It has nevertheless been German scholarship in this area, more than any other, that has provided the foundation for modern Romanological studies. Grellmann’s work attracted a number of Indianists, who became interested in Romani and who made passing references to its genealogy in their work. Such scholars included Schlegel, Bopp and Jülg. Contemporary with them was a handful of Romanologues who were publishing descriptions of specific dialects of European Romani: Bischoff, von Heister, Puchmeyer and Graffunder among them. In 1844, Augustus Pott produced the first scientific historical and comparative study of the language, for which he has come to be regarded as the father of Romani linguistics; this work was supplemented by the research of Ascoli, also writing in German, and in the 1870s and 1880s Franz Miklosich produced the first etymological and dialectological studies. A number of 19th-century German Indo-Europeanists cut their philological teeth on Romani, although its study today remains, as then, marginal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IX. German Treatment of Gypsies in the Twentieth Century

                                  

 

“You talked about Auschwitz. My name is Gustav Wexler. I know about Auschwitz. “

“Mr. Morris, my name is Mrs. Hersh. May I say something? Israel was bought and paid for with the blood of six million martyrs ... Why do you think the Jews should be the only people without a homeland?”‘

“Do I think that? On the other hand, Mrs. Hersh, where is the homeland of the Gypsies? What did their blood buy and pay for?”

“Gypsies? “, Wexler said. “What’s Gypsies got to do with it?”

“Half a million Gypsies also died in the concentration camps, “Adam said. “Doesn’t that even earn them a couple of fields? One caravan site with running water? A day trip to a stately home? Nothing?”‘

“The Gypsies, “ Wexler said, “have no historic homeland.

“Ah. That must be where they made their big mistake. “

“The Gypsies, “Mrs. Hersh said, “what culture have the Gypsies got?”

“No culture?” Adam said. “To hell with them.”

“Mr. Speaker, “ Wexler said, “may I ask you something? Because can you give me the names of ten famous Gypsies?”  (Raphael, 1977:253-254).

 

 

     

 

Towards the end of the 19th century, a conference on “The Gypsy Filth” (Der Zigeunerunrat) was held in Swabia, and plans were made to round up all Gypsies throughout the German-controlled territories. A system was proposed whereby bells would be rung in villages as a means of signalling their presence. This led to the later establishment, in Munich in 1899, of the Central Office for Fighting the Gypsy Nuisance (Zentrale zur Bekämpfung des Zigeunerunwesens), under the direction of Alfred Dillman. This bureau was not officially closed down until 1970.

     

Long before the Nazis came to power, the Gypsies had been treated as social outcasts. Their foreign appearance, their strange customs and language, their nomadic way of life and lack of regular employment had increasingly come to be regarded as an affront to the norms of a modern state and society. They were seen as asocial, a source of crime, culturally inferior, a foreign body within the nation. During the 1920s the police, first in Bavaria and then in Prussia established special offices to keep the Gypsies under constant surveillance. They were photographed and fingerprinted as if they were criminals. With the Nazi takeover, however, a new motive was added to the grounds for persecution: their distinct and allegedly inferior racial character (Noakes, 1985:17).

 

     

            When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, his Nazi administration inherited anti-Gypsy laws which had already been in force in Germany since the Middle Ages. The January 20th edition of Le Temps that same year carried the following story (see also Shoemaker, 1933:158-160):

     

Gypsy Island

 

According to the Viennese papers, mayors in the district of Oberwarth, in Burgenland, have today examined the question of the Gypsies who, they claim, have become a veritable plague in the country. They maintain that the Gypsies are multiplying three or four times more rapidly than the indigenous population ... These mayors want to withhold civil rights from the Gypsies, and institute the same kinds of laws against them as exist in Hungary, which include in particular clubbing, in cases of theft. The mayors have endorsed a proposal made by the District Prefect that the Société de Nations be invited to examine the establishment of a Gypsy colony on one of the Polynesian islands.

     

            During the first few months of Nazi rule, an SS study group proposed that all Gypsies then in Germany should be killed by drowning them in ships taken out into mid-ocean and sunk. There were not, at that time, any anti-Jewish laws in effect, and in fact the Weimar Constitution of 1918 had reaffirmed the equality of  Jews with other Germans in that year (Gilbert, 1947:493). Instead, the authorities in the Research Center for Racial Hygiene and Biological Population Studies began a lengthy process of codifying persons of Romani origin (dealt with in the recent novels of the Romani Holocaust by Ramati (1985) and Florence (1985); the novels of Kosinsky (1965) and Kanfer (1978) also deal with the same theme). On September 15th, 1935, Gypsies became subject to the restrictions of the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of Blood and Honor, which forbade intermarriage or sexual intercourse between Aryan and non-Aryan peoples (Noakes, loc. cit.). Criteria for classification as a Gypsy were twice as strict as those later applied to Jews: if two of a person’s eight great-grandparents were even part-Gypsy, that person had too much Gypsy ancestry to be allowed, later, to live. The Nuremberg decree on the the other hand defined a Jew as being minimally a person having one Jewish grandparent, i.e. as someone who was one quarter Jewish (Hilberg, 1961). If the criteria applied to the Jews had also been applied to the Gypsies, nearly 20,000 Gypsy victims would have escaped being murdered by the Nazis (Kenrick and Puxon, 1972). The subsequent classificatory treatment of Jews was in fact derived from, and patterned upon, those developed for the Romani population. An article which appeared in the British press on the eve of the Second World War included the prophetic words “In case Hitler is interested, they are pure Aryan” (Sulzberger, 1939:7).

 

            Eva Justin, one of those concerned with compiling genealogical data of this sort was, after the war, employed as a social worker and never prosecuted. In her treatise on Gypsies, she expressed the hope that her research would prevent any further flow of such “unworthy primitive elements” into the German nation. Her companion during the war, Dr. Hermann Arnold, remains today a respected ‘Gypsy expert’, and until recently was a consultant on Gypsies with the Ministry of Family Affairs in Bonn.

            Some Gypsies were sterilized as early as 1933, though no Jews had yet been; beginning in the same year, camps were being established by the Nazis to contain Gypsies at Dachau, Dieselstrasse, Mahrzan and Vennhausen, although at so early a date, Jewish victims were not being sent en masse to any camps. It is a matter of singular disgrace that, in 1936, the anti-Gypsy campaign became globalized, through the establishment of the International Center for the Fight against the Gypsy Menace by Interpol, in Vienna, which today has branches in 138 countries. Again, this did not happen for the Jews. In effect, the Nazi Party sought, and was given, the cooperation of other European governments in its campaign to locate and identify Gypsies throughout Europe for its later plans for extermination.

            In 1938, a Nazi Party proclamation stated that the Gypsy problem was categorically a matter of race (“mit Bestimmtheit eine Frage der Rasse”), and was to be dealt with in that light; a year later, Johannes Behrendt, speaking for the Party, declared that “elimination without hesitation” (“Austossung ohne Zögern”) of the entire Gypsy population had to be instigated immediately, although a number of families were to be kept in a compound for future anthropologists to be able to study. Among the many categories of victims in Hitler’s Germany, only the Gypsies and the Jews were singled out for annihilation on racial grounds, only Jews and Gypsies being considered genetically so “manifestly tainted” as to pose a threat to German racial purity.

 

 

 

 

 

[At the U.S. Government War Crimes Tribunal] Ohlendorf ... told Musmanno that he did his duty as best he could at all times. Asked if he killed other than Jews, Ohlendorf admitted he did: Gypsies.

 

“On what basis did you kill Gypsies?.”

“It was the same as for Jews,” he replied.

“Racial? blood?.”

Ohlendorf shrugged his shoulders. “There was no difference between Gypsies and Jews” (Infield, 1982:61).

 

A Gypsy transport awaiting departure

     

 

            In July, 1938, the machinery of the Endlösung or Final Solution was put into effect with the transportation of a group of Gypsies to Berlin. During the following months, transportations to the camps in Poland began, but were later stopped because of the expense involved, and the need to use the trains for moving German weapons and troops to the Eastern Front.  Gypsies in Poland and the Baltic States, Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Italy, Hungary and the rest of Nazi-occupied Europe were herded into camps for later extermination, though others were frequently dispatched on the spot. The treatment given to a Gypsy mother and her young daughter by a group of soldiers in northern Jugoslavia is not untypical:

     

First the girl was forced to dig a ditch, while her mother, seven months pregnant, was left tied to a tree. With a knife they opened the belly of the mother, took out the baby, and threw it in the ditch. Then they threw in the mother and the girl after raping her. They covered them with earth while they were still alive (Paris, 1962:62).

 

            The effectiveness of Hitler’s campaign of genocide ensured that there were almost no Gypsy writers who survived the War, and because Gypsies have been overlooked since then, it has been hard for chroniclers to piece together this story; they have had largely to rely upon the accounts of Jewish and other survivors for their information.  A man named Grabów who escaped from the death camp at Chelmno was able to get a letter through to his relatives telling of the atrocities being perpetrated against Gypsies there:

     

... The place where everyone is being put to death is called Chelmno, not far from Dabie; people are kept in the nearby forest of Lochów. People are killed in one of two ways: either by shooting or by poison gas. This is what happened to the towns of Dabie, Izbica Kujawska, and others. Recently, thousands of Gypsies have been brought there from the so-called Gypsy camp in Lodz, and the same is done to them ... (Dobroszycki, 1984:xxi, letter dated January 19th, 1942).

 

     

 

 

 

 

 

            Shoshana Kalisch was a survivor of the Lodz concentration camp, and tells of sharing it with Gypsies brought there from Austria:

 

The Gypsies did not last long. Left without food for days, they were tortured sadistically by their special guards, who often forced them to do gymnastics until they collapsed or died ... The Nazi commander ordered squads of Jews to bury the Gypsies in the Jewish cemetery. Surviving Gypsies were deported to Auschwitz ... when we were deported to Auschwitz, my sister and I were assigned to a barracks of “C” compound at Birkenau, adjacent to the camp in which the Gypsies were detained ... One night in early August, we heard spine-chilling

Gypsy families in Auschwitz

 

shrieks coming from the Gypsy camp, augmented by the sound of trucks coming and going and the ferocious barking of dogs. The elder in charge of our barracks told us that the Gypsies were being taken away. The sound of the trucks, the barking of the dogs, and the screaming and wailing of the Gypsies permeated our camp throughout the night.

We held onto our shoes, our only possessions aside from the single garment on our bodies, ready to run - which would of course have been useless - expecting in silent terror to be the next ones taken away. Feeling only my sister’s and my heartbeats, I made up my mind not to scream when they came for us. The Gypsies, I thought, had been screaming for me too (Kalisch, 1985:87-88).

 

            Shoshana Kalisch (op. cit.) also reproduces a song which was written about the Gypsies in her camp. “Strictly quarantined and isolated from the rest of the ghetto, the Gypsies were easily ignored or forgotten,” she says. “Thus it is all the more touching to hear a song describing the Gypsies’ plight by the Lodz, ghetto musician David Beigelman.” Beigelman died of exhaustion in a slave labor camp just three months before liberation:

 

            Tsigaynerlid

 

            Finster di nakht, vi koyln shvarts,                     

            Nor trakht un trakht, un s’klapt mayn harts.                       

            Mir Tsigayner lebn vi keyner,                 

            Mir laydn noyt, genug koym oyf broyt.        

                                    

            Dzum dzum dzum,    

            Mir flien arum vi di tshaykes,             

            Dzum dzum dzum,    

            Mir shpiln oyf di balalaykes.              

                                    

            Nit vu men togt, nit vu men nakht;              

            A yeder zikh plogt, nor kh’trakht un trakht.                     

            Mir Tsigayner lebn vi keyner,                 

            Mir laydn noyt, genug koym oyf broyt.        

                                   

            Dzum dzum dzum,    

            Mir flien arum vi di tshaykes,

            Dzum dzum dzum,    

            Mir shpiln oyf di balalaykes.

 

 

            Gypsy Song[3]               

 

            Dark is the night, like blackest coal.             

            I brood and brood, my heartbeats toll.            

            We Gypsies live like no no others do,

            Suffering pain, and hunger too.           

                                  

            Dzum dzum dzum,      

            Like seagulls we fly near and far,

            Dzum dzum dzum,      

            We’re strumming our Gypsy guitar.               

                                  

            Nowhere to stay, almost no food;            

            Everyone struggles, but I just brood.                  

            We Gypsies live like no others do,          

            Suffering pain, and hunger too.            

                                  

            Dzum dzum dzum,

            Like seagulls we fly near and far,

            Dzum dzum dzum,

            We’re strumming our Gypsy guitar.

 

 

            Rromani Dzhili

 

            Tunjariko e rjat, angar kalo,

            Nekezhi’ ma, marel o  jilo;

            Trajin el Rrom sar nisave

            Rrevdin e dukh, sa bokhale.

 

            Dzum dzum dzum

            Sar macharki pash-dural hurjas,

            Dzum dzum dzum

            Amare levuci rromane bashas.

 

            Chi beshav katende, kak manaj te xav,

            Saorre chingarel, ‘ma man te nekezhisavav;

            Trajin el Rrom sar nisave

            Rrevdiv e dukh, sa bokhale.

 

            Dzum dzum dzum

            Sar macharki pash-dural hurjas,

            Dzum dzum dzum

            Amare levuci rromane bashas.

 

Document dated August 31st, 1938, dealing with the problem of finding locations in which to confine Gypsies

            In 1942, information on the Gypsy population of England, Sweden and Spain began to be collected in anticipation of eventual Nazi takeover of those countries. In Germany itself, large-scale roundups were established by February, 1943, and by April over ten thousand Gypsies had arrived in Sachsenhausen where they were put to work. Conditions in these and other concentration camps are painfully described in Kenrick and Puxon (1972), which also recounts the terrible medical experiments which were carried out on Gypsies, especially upon young girls. Twins were also selected for experimentation; the “Angel of Death,” Joseph Mengele, used Gypsy children in particular for his research. One Gypsy survivor, Hans Braun, who now lives in Canada remembers Mengele and his experiments at Auschwitz, where on just one day, August 1st, 1944, four thousand Gypsies were dispatched to their deaths. Braun has an especially vivid recollection:

     

I remember very well how he gave a small Gypsy boy of five or six an injection with a needle about 30 centimetres long. He stuck the needle into the boy’s back to extract the spinal fluid; he stuck it up to the neck vertebrae. The needle broke, and it didn’t take long for the child to die. Behind the building there was a kind of butcher’s block with a trough for blood, like a wash basin ... Mengele cut the child open from the neck to the genitals, dissecting the body, and took out the innards to experiment on them. This was something I will not forget (Tyrnauer, 1985b:7).

 

            A Jewish survivor, Vera Alexander, had the job of supervising fifty sets of Gypsy twins in the same camp. She describes an incident which took place in 1943:

     

I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Nina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state - they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents - I remember their mother’s name was Stella - managed to get hold of some morphine, and they killed their children in order to end their suffering. Soon after that, I was taken to another camp, and the Gypsy camp was entirely liquidated (Davis, 1985:23).

 

 

            Nineteen-forty-three was also the year Himmler decided that the Gypsy camps were to be done away with, and so began a program of liquidation which was ultimately to destroy over half a million Romani lives. Gypsies were beaten and clubbed to death, herded into the gas chambers and forced to dig their own graves and jump into them. In Lithuania, a thousand Gypsies were locked inside a synagogue, which was then burnt to the ground killing them all. Children had their heads smashed by being swung by the feet against a wall. One eyewitness account tells of Gypsies screaming through the night in anguish, waiting to be murdered. It is ironic that the Romani word sastipe, the general greeting for health and luck, should have the same Sanskrit root (svastha) from which the word Swastika is also derived.

 

 

            An account of the punishment meted out to one Gypsy who tried to escape from Dachau, is found in Kogon:

     

He was locked in a large box with iron bars over the opening. Inside, the prisoner could only hold himself in a crouching position. Koch (the camp commander) then had big nails driven through the planks so that each movement of the prisoner made them stick in his body. Without food or water, he spent two days and three nights in this position. On the morning of the third day, having already gone insane, he was given an injection of poison (1950:102).

 

     

 

 

            Manfri Wood, a Gypsy serving with the British Royal Air Force, told of his first impressions as a member of a liberation team entering Belsen after the collapse of the Third Reich:

     

We faced something terrible. Heaps of unburied bodies, and an unbearable stench. When I saw the surviving Romanies, with young children among them, I was shaken. Then I went over to the ovens, and found on one of the steel stretchers the half-charred body of a girl, and I understood in one awful minute what had been going on there (Kenrick and Puxon, 1972:187).

     

            Since the end of the Second World War, little of benefit has been achieved from the Gypsy point of  view. Not a single Gypsy was called upon to testify at the Nuremberg Trials, or has been to any of the subsequent war crime tribunals.

            The downfall of the Third Reich did not halt the devaluation of Gypsy lives. Though West Germany paid nearly $715 million to Israel and various Jewish organizations, Gypsies as a group received nothing ... [although] Gypsy activists have uncovered a case of a woman who received ten dollars for the death of her baby in Auschwitz.

            West German officials have rejected the efforts of several thousand Gypsy survivors of the War to establish citizenship in the Federal Republic, even though their families have lived in Germany for generations (Anon., 1979:67).

            Romani Rose, Vice President of the World Romani Union and its most vigorous activist, has been trying, so far without success, to obtain compensation from a number of German companies for their use of  Gypsies as slave labor in Nazi Germany:

     

Seven companies have paid more than 58 million marks ($29 million) to Jewish forced laborers and their families. Rose, 39, was interviewed in the offices of the Gypsy Central Council in Heidelberg. He said “absolutely none” of the Gypsies have been paid so far ... Rose said 700 German Gypsies have notified him of claims for slave labor, but he added that the number could rise to 1,000. He estimated that up to 15,000 Gypsy survivors of the Nazi forced-labor program are in Germany and Austria alone. One of those, Hugo Franz, said at the press conference: “Prisoners died like flies from breathing in poison gas. Civilian workers and SS guards both beat us. Many of the prisoners went blind from the poison gas; we went for days without sleep.” The Gypsies have named 11 companies for which they say members of the Romani population were forced to work during the Nazi era. Rose said demands had been sent to all of them. Among companies Rose named was the Daimler-Benz car and truck manufacturer (Costelloe, 1986:3A).

 

* * *

 

            Since the mid-1970s, representatives of various Gypsy organizations have been in conference with Herr Willy Brandt and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in an attempt to claim reparation amounting to $365 million. Stimulated in part by Jewish activists, Gypsies are pressing more and more openly for recognition of their plight. In October, 1979, 2,000 Gypsies marched to Bergen-Belsen where thousands died between 1939 and 1945. Today, there is a growing acknowledgement of the Gypsy situation among German scholars (e.g. Günther, 1985), although prejudice at the popular and governmental levels remains deeply entrenched. German government spokesman Gerold Tandler, as recently as the 1970s, called Gypsy demands for war crimes reparations “unreasonable” and “slander[ous]” (Pond, 1980:B17), while in 1985, the Mayor of the City of Darmstadt, Günther Metzger, told the Central Council of the German Sinti and Roma that they had “insulted the honor” of the memory of the Holocaust by wishing to be associated with it (Wiesenthal, 1986:6). German Gypsies are now learning that it is to their advantage to pass as Jews; a recently-documented example is that of a musician who 

 

... changed his Romany name, Kroner, to Rosenberg; with a Gypsy name, he had been out of work for months, but with a new Jewish name, he was highly employable. “The German conscience is very selective,” he laughed (Marre and Charlton, 1985:196).

 

     

            The Gypsies in West Germany, now numbering some 50,000 (no population estimates have been released by the East German government, although they are probably extremely small), live mostly in ghettos and receive minimal schooling and health care. In a recent government survey of German attitudes towards Gastarbeiter and other non-indigenous groups, Gypsies were clearly ranked at the very bottom in terms of their perceived social worth and acceptability. “Owners of almost 90 percent of West Germany’s campsites ... have tacked up signs reading GYPSIES FORBIDDEN. Police periodically descend upon camping Gypsies with guard dogs and submachine guns, and force them to move on” (ibid.). In November, 1973, a villager in Pfaffenhofen in Bavaria opened fire upon a group of Gypsy women who had come to buy produce from his farm, killing two and wounding a third. The sympathies of the police were with the farmer (David, 1973:75).

 

 

 

 

 

            One of the most pressing issues facing American Romanies is the securing of representation on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council. This was established in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter to be an enduring memorial to all those who perished in Hitler’s Germany. Sixty-five individuals were appointed but, as with Nuremberg, no Gypsies were ever approached. Elie Wiesel claimed in his Report for the Holocaust Memorial Commission to the President of the United States that Jews were “certainly the first” victims of the Holocaust (1979:3), and that the Holocaust was “essentially a Jewish event ... the Jewish people alone were destined to be totally annihilated, they alone were totally alone ... At the same place appears the definition that “The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators.” In the entire report, the word Gypsy appears just once, along with Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Frenchmen, Serbs and Slavs as “others,” in an appendix. The total number of Romani dead is now estimated to be as high as one and a half million.  While this amounts to a quarter of the number of Jewish victims, in terms of the genocide of an entire people, the proportions are nevertheless similar - a fact which has not escaped a number of Holocaust scholars:

     

The Nazis killed between a fourth and a third of all Gypsies living in Europe, and as many as 70 percent in those areas where Nazi control had been established longest (Strom and Parsons, 1978: 220).

 

How many people in Britain and America today are aware that the Gypsies of Europe were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to their death in almost similar proportions to the Jews? (Heger, 1980:15).

 

... the Gypsies had been murdered [in a proportion] similar to the Jews; about 80 percent of them in the area of the countries which were occupied by the Nazis (part of a letter dated December 14th, 1984, from Simon Wiesenthal to Elie Wiesel, protesting the exclusion of Gypsies from the Holocaust Memorial Council).

 

     

            Pressure for recognition from Gypsy groups in the United States consistently met with indifference to begin with. When acknowledgement was made at all, it was invariably unkind. Professor Seymour Seigel, former chairman of the U.S. Holocaust  Memorial Council, in an article which appeared in the Washington Post questioned whether Gypsies really did constitute a distinct ethnic population - a particularly insensitive comment when it was because of their ethnicity Gypsies were targeted for extermination - and called attempts to obtain representation on the Council “cockamamie” (Grove, 1984:C4). Other journalists reported that they were told by the Council’s liaison staff that Gypsy protesters were “cranks” and “eccentrics” (Doolittle, 1984:5). Clearly, the individuals controlling the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council were as ignorant of the true facts of Gypsy history as any other Americans, and their concern has contrasted very sharply with that demonstrated by Jewish supporters in Europe, for whom the facts are better known. Since the staff in Washington reads the same novels and watches the same films as the rest of the population, their biases were hardly surprising. In July, 1985, a 167-page work by Dr. Marilyn Bonner Feingold entitled Report on the Status of Holocaust Education in the United States was circulated, “to bear witness and to remember the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the millions of others who perished at the hands of the Nazis” (p.1), but once again, one will search in vain for the words Gypsy or Romani in its pages. A report and bibliography on the fate of Gypsies in the Holocaust commissioned by the Council by Tyrnauer (submitted in February, 1985), on the other hand, had still not been publicized or circulated a year and a half later, and according to a letter from the Council’s Executive Director Richard Krieger to Dr. Tyrnauer, dated September 26th, 1986, there are still “no immediate plans for its publication.” Gypsies either played a bit-part in the Holocaust, apparently, or were not a part of it at all.

            Continuing agitation from Romani organizations such as the Roma National Congress and the U.S. Romani Council, brought the beginnings of a response; picketing in Washington by members of the latter organization was covered by the press, and while the reports were not always the most objective, public attention has been brought to the situation. The struggle has benefitted from non-Gypsy support also, most of it Jewish. Miriam Novitch has spoken up for the Gypsy cause, and Simon Wiesenthal threatened to make the fact that Gypsies were being excluded from the Council a public issue (1985:3). Perhaps largely because of this intervention, the post of Special Advisor on Holocaust-Related Gypsy Matters to the Council was created in May, 1985, and a representative appointed. But when questioned a year later why that advisor’s involvement had never once been sought, the Council’s then acting director Micah Naftalin told the Washington Post that it had only ever been an “honorary” position (Hirschberg, 1986:A16).

            New appointments to the Council were to be announced in Spring, 1986, and it was expected that one or more Gypsy representative would be included. Naftalin and Wiesel both told the New York Times (for January 14th, 1986, p.B4) that they “bet they would do it.”  American Gypsies had been waiting since 1979 for the situation to be redressed, and the names of eight candidates had been submitted in 1985. The announcements were anxiously awaited. The Rornani community was stunned when word came that the Office of Presidential Appointments had voted not to include any Romani representation; once again, Gypsies had been excluded. White House spokesman Linas Kojelis told a World Romani Union representative that Gypsies might have received more acknowledgement if they had been a more powerful people; a classic example of blaming the victims for the crime.

            Since then, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council has taken a more active interest in the Gypsy situation. Former acting director Micah Naftalin has gone on record as stating that “the only other ethnic group [besides Jews] marked also as a genocidal target was the Gypsies” (1986:185) - the first time this fact has been acknowledged in print by the Council. A meeting to apprise Gypsy representatives of the Council’s plans was held on May 5th, 1986, and was well attended. In June, a representative of the Romani Union was for the first time invited to address the whole assembly. A ceremony to commemorate Gypsy victims of the Nazis was held in September the same year, and a Conference called “The Other Victims” was likewise planned for February, 1987, in which Gypsies were asked to participate. Such separate treatment was not well received by Gypsies, however, who argued that there was after all just one Holocaust: ande jekh than hamisajlo amaro vushar ande’l bova, “our ashes were mingled in the ovens” - why should that be remembered separately today?

            The fact that the Romanies were Hitler’s first real victims is gradually becoming better known; but Elie Wiesel, who watched helplessly as his father was beaten by a Gypsy Kapo in Auschwitz (Wiesel, 1982:36-37) still felt it necessary in his address at the Romani Day of Remembrance, to emphasize that the Jews were nevertheless “the supreme victims” of the Third Reich, and in his speech upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in the following month, he made the Point that the Nazi victimization of the Jews was “unique.” At the ceremony on September 16th, Professor Wiesel made the following statement:

 

I confess that I feel somewhat guilty towards our Romani friends. We have not done enough to listen to your voice of anguish. We have not done enough to make other people listen to your voice of sadness. I can promise you we shall do whatever we can from now on to listen better (Anon., 1986b:A23).

     

            At that ceremony, California representative, Congressman Tom Lantos, gave his assurances that he would initiate a letter, signed by members of the Congress and of the Senate, to be sent to Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany, Opposition Leader Johannes Rau, and East German Premier Erich Honecker, urging that war crimes reparations be made to Romani survivors in those countries (loc. cit.).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

X. German and Dutch Transportations to America

                                  

 

Germany had been trying to rid its territories of Gypsies since their arrival there in the early 15th century (Hancock, 1980a), and found a convenient dumping ground in their colony in Pennsylvania. Shoemaker (1926) wrote of the havoc caused by the Thirty Years War which devastated the Rhineland, and which resulted in a wave of Palatine migration: individuals who ‘sold’ themselves to redemptioners for the price of their fare to America. “This species of servitude, and the selling of emigrants for their passage had not a few of the features about it, of involuntary chattel slavery, and it was characterized at the time as the’German slave trade”‘ (Beidelman, 1894:584, and discussed in detail in Mühlenberg, 1741). Wright (1927:212) refers to their also being brought to Pennsylvania by Dutch slave traders, possibly a misinterpretation of Shoemaker, op. cit., upon whose work his own essay was based. Shoemaker indicated that numbers of Gypsies from Germany were indentured and shipped out during this same period, although they were not allowed to obtain passports, which would presumably have given them the legal means to return to Europe - a tactic most recently employed by the Polish government in 1981 (Michalewicz, 1982:7).

            In the same article, Shoemaker described the circumstances of an attempted passage to America:

  

On a number of occasions Gipsy bands endeavored to charter whole ships at Rotterdam, but as they were watched with the same argus-eyed authority as are bootleggers today, their efforts were always at the last minute frustrated. It is related that one ship, the ‘Stein-Awdler’, giving it its Pennsylvania Dutch pronunciation, got away under cover of darkness, but during an unfavorable tide, it still lay in the harbor at daybreak, when the papers were scrutinized and declared invalid by the port authorities.  Several boat loads of port wardens went in pursuit, but the boats were not to carry the unfortunate Chi-kener back to dry land, but to order them off the ship - they were driven overboard, men, women and children, like a plague of rats, and had to jump out in the mud up to their waists, and get ashore as best they could, leaving their possessions behind, which were seized as a fine levied against them as a body. On shore, the mud-saturated refugees were attacked by a mob armed with boat hooks and soundly beaten, and probably quite a few died of their wounds and exposure afterwards (1924:4-5).

 

            He also said that of those “hundreds of Romanies” who were able to sell themselves in return for passage, “most of the Chi-kener families were broken up ... as some were dumped on the inhospitable New England coast, others in New Jersey and still others in the Far South, instead of at the ports along the Delaware” (1925:4).

            A letter published in the National Gazette on May 19th, 1834, tells of the indiscriminate flogging of Gypsies, called “Yansers,” in neighboring New York state, apparently as a means of sport for whoever could afford it:

    

There is yet another tribe, at or near Schenectady, called Yansers, although their patriarchal name is Kaiser. A gentleman appointed some years ago to some town office there, states that he found a charge of four pound ten shillings for whipping Yansers; the amount, being small, was allowed. A similar charge being brought the next year, he asked what in the name of goodness it meant? Behold, it was for chastizing Gypsies whenever occasion presented, which was done with impunity and for some profit ... it is supposed by the best informed of my neighbors, that they came over with the early settlers in the German Valley ... they are everywhere manufacturers of baskets, brooms and other wooden wares.

 

            Legislation against Gypsies in this part of the country dates from at least this time, and continues sporadically to be enforced. In 1976 “a band of gypsies ... was arrested on entering Washington County from neighboring Pennsylvania. Since one of the gypsies was suspected of stealing ‘a few hundred dollars’ from a Pennsylvania gas station, all the band’s property was confiscated and sold” (Logan, 1976), even though the charge was never proved.

 

 

 

XI. Treatment Elsewhere in Europe: England and Scotland

                                  

 

An account dated 1528 claimed that there were ten thousand Gypsies in the British Isles by that year. Two years later the first anti-Gypsy act was passed, which stated that “hensforth no such Psone be suffred to come within this the Kynge’s Realme”; any Gypsy entering England had his property confiscated, and was ordered to leave within two weeks. Until that time, Gypsies in England, as elsewhere in Europe, had shown “counterfaicte passeports” signed by state or church dignitaries requesting that local officials allow them to pass unhindered (Acts, 1589:279)[4]. An earlier record of banishment from Scotland is found in Denmark, however, dated July, 1505, which stated that they had been transported thence by James IV. Walter Simson, whose book deals principally with the Scottish Romani population, writes of Gypsies in that country during this period who were put to death “... on the mere ground of being Egyptians ... The cruelty exercised upon them was quite in keeping with that of reducing to slavery the individuals” (1865:121-122). Quoting from Miller, 1775, he goes on to indicate that Gypsies employed as coal-bearers and salters in 18th century Scotland were “in a state of slavery or bondage ... for life, transferable with the collieries or salt works.”

            One reference by Gairdner (1898, vol. xv, p.325) documents shipment from the Lincolnshire coast to Norway in 1544; links between Gypsies in Britain and Scandinavia during the 16^th century are dealt with in more detail by Bergman (1964:13ff.). In 1547, Edward VI instituted a law (I Edward VI, c.3) which required that

     

they be seized ... and branded with a V on their breast, and then enslaved for two years. Such slaves could be legally chained and given only the worst food; they could be driven to work by whips. If no master could be found, they were to be made slaves of the borough or hundred or employed in road work or other public service ... if the criminals ran away or were caught, they were to be branded with an S and made slaves for life (Kinney, 1973:45).

     

            By Cromwell’s time in the 1600s, it had become a hanging offense not only to be born a Gypsy, but for non-Gypsies to associate with Gypsies. Roberts referred to this in his 1836 treatise on the origins of the Gypsy people:

     

  In the days of Judge Hale, thirteen of these unhappy beings were hanged at Bury St. Edmunds, for no other cause than that they were Gypsies; and at that time it was death without benefit of clergy for anyone to live among them for a month (1836:112) ... In England, many penal laws were enacted against them, and very great numbers were executed for no other crime but being Gypsies. At one Suffolk assize, no less than thirteen of these poor wretches were executed, legally convicted of being born of Gypsy parents (1836:171).

 

            A law in the State of Maryland similarly penalizes non-Gypsies apprehended in the company of Gypsies: “all the property of members of any group with which [a Gypsy] may be traveling can be confiscated and sold to pay any fine a court may levy against the arrested Gypsy” (Logan, 1976). The same is true in Indiana, where “it shall be ... unlawful for any person or persons associating or consorting with any such wandering or nomadic band of Gypsies to subsist ... having no visible means of earning a fair, honest and reputable livelihood” (State of Indiana Statutory Regulations, Section 1; quoted in Marchbin, 1939:151-152).

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

XII. British Shipments to the Americas

                                  

 

It was widely believed during much of the 19th century that no Gypsies had ever come to North America. Hoyland stated that “Grellmann is of opinion, that America is the only part of the world in which they are not known” (1816:11); Crabb confidently wrote that while they inhabited “... many countries of Europe, Asia and Africa ... on the continent of America alone are there none of them found” (1831:6), and a story published in the United States in 1843 in The Lady’s Book included the remark that “... you must be deceived! There never has been a gipsy in North America!” (quoted in Groome, 1899:xv). As late as 1874, the American Cyclopaedia told its readers that it was “questionable whether a band of genuine Gipsies has ever been in America.” Even Matt Salo, who has collected the most extensive documentation of North American British Gypsy ancestry, has stated more than once that the “Romnichels began appearing in the U.S. in the 1850s” only (1982:281). It is clear from existing records, however, that those first to arrive here from Britain did so nearly two centuries before that. Simson devotes several pages to this, maintaining that the fact that

 

many Gipsies were banished to America in colonial times, from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, sometimes for merely being ‘by habit and repute’ Gipsies, is beyond dispute ... Gipsies may be said to have been in America almost from the time of its settlement (1865:418).

     

            Hall noted that “Thickly sprinkled with Gypsy names are the ‘transportation lists’, 1787-1867, reposing on the shelves of the Public Records Office in London” (1915:281), while Brown (1929:148) quoted one Romanichal verbatim who told him that he remembered his grandfather telling him that his great-uncle fought in the American Revolution in 1776. Paine’s History of East Harwich, in Vermont, mentions a Romanichal family named Cahoon living at Grassy Pond during the mid 1700s, also referred to briefly in Kipling’s Captains Courageous (Paine, 1937:464). But the earliest actual document known to us, dates from the time of the administration of Oliver Cromwell’s successor, his son Richard, when the first trans-Atlantic expulsion of Gypsies was  instituted:

     

  In 1661 ‘Commissions and Instructions’ were issued anew to justices and constables, by Act of Parliament, with the view of arresting Gypsies ... a great many Gypsies must have been deported to the British ‘plantations’ in Virginia, Jamaica and Barbadoes during the second half of the seventeenth century. That they had there to undergo a temporary, if not ‘perpetual’ servitude, seems very likely (MacRitchie, 1894:102).

 

            A reference dated November, 1665, comments upon the motives for indenturing Gypsies and others in this way:

     

  The light regard paid to the personal right of individuals was shown by a wholesale deportation of poor people at this time to the West Indies ... out of a desire as weel to promote the Scottish and English plantations in Gemaica and Barbadoes for the honour of their country, as to free the kingdom of the burden of many strong and idle beggars, Egyptians, common and notorious thieves, and other dissolute and looss persons banished and stigmatised for gross crimes (Chambers, 1858:304).

 

            In 1714, British merchants and planters applied to the Privy Council for permission to ship Gypsies to the Caribbean, avowedly to be used as slaves (MacRitchie, op. cit.), and in the following year, according to a document dated January 1st, 1715,

     

  Prisoners ... were sentenced ... to be transported to the plantations for being [by] habit and repute gipsies ... On the said gipsies coming here the town was brought under a burden [and] they had used endeavours with several merchants who have ships now going abroad [i.e., to transport them as slaves], for which they are to receive thirteen pounds sterling  (Memorabilia, 1835:424-426).

     

            Among the family names of those individuals were Faa, Fenwick, Lindsey, Stirling, Robertson, Ross and Yorstoun.

            Gypsies, according to the legal definition which was in effect throughout this period in England, included “all such persons not being Fellons wandering and pretending [i.e. Identifying themselves to be Egypcians, or wandering in the Habite, Forme or Attyre] counterfayte Egypcians” (Statutes, Eliz., 39.c.4, quoted in Smith, 1971:109. See also Axon, 1897, passim, and Beier, 1985:58-62).

            Barbados served as an entrepôt for the distribution of slaves to other British territories in the western hemisphere for many years. Whether ultimately bound for Virginia, Jamaica or elsewhere, large numbers of slaves passed first of all through that island (Hancock, 1980b). However, while the designations Gypsy, Gypcian, Egyptian, &c., turn up in the records of transportation located in Britain, nothing similar appears anywhere in the documents examined in Barbados, visited for this purpose by the writer in the Spring of 1979. These were Hotten (1874), Nicholson (n.d.), St. Hill (1937), Anon. (1963), Headlam (1964), Kaminkow (1967), A. Smith (I 971), Coldham (1974) and F. Smith (1976). Nevertheless, an examination of the lists of transportees found in these works and in the Barbados Records indicated that a great number of individuals bearing Romanichal (British Gypsy) surnames did in fact arrive in Barbados: the names occurring include Boswell, Cook/Cooke, Hern/Herne/Heron, Lee/Leek, Locke, Palmer, Penfold/Pinfold, Price, Scot/Scott,  Smith and Ward, ranging from one Pinfold to nine Boswells to over a hundred Smiths. Only a small percentage of these were likely to have been Gypsies, of course. Sometimes, a further clue was     provided by the county of origin of the individual, where given (Cookes from Middlesex and Kent), or by occupation (Boswell, a blacksmith), but these must also be considered non-conclusive.

            Alexandre Exquemelin remarked upon a number of “Egyptian wenches” among the bondservants in Tortuga, when he visited that island in 1666, but we cannot be sure that Gypsies were meant here. So far, only one reference to Gypsies as a discrete group in the West Indies, and referred to as such, has been located, and that from Jamaica:

 

I have known many gipsies [to be] subject from the age of eleven to thirty to the prostitution and lust of overseers, book-keepers, negroes, &c., to be taken into keeping by gentlemen, who paid exorbitant hire for their use (Moreton, 1793:130).

     

            The censuses themselves do not mention Gypsies, although Jews are listed separately from other whites (Dunn, 1962). This omission may not be significant, however, since the Amerindian slaves brought in from South America, and possibly New England, are not listed either - a fact remarked upon by Handler (1970:127). Robert Rich, a resident of Barbados writing in 1670, noted that the population there consisted of English, Irish, Scottish, Dutch, French, Jewish, colored and black slaves (in Ogilby, 1671:378-379).

            This leaves four possibilities: firstly, that Gypsies were counted together with the white population, perhaps because of a common point of origin at time of shipment, and were therefore not officially registered separately; secondly, that most were shipped on to the North American colonies, and did not remain long enough in the West Indies to become a recognized, established community; thirdly, that by some means, some of them at least were able to return to Britain, and lastly, that the population was ultimately bred out of existence.

            Against the first stands the fact that Gypsies, being of Asian origin, are ultimately not ‘white’, despite the presence in modern times of many English-looking Romanichals, resulting from miscegenation with Europeans. Such genetic mixture would, in any case, have been far less apparent in the 17th century, and even today, it would be difficult to attribute the white Barbadian’s “sickly white or light red” complexion (Price, 1962:49) to the British Gypsy population. Furthermore, the fact that the Gypsies who were brought to the West Indies were not native speakers of English would have served to distinguish them from other non-African bondsmen. Their speech, which “none could understand” was often referred to in 17th century descriptions of Gypsies in England (cf. Hancock, 1984:92-95, and Beier, 1985:60).  Von Uchteritz, in 1652 (before the first-known trans-Atlantic English or Scottish shipments of Gypsies) noted that among the slave population, “Those who are Christian speak English; the Negroes and Indians, however, have their own strange languages” (Gunkel and Handler, 1970:93). The existence of the factors, together with the deeply-entrenched Romani cultural restrictions on over-fraternizing with non-Gypsies, must certainly have made them an easily-recognizable group.  The second possibility is supported by the fact that we do have a concrete reference to the presence of British Gypsies in North America during this period,  turning up in Virginia in 1695 from Henrico county. It is on  record that what appears to have been a charge of rape made by a Gypsy woman was dismissed by the magistrate,

 

it being the opinion of this Court that the Act ag’st ffornication does not touch her, she being an Egyptian and noe Xtian woman (Anon., 1894:100).

     

         The family name of the woman, Joane Scot, occurs in the Barbados annals, and survives among American Romanichals today.  The Colonial Entry Book during the same period contained a law which provided that “all ... gypsies ... shall either be acquitted and assigned to some settled aboade and course of life here, or be appointed to be sent to the plantations for five years” (Wright, 1939:141).

            There is also documentary evidence to support the third possibility. Investigation of court records, transportation certificates and the local British press of the period, together with compilations published in the United States (such as e.g. Boyer, 1979), indicate not only extensive shipment of Gypsies, but the subsequent return of numbers of these to the country of origin. The conclusion, that “there was a fairly regular traffic of returnees, both legally and illegally” (Smith, 1979), has much to uphold it, though with more relevance, possibly, to the penal colony at Botany Bay in South Australia. This was established after America’s achievement of independence closed Georgia as a dumping-ground for England’s criminals. Numbers of Boswells, Lees, Skeltons, Scarretts and Smiths were shipped there from the Midlands counties during the first quarter of the 19th century, though as felons rather than as slaves or bondservants. The works of George Borrow and others contain references to Gypsies being bitcheno pawdel or bitchady pawdel, “sent across” to America or Australia, a period of Romani history by no means forgotten by Gypsies in Britain today. One term in contemporary Angloromani for “magistrate” is bitcherin’ mush, the “transporter.” Some factual references to the American situation are to be found in Pinkerton (1880), and to the Australian situation in Langker (1980), but much work remains to be done in these areas.

 

* * *

 

            The notion of Gypsy is well-established in the West Indian folk tradition, though no more accurately here than anywhere else in the world. Wright (1938) tells of the panic the arrival of Gypsies in Jamaica caused earlier in this century. The word itself turns up in several of the island creoles, variously meaning “playful,” “frisky,” “meddlesome,” “mischievous” and “bossy.” In both Jamaica and Trinidad, it also refers to ‘pig Latin’, a secret way of talking; in the related dialect of Sierra Leone, where Jamaicans went to settle in 1800, it has come to mean a “short person.” Similarities between some proverbs in the same creole with those in Romani have also been noted (Hancock, 1977:73).  In Guadeloupe, Le Gitan is a name with which drivers commonly christen their taxis, trucks, &c. (Métraux, 1950:1411), while in her introduction to Jekyll’s collection of Jamaican folktales, Alice Werner draws parallels with Gypsy themes (1907:xxvi).

            A search for the existence of Romani words in the Caribbean creoles has so far turned up only two, the items bul “buttocks” and kori “penis.” The former is known in Barbados, Tobago, Trinidad and probably elsewhere. It is unlikely that the word which, like the Romani language itself is of Indian origin, came in with the thousands of indentured East Indian laborers, since they did not go at first to Barbados. In any case, the word is unknown to them in their own speech, mainly Bhojpuri, which uses  instead the terms bunda or gar.  The latter has so far only been found in Trinidad. Its form is specifically Angloromani, i.e. The type of Romani spoken only by Romanichals, and again differs from the equivalent term in Bhojpuri.

            The world-famous pre-Lenten carnival in Trinidad traditionally has a Gypsy section, and the costumes colorfully and accurately represent the Hollywood stereotype. Indeed, it is quite possible that this portrayal owes more to modern fictional literature imported from Britain than to any unbroken continuum with the 17th century. There is also currently a popular calypsonian called ‘Gypsy’.

            The Gypsy slaves may have been absorbed into the (mainly Irish, Scottish and south-western English) white bondservant population, though it is hard to imagine this happening voluntarily. This is, however, the argument maintained by Marchbin (1939:119). More likely intermixture with the general free colored population took place as a result of the forced concubinage described by Moreton above - the same process which has produced, though not by force, the ‘Black Irish’ of Jamaica and the Afro-Gypsy community at Atchefalaya. Bercovici, with a fair amount of imagination, has speculated that

    

  It is very possible that these Gypsies, then in Barbados, sought refuge with the Indians, intermarried, and were completely assimilated by the aborigines ... perhaps this might account for some customs common to the American Indians and the Hindus (1928:510).

     

            Shoemaker has also referred to the interaction of the two peoples, rather anticlimactically: “... the first contact between Gipsy and Indian, a romantic and historic foregathering of oppressed peoples ... as one old man from the Little Sand Hills of Dauphin County said in describing it, ‘they hated one another”‘ (1924:6).

 

            There is a local poor white population in Barbados, known as the Redlegs, whose members are distinct in their appearance from other whites in the country. A similar white West Indian population is found in Montserrat, and there are numbers also in Bequia, St. Vincent, Grenada, Jamaica and elsewhere (Williams, 1985), but none has yet been investigated with Romani genealogy in mind. The list of Barbadian Redleg families (Bradshaw, Davis, Dowding, Edwards, Gibson, Gooding, Graves, Harris, Hinkson, King, Marshall and Medford) contains a few surnames also found among North American Romanichals (e.g. Davis, King and Marshall) but Hotten, who was well-acquainted with Romanichal language and history, made no reference to Gypsies in his standard work on transportations to the islands (1874). The two most easily-available and complete sources on the Redlegs, Price (1962) and Sheppard (1977) also make no mention at all of Gypsies.

            There are a great many Romanichals in the United States, especially in the South. Salo believes that they may constitute “the largest among the Gypsy groups” in the whole of the country (1977:7), although estimates within the Romani population put their own numbers at ca. 80,000, compared with ca. 500,000 Vlax-speaking Gypsies. While descendants of the Gypsies sent here by the Germans and the French are still sometimes to be found in the areas they were taken to, Gypsies from Britain, being in greater numbers, have spread out over the country, and statements about their history since arrival are speculative at best. American Romanichal families are aware of the circumstances of their arrival, and an examination of their oral tradition will surely help complete the picture. Such internally-transmitted tradition is being gathered by Harry Bryer, whose family arrived in North America in the mid-1800s, while a file of externally-documented records is being compiled by Matt Salo from an examination of newspapers, parish registers and so on. Meanwhile, non-academic speculation will surely also continue to find a place in the printed page, such as that by Burnett, who believed that the ancestors of the Melungeons of Tennessee “may have entered the country as Portuguese or gypsies, and afterwards some families may have intermingled with the negroes or Indians or both” (1889:349).  Until Romani history is documented by Gypsies themselves, recording this kind of information will proceed slowly, and inquisitiveness from outside will continue to be discouraged. The editor of the February, 1986, issue of Romany Fires of Revival, for example, a privately-circulated evangelical newsletter sent out monthly to some 600 American Romanichals, cautioned his readers that two specialists were “gathering information about the Travelers and doing a research on our people.”

            It is tempting, perhaps, to look for Gypsy elements in North and South American and West Indian music, dress, folklore and cuisine; this is a justifiable line of pursuit and one which has not received the attention it should have. There are several reasons for this: the inaccessible nature of the Romani communities, the vagueness of the documentation available, and the strength of the fictional image which confuses the perception of the reality. False leads are many: “gypsies” in the American theatre have nothing to do with Gypsies; there is no connection whatsoever in Romani culture with Hallowe’en, though Non-Gypsies perceive one; in Cuba, a kind of cake called brazo gitano turns out to be an importation from Spain.

            A case for extensive Romani contribution to Brazilian culture has already been made by Mello Moraes (op. cit.), who believed that “the Brazilian nation, from the highest to the lowest, is strongly tinctured with Gypsy blood,” a notion also supported later by Groome (1899:xvii). Writing nearly ninety years ago about the West Indian islands, MacRitchie (op. cit.) wondered “to what extent the people of those places today are possessed of seventeenth century Gypsy blood ... an interesting, though perhaps delicate, question.” Irving Brown too, writing of the situation in the United States, believed that “Some of the oldest Dutch families of Manhattan, and some of the most aristocratic Creoles of the South, must have a dash of Romani blood in their veins” (1927:12). But until the British, Caribbean, and North and South American sources are re-examined at first hand, and recollections from and by the people themselves are systematically gathered, it will be difficult to guess, and little more is likely to be forthcoming in this chapter of Romani history.

 

 

 

 

XIII. The Contemporary Situation of Gypsies in Europe

                                   

 

            The history of the enslavement and persecution of the European Gypsy population dealt with in these pages is factual. It is also a fact that, even in the best of times, Gypsy populations have had to deal with discrimination and prejudice on a daily basis; much is made in the press of the “Gypsy problem,” with scant regard for the problems which the non-Gypsy population creates in turn, and with which Gypsies themselves have to deal with on as daily basis. In Britain, where according to the 1983 report of the Save the Children Fund the infant mortality rate among Gypsies is fifteen times higher than the national average, the City of Bradford sought a court injunction in May, 1985, to make it illegal for Gypsies to trespass within city limits - a move which the press called “a policy of apartheid” (Leeds, 1985:6-7). In the same country some years earlier in March, 1968, a speaker in a political broadcast from the City of Birmingham publicly proclaimed that “There are some of these Gypsies you can do nothing with, and you must exterminate the impossibles; we are dealing with people whom members of this Council would not look upon as human beings in the normal sense” (Kerswell, 1979:6). In October of the same year, the Sundon Park Tenants’ Association Report included the statement that “There is no solution to the Gypsy problem short of mass murder” (The Essex Post for November 24th, 1969). Teams employed by local governmental bodies to keep Gypsies on the move by using strongarm tactics are becoming increasingly common in Britain:

     

Spook Erection is the name of a company that throws Gypsies out of their homes; it is employed by several Midlands councils ... Spook’s people are apt to use violence and intimidation, and there is disturbing evidence that Spook’s methods are condoned by some local police and council officers.

 

According to Hughie Smith’s eyewitness account ... Spook’s men found Dempsey Boswell and his family; they were camped on a small site, with [the local Borough Surveyor’s] permission. Watched by police,  Spook’s men started to tear the place apart. Boswell’s pregnant sister ran towards the caravan to put out a fire, and to put away crockery that was being tipped over. In the ensuing struggle Dempsey Boswell came to the aid of his sister, whose baby was stillborn later that day. Dempsey Boswell was arrested for assaulting five police officers ... Mr. Boswell pleaded guilty; he was fined l50 pounds and bound over for two years ...

 

Tough tactics against Gypsies are now widespread. Cardiff Council, for example, uses a local company called Property Protection Agency to clear sites. A police search instigated by Hughie Smith uncovered an array of implements such as pick-axe handles, but the Agency said these were “for defensive purposes only,” and no further action was taken ... Wolverhampton has  asked outright for a ‘Gypsy Task Force’, to engage in “Gypsy prevention operations” (Cook, 1983:16-18).

 

            An earlier incident in the same city of Wolverhampton in 1969 led to the deaths of four Gypsy children, when a trailer was pushed over with a bulldozer by the authorities who were attempting to move it. The wife was ready to give birth to her fourth child, and her husband had refused to remove his home until the baby had come. When it was bulldozed, the kerosine lamp was smashed and started a blaze which killed her three children and resulted in the still-birth of the child she was to have delivered that day.

 

            The huge discrepancy which exists between official attitudes in Britain towards Gypsies and towards other minority populations is starkly illustrated by the following two job advertisements, issued in 1985 by the City of Leeds Department of Environmental Health. These were posted side by side on the same document (No. CD3703, June 28th, 1985):

     

 

1) ASSISTANT GYPSY LIAISON OFFICER

 

The postholder will assist in the enforcement of the

Council’s policy on Gypsies ... serving eviction

notices and physically evicting caravans from

Council-owned land ... Assisting in the treatment of

male clients for head, body or pubic lice, scabies and

other conditions. Appearance in court to produce

evidence in support of applications for possession

orders.

 

2) ASIAN LIAISON OFFICER

 

To be responsible to the Director of Housing for work

on various housing matters, including housing welfare

... involving the Asian ethnic minority in Leeds, both

in the public and private sectors. To assist the

Department in efforts to achieve equal opportunities in

the field of housing, and to assist in bringing about a

better understanding of the needs and requirements of

ethnic minorities. To provide assistance by acting as

interpreter to overcome the inevitable language

problems which arise.

 

     

            Just as governmental spokesmen in Britain have, since the end of the war called for the extermination of Gypsies as a way of dealing with them, ensuring their non-propagation by means of sterilization did not stop with Hitler either. The Czechoslovakian newspaper Vychodoslovenske Noviny, in May, 1976, carried the text of a governmental proposal which called for the compulsory sterilization of Gypsies as an act of “socialistic humanity,” and sterilization is clearly what is being referred to in a more recent news bulletin first published in Bratislava Smena on August 6th, 1986, and in the Western press in Insight, on the following September 15th. Claims of a 20 percent rate of mental retardation among the Romani population are now being made to justify its instigation:

     

 

The destruction of the Romany (Gypsy) minority is the task of Czechoslovakia’s Government Commission for Problems of the Gypsy Populace. One of its Slovak officials, Jozef Prokop, who recently expressed official horror at the high Romany birthrate, claimed that 20 percent of the 7,000 Gypsies born annually were mentally retarded. He asserted that those who still maintained the traditional itinerant lifestyle were genetically unfit.  Prokop announced that “we will also in the future pursue regulation of the birthrate of the unhealthy population.” And, as for any children born to traditional Romany families, “we will have to seek alternative methods of their upbringing; for example, in foster homes, special boarding schools and the like (Anon., 1986a:40).

     

            In Hungary, according to the newspapers Magyar Hirlap and Kritika, a 1983 pop-song by a group called Mosoly at the Mosaic Club in Budapest, began

     

The only weapon with which I can defeat them is a flame-thrower;

I will exterminate all Gypsies, adults and children,

Though they can only be destroyed if we cooperate.

If we exterminate them successfully,

We’ll have a land free of Gypsies.

     

            In an article entitled “Hungary’s Gypsy explosion” in the World Press Review for October, 1983, a spokesman for the Hungarian government expressed fears that if Romani nationalism were encouraged in that country, “we could have pogroms, with Gypsies killing Hungarians, and vice-versa” (p.12). The same article pointed out that less than ten percent of Hungary’s officially-estimated nearly 400,000 Gypsies are in the professions (the unofficial estimate is something over half a million), and the life expectancy is fifteen years lower than the national average. According to another article about the Hungarian situation, “about 15 percent of Gypsy pupils are sent to schools for mentally deficient children, whereas their handicap is chiefly a cultural one” (Satory, 1986:5). A medical investigation by a team of Swedish doctors which was conducted ten years earlier, concluded that Gypsies are “on average no less intelligent” than non-Gypsies (Duckenfield, 1976:5). In Italy,

     

  Infant mortality rates are very high - most families refused to say how many children they had lost, but over 70 percent of those who answered had lost one or two, and many families had lost as many as 10 to 15 children.  Respiratory and digestive diseases are rife, life expectancy is much lower than for the average Italian, and less than three percent of Gypsies are over 60 (The Baltimore Sun for October 13th, 1985, p.16A).

     

            A lower life expectancy among Gypsies than the national average is also reported from Spain, where

     

  Gypsies have been condemned by a hostile society to live in poverty and ill-health. The average life expectancy of a Gypsy male is 64 years, nine fewer than the Spanish average. Only a quarter of Gypsy children attend school, only 26 percent of Gypsy men have regular employment ... (Ellman, 1985:J2).

     

            A year prior to that report, in Zaragosa, Spain, non-Gypsies violently opposed city authorities’ building houses for the local Gypsy population, and retaliated by burning them down and attacking the Gypsy children trying to attend school there, pelting them with bricks (The New York Times for October 25th, 1984).

            In December, 1985, Reuters released details of the arrest of a gang of Yugoslav kidnappers in Austria who, since 1980, have been stealing children from defenseless Gypsy families and selling them to Americans and Italians. The parents of the of 100 kidnapped children have been too frightened of the authorities to report these crimes (The Daily Colonist for December 1st, 1985, p.5 and Rullmann, 1986).

            Gypsy children were also systematically taken from their parents since 1926 in Switzerland, to provide them with a “better life.” An organization named Pro Juventute has headed a program called “Operation Children of the Road” for many years. “The idea, based on proto-Nazi ideas of ‘racial hygiene’, was to destroy the Romany way of life” (Williams, 1986:10), and are reminiscent of the new plans announced by the Czechoslovakian government detailed above.

            Although newspaper reports, which often described the program as a form of “kidnapping,” were published as early as 1973, little was done to unite the families until recently ... many of the children wound up in prisons, mental institutions or juvenile detention centers. [... the lawyer] said “We don’t know where all the children are, if some were adopted, or sent abroad, if some died.” ... In one case cited by Swiss newspapers, a woman lost five of her seven children to

the program (Netter, 1986:A9)

            From Sweden, it was reported in the London Times (for August 21st, 1985), that “An enquiry is to be held into an incident in which police watched from a patrol car as 50 youths attacked a Gypsy family with stones and a firebomb, in Kumla, central Sweden.”

            Most of the newspaper accounts included here have intentionally been selected from those which have been published during the present decade, to give an idea of the situation as it is today. Hundreds of similar reports are on file in the archives of the Romani Union, which date back to the last century. But they have had little effect on the public conscience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

XIV. The Contemporary Situation of Gypsies in North America

                                  

 

It is a sad reflection on the state of justice in the United States that, despite its unconstitutionality, Gypsies remain the only American ethnic minority against whom laws still operate, and who are specifically named in those laws. As with Balkan slavery and the Nazi genocide, it too illustrates the general lack of awareness among non-Gypsies of the true details of Gypsy history, despite the vast number of literary works having Gypsy themes. This fact also serves to demonstrate the enormity of the separation between the fictional and the real Gypsy. Some of these laws, only the first two of which were still in effect at the time of writing, include:

     

gypsies ... for each county ... shall be jointly and severally liable with his or her associates [to a fine of] two thousand dollars (State Code of Mississippi, Section 27-17-191).

 

The governing body may make, amend, repeal and enforce ordinances to license and regulate ... gypsies (New Jersey Statutes, 40:52-1).

 

After the passage of this act, it shall be unlawful for any ... gypsies ... to ... settle ... within the limits of any county of this state [without having first obtained a yearly license to do so] (Pennsylvania Statutes,  Section 11810).

 

Any person may demand of any ... gypsies that they shall produce or show their license issued within such county, and if they shall refuse to do so ... he shall seize all the property in the possession of such [Gypsies] (Pennsylvania Statutes,  Section 11803).

 

Gypsies [in the State of Maryland] must pay  jurisdictions a license fee of $1000 before settling or doing business. When any gypsy is arrested, all his property and all the property of members of any group with which he may be traveling, can be confiscated and sold to pay any fine a court may levy against the arrested gypsy. Sheriffs are paid a $10 bounty for any gypsy they arrest who pays the $1000 fee after he is arrested (Logan, 1976).

 

Whenever ... gypsies shall be located within any municipality ... the county department of health or joint county department of health shall have power ... to order such [Gypsies ...] to leave said municipality within the time specified (Pennsylvania Title 53: Municipal and Quasi-Municipal Corporations, Chapter xvii, Section 3701).

 

It is illegal in Pennsylvania to be a Gypsy without a license ... Any Gypsy who insists on being what he was born - a Gypsy - without a license, is liable to up to $100 fine and 30 days injail. A constable may confiscate and sell a convicted Gypsy’s possessions to satisfy the sentence ... any person may demand to see a Gypsy’s license. If the Gypsy cannot produce a license, the person may turn the Gypsy in to any convenient justice of the peace (Smart, 1969).

 

Upon each company of ... Gypsies, engaged in trading or selling merchandise or livestock of any kind, or clairvoyant, or persons engaged in fortunetelling, phrenology, or palmistry, $250 [is] to be collected ... [from those who] live in tents or travel in covered wagons and automobiles, and who may be a resident of some country or who reside without the State, and who are commonly called traveling horse traders and Gypsies (Georgia Acts and Resolutions, 1927, Part I, Title II, Section 56, p.3).

 

Texas law refers to “Prostitutes, Gypsies and vagabonds” in the same breath, and charges the Romany people $500 to live there (Bernardo, 1981:108).

 

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Indiana, that it shall be unlawful for any band of Gypsies ... to camp in tent, wagon or otherwise, on any public highway in this state, or lands adjacent thereto ... Any person or persons violating the provisions of this Act shall be deemed guilty ... and upon conviction shall be fined not exceeding twenty-five dollars or imprisoned in the county jail not exceeding thirty days, or both (State of Indiana Statutory Regulations, Section I). “This statutory law has been used so often against the Gypsies in that state, that Indiana has not been visited by Gypsies for a long time” (Marchbin, 1939:152).

     

            Many of these laws, a list of which fills thirty-four pages (Gilbert, 1947:567-601), were inherited from Europe and were intended to be used against the earlier Gypsy populations in the United States; they have since found new application against the more recently arrived, and more visible, Vlax-speaking Rom. Smart (loc. cit.) pointed out the injustice inherent in such laws: “Because the state does not require an Irishman to have a license to be Irish, or an Italian to have an Italian license, it is both un-American and discriminatory for the state to require a Gypsy to have a license to be a Gypsy.”

            Steve Kaslov, who founded the first Romani benevolent society in the United States, the Red Dress Association in New Jersey in 1927, and who met with Franklin D. Roosevelt to try to get some support for the plight he saw his people in, believed that it was the police, enforcing such laws, who posed the greatest threat to American Gypsies:

 

  In county after county, state after state, troopers whisk unwanted Gypsies over the boundary ... Steve tells of one such journey: “We were not allowed to stop for rations” ... Real tears ran down his cheeks at the bitter memory of that experience ... In New York, as in other places, the law is often applied to them with needless cruelty. Only a few weeks ago, a five weeks old nursing baby died of starvation in an unheated room when the mother, who was arrested on a charge of stealing a wallet, was held in the custody of the police for three days (Weybright, 1938:142,145).

     

            Ironically, while the earliest Gypsies were being brought to America as unwilling immigrants, the U.S. Government sought to ban their entry at the end of the 19th century:

     

... after passing in the early ‘eighties the Chinese Expulsion Act and the Act that barred European contract labour ... the welcoming arms of the goddess of liberty that surmounts the huge pedestal on Bedloe’s Island at the entrance of New York harbour, holding aloft the torch of enlightenment to a darkened world, were at the end of the nineteenth century extended to selected immigrants only. The bias against Gypsies which has obtained for generations in Europe had, through distorted stories in continental newspapers, by this time reached America and produced a profound effect. By the year 1885 Gypsies arriving in parties, as they usually did, on the shores of the North American Continent were frequently denied entrance, and the steamship companies were obliged to take their human cargoes back by the same boat (Marchbin, 1934:135).

 

Trigg adds to this:

     

  In the latter half of the nineteenth century, many more Gypsies, mostly from Slavic countries, were to arrive in the United States. By 1885, however, Gypsies were excluded by immigration policy, and many returned to Europe (1973:224).

     

            Benton’s 1985 history of Ellis Island refers to “massive deportations” of Gypsies by U. S. Immigration Department authorities in 1905 and 1909 in particular, while Pitkin quotes from the Tribune for July 25th, 1909, which supported Commissioner William Williams’ upholding of the government’s exclusion policy: “the whole country is better off without them, even though their wealth per capita was several times greater than the amount commonly required” which was $25 (Pitkin, 1975:60). A detailed account of Romani immigration into the USA is found in Marchbin (1939).

            Anti-Romani policies towards the end of the 19th century probably derived their impetus from the increase in discrimination evident at the beginnings of Reconstruction, following the abolition of slavery in America; there are several references to Romanies as a “people of color,” i.e. as a visible minority, in the literature of that period. In 1866 President Andrew Johnson expressed his fear that the requirements of the Civil Rights Bill were designed “to operate in favor of the colored, and against the white, race” because they “comprehend the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies as well as the entire race designated as blacks” (Legislation for the Colored Man, Philadelphia, February, 1866). This presents the possibility, at least, that Vlax Romanies from eastern Europe were already finding their way into the United States at this early date.

            Calahane indicates that the effects of the American policy had repercussions even on the other side of the Atlantic; one group, which had reached Britain from the Continent, could not find a company willing to bring them across:

 

We find record of one hundred Gypsies who arrived by train at Liverpool in July, 1886. They were called the “Greek Gypsies” and had started from Corfu, but according to their passports, had come from all parts of Greece and European Turkey, bound for New York. The United States being closed to pauper immigrants, no steamboat would accept them, and they encamped at Liverpool ... Their subsequent fate is unknown. No doubt at some later date some of them, at least, succeeded in reaching these shores (1904:326-327).

 

     

 

           

            Gypsies were attempting to reach North America from all parts of eastern Europe during these years; well-represented in this exodus were the Rusurja or Russian Vlax Rom, who remember the events leading to their settlement in this country. The late John Megel, grandson of Steve Kaslov and until his untimely death in August 1986, a spokesman for his community, recounted that, prior to abolition, Gypsies in Russia, although in a condition of slavery (Hoyland, 1816:32), were not otherwise being brutalized. With the influx of the thousands of liberated slaves from Rumania, however, this relatively calm situation was affected, leading ultimately to a wave of antigypsyism throughout western Russia serious enough to force many groups to consider leaving for good. Sons were sent out with instructions to return with information about  the best place to make for. The United States was an attractive choice, but immigration laws there made it a problem to enter in the conventional way. It was not difficult, however, to buy Argentinian documents and thus enter the United States as nationals of that country; as a result, many Russian Gypsies sailed for South America, subsequently to make their way overland along the Pacific coast into the USA. The Argentinians soon realized that the Rusurja were coming into their country with considerable amounts of gold, however, and those newly-arriving started to be apprehended and relieved of all their possessions by the local people. Gradually, Argentina ceased to be a principal means of gaining access to the United States, although there is still a small influx of Rom entering the country across the border with Mexico. In 1976, one such group, who had come here from Czechoslovakia and who had been smuggled across the border by Mexicans hired to bring them in, were beaten and robbed and abandoned in the Arizona desert (“Just the Gypsy in their soul?,” The Miami Herald, February 1st, 1976, p.2E). “The border patrol moved at once to deport them to somewhere. Anywhere, even,” and drove them north out of the state, where they were once again abandoned. In this way, the group made its way to New York (“Officials seeking to deport Gypsies frustrated,” The New York Times, July 27th, 1976, p.16) reaching the Canadian border which they crossed, immediately to be detained by Canadian officials, since the U.S. Authorities promptly refused to allow them to re-enter.  One of the women in the group attempted to hang herself in her cell, rather than go on living being hounded from place to place (“La mort plutôt que l’expulsion,” Journal de Montréal, August 17th, 1976, p.3) Two anonymous landowners offered the group places where they could live temporarily, although the offers were not allowed (“Gypsy clan offered farm in Canada,” The Montreal Star, 19th August, 1976, p.A3). Not one of the newspaper reports of this tragic train of circumstances indicated the slightest sympathy for the victims, who were eventually deported, but instead made use of all the journalists’ clichés one predictably associates with Gypsies.

 

 

 

            While the expulsion act against the Chinese was repealed in 1946, the situation regarding the immigration of Gypsies remains unclear and unresolved. The policy of driving Gypsies away, however, is still actively upheld by the American legal system. The June, 1975 issue of The Police Chief (“Official Publication of the International Association of Chiefs of Police”) contained the recommendation that

     

  Strict laws and the enforcement of them will deter Gypsies from inhabiting your community. The laxness of the laws in a certain area ... will attract Gypsies. Only in this way can you protect your community (Boughourian and Alcantara, 1975:74).

            Since the publication of that article, a whole book has appeared written in the same vein, by an ex-policeman and a lecturer on legal matters from Chicago (McLaughlin, 1980), and a number of police department “Gypsy Divisions,” reminiscent of those in pre-war Nazi Germany’s police state have been established around the country, some with specially-assigned resident “experts.” Needless to say, this kind of legalized discrimination is leveled at no other ethnic minority, although there are presumably Italian, Navaho, Irish, &c., criminals as well preying upon the American public. In 1981, Terry Getsay (“a nationally-recognized Gypsy expert”), who at that time headed the Illinois State Police’ Gypsy Activity Project, published a particularly vicious three-part article entitled “GYP-sies: the people and their criminal propensity” in Spotlight; his lecture tours in the northern states have led to a marked increase in the harrassment of Gypsies by members of local police departments who have attended his talks. He also presented his views on television station WDIV in Detroit in 1984, in a three-part documentary entitled “Gypsy scams and schemes.” In an article in another police magazine, Centurion, he is quoted as believing that

     

  The label of ‘Gypsy’ refers to any family-oriented band of nomads who may be from any country in the world ...  The only measure of respect a Gypsy woman can get is based on her abilities as a thief (Schroeder, 1983:59,63).

     

 

 

            Detective Sergeant William Bradway, chairman of the Michigan State Police Gypsy Criminal Activity Task force, defines Gypsies as “domineering, very loud, outspoken, cunning and quick-witted ... they are completely comfortable with a lifestyle centered around victimizing others. They are not very nice” Willing, 1984:3A). A year earlier, a documentary on the NBC news program Monitor began “American Gypsies, known as Travelers: if you’ve never met the Travelers, lucky you!” (NBC transcript for March, 1984).

            The association of Gypsies with crime is deep-rooted. Some of it is justified; Gypsies have often turned to theft in order to survive in a universally hostile environment. Much of it is not justified, however, and is the result of exploitation of a stereotype by a popular press which is less interested in the honest Gypsies who have not been equipped to challenge this misrepresentation. Journalist Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in his review of Peter Maas’ highly defamatory King of the Gypsies, went so far as to refer to Gypsies as the “slag in the [American] melting pot,” and to call them “an ethnic sick joke” (The New York Times for October 28th, 1975). The notion of Gypsies as criminals has received scholarly sanction too, in the past. A study of crime by a professor of psychiatry and criminal anthropology at the University of Turin, published by the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology in 1918, described Gypsies thus:

    

  They are the living example of a whole race of criminals, and have all the passions and all the vices of criminals. “They have a horror,” says Grellmann, “of anything that requires the slightest application; they will endure hunger and misery rather than submit to any continuous labor whatever; they work just enough to keep from dying of hunger” ... they are vain, like all delinquents, but they have no fear or shame. Everything they earn, they spend for drink or ornaments. They may be seen barefooted, but with bright colored or lace-bedecked clothing, without stockings, but with yellow shoes. They have the improvidence of the savage and that of the criminal as well ... they devour half-putrified carrion. They are given to orgies, love a noise, and make a great outcry in the markets. They murder in cold blood in order to rob, and were formerly suspected of cannibalism ... this race, so low morally, and so incapable of cultural and intellectual development, is a race that can never carry on any industry, and which in poetry has not got beyond the poorest lyrics (Lombroso, 1918:40).

     

            This appeared in a textbook which for years provided a basis for American legal attitudes, and has been relied upon, just as Lombroso relied upon Grellmann before him, by subsequent specialists. Similar biases were found even earlier in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica: “Cleanliness is not one of their characteristics ... they are self-professed liars ... The Gypsies can, with some justification, be called parasites ... Both the men and the women are gaudy, ostentatious, boastful, arrogant and superstitious ... those who wish to think of them as verminous dirty wastrels will be able to find examples to back ... their claim,” while at pp. 43-44 in Volume XI of the 1956 edition of the same work, these attitudes are even more plainly stated:

     

  The mental age of an average adult Gypsy is thought to be about that of a child of ten. Gypsies have never accomplished anything of great significance in writing, painting, musical composition, science or social organization. Quarrelsome, quick to anger or laughter, they are unthinkingly but not deliberately cruel. Loving bright colors they are ostentatious and boastful but lack bravery. They have little idea of time, proportion or measurement and are superstitious about childbirth, fertility, food and sickness. Their tribal customs sometimes have the force of law. Believing in charms and curses, they admit the falsity of their fortune telling. They betray little shame, curiosity, surprise or grief and show no solidarity.

     

            The reasons for this prejudice, which has its roots in the Mediaeval conflict between Christian and Muslim, as well as for its perpetuation in the modern day, are discussed further in the following chapter.

 

 

 

 

 

XV. Antigypsyism

                                  

 

Gypsies have existed as an oppressed people for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most significant of these originated in the time and circumstances of arrival in Europe, but a number of other factors complicate the picture as well.

            Because of the nature of their entry into Europe, Gypsies arrived as a scattered nation of people united by language, culture and origin, but at the same time lacking any of the means by which other populations bound by the same factors assert and defend their identity.  Gypsies had no political or military strength, and no geographical territory with which they could identify. Nor had they a history, or a religion, or a language which was familiar to those around them.  Association with the Islamic threat, their dark skin, and the various means of livelihood which exploited the superstitious nature of the Medieval Europeans, all helped instill a negative image of the Gypsy in the Western tradition. When a group lacks the conventional means of redressing wrongs done to it, it will make the most of what is available; the fear of Gypsy magic was called upon as a means of reprisal some years ago in Florida, for example: a mother whose child was the victim of a hit-and-run accident “vowed to cast a Gypsy curse extending over three generations on the driver and his family if he does not come forward and pay the child’s hospital bill” (Buchanan, 1975:1B). Such incidents help only to reinforce the stereotype from which they ultimately derive.

            In addition to these external factors, internal factors have also helped keep the barriers firm. To a greater or lesser extent all Gypsy groups have inherited from India concepts of pollution and cleanliness, and these form a powerful basis for maintaining social distance from non-Gypsies. These beliefs extend into many areas of daily life, regulating involvement with food and its preparation, animals, personal hygiene, and interaction with others, both Gypsy and non-Gypsy. Among some groups, these concepts are vaguely defined; among others, the Vlax in particular, they are deep-rooted and pervasive. It is because of these cultural beliefs that Gypsies have discouraged familiarity with non-Gypsies who, by their manner of living, fall automatically into an unclean category, and are therefore able to pollute by association. The earliest accounts of Gypsies unanimously agreed that Gypsies had no religious or cultural beliefs; some more modern treatments, while admitting that these exist, maintain that they have all been adopted from outside. It is understandable that writers such as Hoyland, Crabb and others came to such conclusions - they were permitted no such information by the Gypsies they were so ardently trying to civilize. Contemporary exponents of this view, such as Jiri Lipa or Jozsef Vekerdi, are less easily accounted for.

            This reserve has had other, further-reaching effects; not often being able to obtain information at first hand about the true nature of Romani life, novelists have embellished their prose with fantasies of their own, and in doing so created in the last century the literary figure with which the Gypsy is today most often associated: a composite Gypsy, wearing Spanish flamenco dancer’s dress, traveling in an English Gypsy caravan, playing Hungarian Gypsy music.

            The first American account to discuss Gypsies at any length appeared in the Christian Enquirer for September 29th, 1855; American readers were given a picture which must have helped set the stage for what followed:

     

  The Gipsies ... are an idle, miserable race, a curse to the countries they inhabit, and a terror to the farmer through whose lands they stroll. They seem utterly destitute of conscience, and boast of dishonesty as if it were a heavenly virtue ... Laws have been passed in several countries to banish them, and great cruelties sometimes practiced to enforce these laws ... So deeply rooted are sin and vagrancy in the hearts of this miserable race, that neither penal laws nor bitter persecution can drive it out. They are not beyond the power of the Gospel, however, nor yet beyond the mercy of the Redeemer.

     

            Attitudes towards the Gypsy today are mixed; while negative characteristics, usually theft or baby-stealing, often provide the rationale in fiction for introducing Gypsies into the plot, other, more positive characteristics also find a place. One such is the supposedly unfettered nature of Gypsy life, an outlet for the Victorian reader who no doubt longed for simpler, pre-Industrial Revolution times. But however Gypsies are defined and presented by the dominant culture, such definition and presentation denies Gypsies their real identity, and this is ultimately a kind of oppression.

            The notion of an “outlet” has been discussed by Cohn, who believes that Gypsies “persist because they, or groups like them, are needed in our culture” (1973:61), in other words, there exists a need for an avenue of escape, for whatever reason, and Gypsies, or more accurately the fictional image of Gypsies, are useful in providing this (discussed at length in Hancock, 1976). Sibley, quoted in the introduction, goes further and sees the denial of the real Gypsy identity as one means by which the dominant society can maintain its own parameters. Quoting from Erikson (1966:13,64), Ronald Takaki has also elaborated upon this notion of parameter-maintenance by keeping non-members in their place:

 

  Deviant forms of behavior, by marking the outer edges of group life, give the inner structure its special character and thus supply the framework within which the people of the group develop an orderly sense of their own cultural identity ... one of the surest ways to confirm an identity, for communities as well as for individuals, is to find some way of measuring what one is not (1979:126).

 

            Yet another rationale is provided by Kephart, who explains antigypsyism in terms of Gypsies being seen as a countercultural population, a group of people actually working against the values of the majority:

 

American Gypsies, too, continue to face prejudice and discrimination ... Some observers contend that it is a matter of ethnic prejudice, similar to that experienced by blacks, Chicanos and other minorities. However, it is also possible that the Rom are perceived as a counterculture ... If people perceive of Gypsies as a counterculture, then unfortunately for all concerned, prejudice and discrimination might be looked upon as justifiable retaliation (1982:43).

     

            The Romanies least well-equipped to retaliate against such social pressures are those best represented in the American Gypsy community: the Vlax, most of whose history in Europe has been one of enslavement. Existing for centuries in a society which provided all of what little material possessions they had, and which allowed them no involvement in any kind of decision-making, their modern descendants still look to the establishment as a source of support rather than as something to be worked with for the long-term good.  British and Hungarian Gypsies, subject to more assimilative pressures in their countries of origin, for better or for worse have learned to melt more effectively into the larger society, and have a much higher proportion of “professional” occupations represented among them in the United States. An exception among the Vlax are some of the Machvaya and other Romanies of Serbian origin, a number of whom have also aquired mainstream occupations as well as high status within the Vlax community. It is likely that this is also due to assimilative factors. After abolition, those fleeing from Rumania westwards into Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia fared very differently from those who went eastwards into Russia:

     

  In Servia, the leveling power of Turkish rule, exerted for successive ages, had the effect of  elevating the Gypsies somewhat toward the social status of the other rayahs. Here, therefore, although they are still an inferior caste, and not allowed to exercise the rights and powers of citizenship, the Gypsies are perhaps less widely separated from the peasantry around them than anywhere else in Europe. They fought bravely with their Servian neighbors against the Turks, and as smiths, farriers, and dealers in live stock, have many of them earned a comfortable livelihood, and proved themselves respectable members of society (Clark, 1898:504).

 

* * *

 

            It cannot be denied that the fuel for much of the discrimination against Gypsies in contemporary America is provided by the media. It requires very little effort on the part of those writing for the popular press, whether as journalism or fictional literature, to consult the existing sources and come up with material of their own without ever approaching Gypsy agencies themselves for their information. Almost all of the thousands of works relating to Gypsies have been written by non-Gypsies, and it is probably true that most of those have based their creations on the works of other non-Gypsies without ever checking their facts at first hand.

            Despite the enormous responsibility that journalists have in transmitting information to the public, with very few exceptions the media continue grossly to misrepresent Gypsies and to perpetuate negative, and often defamatory, stereotypes. Appendix two consists of a collage of such representation, from newspapers, magazines, comics, books and films. It has become so commonplace for the press to define Gypsies, an ethnic people, solely by behavioral criteria, that Gypsies themselves will frequently deny their identity:

     

  A Houston builder and Gypsy ... now doesn’t tell anyone he’s a Gypsy because he says it would ruin his business. “I’m not ashamed of it,” he says, “but you’ve got to understand the effect it could have” (Linthicum, 1985:8G).

     

            It is also true that, because of the widespread enforcement of laws over the past centuries which have forbidden Gypsies to stop anywhere, and consequently to attend school, Romani cultures have developed as non literate cultures. Even in countries with long-settled Gypsy populations - and today the majority of the world’s Gypsies are not nomadic - a way of life which does not include literacy as a primary skill continues to be perpetuated. As a result, the kinds of organized approaches made to television stations, congressmen, newspaper editors and the like which other minorities have used to bring their point of view before the public, have simply not been within reach. Lacking access to lawyers, and other establishment means of seeking redress, Gypsies have not, until recently, been able even to take the first step towards challenging media misrepresentation. A situation exists today in which those who write for the popular press feel quite at liberty to say the most outrageous things about Gypsies, while they would be aghast if they were ever expected to put their names to the same kind of article about, say, Italians or Jews or Afro-Americans.

            Non-Gypsy populations receive most of their knowledge of Gypsies from works of fiction and from the media, rather than from Gypsies themselves. Journalists and novelists for years have had  comfortable in the knowledge that no one would be likely to challenge them - and certainly that no Gypsy ever would. When Peter Maas was asked in a Washington Star interview (November 25th, 1975) why he felt he could make such negative claims about Gypsies in his book, he replied that no Gypsies had challenged them, that protesters were “just not out there.” A traditional, fictional image of the Gypsy, of non-Gypsy origin, has emerged and has become so deeply entrenched in the popular mind that the real thing remains unseen.

     

  From an urban perspective, “real” Gypsies - that is, those conforming to the romantic myth - are a rural people; from a rural perspective, “real” Gypsies no longer exist; they are a part of a vanished folk culture. We might compare Brody’s description of the “real” Eskimo as conceived by the white community in the Canadian North: “the tough, smiling, naive, ultimately irrational soul who, animal-like, is deeply attracted to roaming the open spaces of the limitless tundra and ice.” Again, the mythical individual is removed from the dominant society and merges with nature (Sibley, 1981:18).

     

            In Britain and France, Romani Gypsies in dirty roadside sites are condemned as unsanitary squatters who give the “real Gypsies” a bad name. The romantics defend the “true Romany” and write of their “purity of blood,” perceiving a clear distinction between the Borrovian ideal and what they see in real life. Others are less charitable: a letter to the press from an angry citizen in England complained that “they are very much detested and feared ... even the true gypsy glamourised by George Borrow was never liked” (The Surrey Advertiser for April 19th, 1977). In the United States and Canada, the average citizen is likely to think that there are no Gypsies in those countries at all. They never see the campfires and waggons they associate with Gypsies, or the violin-toting individuals sporting earrings, embroidered vests and tambourines. Books and articles have been written which refer to Gypsies as “hidden” or “invisible” Americans, and Gypsies make good use of this fictional image as a shield between themselves and outside society, even giving it back if it is in their interests to do so.

            Over a century ago, Simson dispaired at the widespread false perception which existed of the Gypsy, and at their exaggerated image as “wanderers”:

     

  The popular idea of a Gipsy, at the present day, is very erroneous as to its extent and meaning. The nomadic Gipsies constitute but a portion of the race, and a very small portion of it (1865:8).

      

            Little has changed in the intervening century. Okely, in a recently-published work on the British Traveller population shows how “Outsiders have projected onto Gypsies their own repressed fantasies and longings for disorder” (1983:232), and makes the point that “Gypsies do not travel about aimlessly, as either the romantics or the anti-Gypsy suggest” (p.125). Much is made of this, as well as of stealing and promiscuity, in sustaining the stereotype. Stealing in particular is seen as a Gypsy trait; specialists such as Lombroso or Getsay have even implied that it is a genetic characteristic. Certainly some Gypsies steal, just as some Eskimos or Berbers or Englishmen steal; others don’t. It is social behavior, and it is not transmitted biologically. To believe that such a thing is possible reflects not only prejudice, but an ignorance of scientific fact.

            Problems which exist today are the result of a continuum of circumstances going back for centuries. Few could argue that there has not been moral justification for subsistence stealing in the past, or that in some places it continues to be necessary, although this is not likely to be taken into consideration in a court of law. Historically, stealing has meant survival, and there are many shopkeepers throughout Europe even today, who will not serve Gypsies. There are homeowners, too, who will refuse to give Gypsies as much as a glass of water. Given the the choice between seeing one’s family starve, or else stealing, the latter is going to be the likelier option, whether one is a Gypsy or not. But the public doesn’t seem to be interested in Gypsies who don’t steal; perhaps it spoils the image it has created.

            There are a number of cases on file in the Romani Archives and Documentation Center, of crimes such as shoplifting being perpetrated by people reported as Gypsies, but who in fact turn out not to be Gypsies at all.  The label is freely applied by police reporters on the basis of behavior assumed to be typical of ethnic Gypsies - which of course it is, if the model sought is the Gypsy of fictional literature. It is to the credit of the Saint Paul Chief of Police that he apologized publicly in 1985 for thus misapplying the word in the news bulletins issued by his department.  There are hundreds of thousands of Gypsies in the United States who deplore the illegal activities of those who make the news, and who make a clear distinction between themselves and “le Rom kaj choren,” i.e. Gypsies who steal, and there are hundreds of thousands who try to make a decent and honest living in the face of adversity. Gypsy priests and ministers don’t ever seem to generate media interest.

            History has shown time and time again that oppressor nations either attribute their own techniques of domination to the people they dominate, or else reinterpret their oppressive acts in what they perceive to be a positive way. Shifting blame onto the victim is a self-exonerating response well known in psychiatric circles. Dougherty devotes a whole appendix (1980:354-358) to the theme of Gypsies stealing babies, but gives no irrefutable evidence to support this widespread belief. The documentation gives another side to the story: it has been Gypsy children who have been stolen from their parents by non-Gypsies. The Swiss situation which came to light in 1973, discussed in chapter XIV, is one recent example. The author’s own father was taken from his parents in 1918 for the same reasons, ostensibly for his own good (Hancock, 1985:53). Hoyland writes that “from such Gipsies who had families” in Maria Theresa’s Hungary, “the children should be taken away by force; removed from their parents, relations, and intercourse with the Gipsey race.” One child, “a girl fourteen years old, was forced to be carried off in her bridal state. She tore her hair for grief and rage, and was quite beside herself with agitation” (1816:69-70). Grellmann recommended that taking Gypsies’ children be used as a means of coercion:

     

  The Gipseys, in common with uncivilized people, entertain unbounded love for their children. This excessive fondness for their children is, however, attended with one advantage: when they are indebted to any person, which is frequently the case in Hungary and Transylvania, the creditor seizes a child, and by that means obtains a settlement of his demand, as the Gipsey will immediately exert every method to discharge the debt, and procure the release of his darling offspring (1807:65-66).

     

            In the introduction to the new edition of her book Gypsies: The Hidden Americans from the Waveland Press, (1986), Anne Sutherland tells of a communication from the Chief of Police of one northern city who, having read the first edition of her book, expressed gratitude at having learned of such close family feeling amongst the Rom because he could now use it, by exerting pressure upon Gypsy children, to keep their parents in line.

            “Wandering” or “roaming” is another commonly-repeated attribute, and are words which frequently find a place in accounts about Gypsies. Yet the words imply aimlessness, as though Gypsy lives have no purpose or direction; they are often qualified by words like “carefree.” The harsh conditions of life on the road are never dealt with, and the day-to-day responsibility of feeding a family and keeping it clothed and warm is trivialized out of existence.

     

 

If I am fancy free,

And love to wander -

It’s just the Gypsy in my soul.[5]

     

            Gypsies in western Europe have traditionally been kept on the move because of laws which have given them no alternative. Means of livelihood have been developed which are adapted to this kind of life, and have subsequently become part of the stereotype. Individuals not conforming to these - who include a growing number of those involved in the Romani civil and political rights movement - are not infrequently denied their Gypsy identity by sociologists and others whose investment in them depends upon their remaining passive and traditional. A Gypsy in a horse drawn wooden caravan is ideal; in a motorized trailer, not quite so authentic; in a house, he’s a total disappointment; as journalist Ira Berkow said in a 1975 feature story, “Gypsies are, shockingly, also becoming home owners!” (1975:20).

            Another stereotypically attributed characteristic is that Gypsies care nothing for material possessions, in  keeping, of course, with the perceived “freedom” of a people unencumbered with the trappings of civilized society. Elsewhere (Hancock, 1986b), I have illustrated this with statements that the Romani language does not even contain a word for “possession,” reiterated by six different writers over the course of almost a century. Anyone with any familiarity at all with Gypsies would quickly be disabused of this notion: the traditional lack of material possessions is a result of social circumstance, not personal whim. Other words the language is not supposed to contain are “truth” (Phelan, 1951:81) and “beauty” (Woolfe, 1928:78). None of these writers could speak Romani, however.

            Gypsy women have for long been represented as sexual temptresses, and Gypsy men as a sexual threat to non-Gypsy women, in both song and story. The Impressions’ Gypsy Woman has been recorded by a dozen artists since it was first released in 1961, and tells of the singer’s watching the girl, longing to kiss and hold her as “all through the caravan, she was dancing with all the men” in the “campfire light”; Gypsy Davy is a traditional ballad about a lady who left her mansion and her husband to go off with a Gypsy; Lawrence’s novel The Virgin and the Gypsy is a typical literary work along the same lines. And yet it was the European slaveowners who took Gypsy women at their will and used them, while calling them “whores,” and it was the European slaveowners who castrated their male slaves to protect their own women from their servants’ lust.

            Cohn may be right when he argues ( loc. cit.) that non-Gypsies need a Gypsy image to project their fantasies onto; an example of this appeared in the Sunday supplement of one Boston newspaper in August, 1986. Describing a Romani family in that city, the writer stated on the first page of her article that from their appearance, “... they could be Spanish, or French, or Italian, or Irish,” but by the second page she had already begun to be carried away by the lure of the stereotype:

    

 

  They are glitter and gold, decked out in bright babushka of legend. They are exotic women in colorful skirts, dancing in sensual swirls. They are dark men with smoldering eyes. They are carefree spirits playing the tambourine. The entire image is crowned with a halo of mystique, shrouded in a cloak of mystery. And there is some truth to all of it (Brink, 1986:4-5).

 

     

            The article also stated that Gypsies don’t work, have no professional people among them, and are not officially recognized as an ethnic community in the United States.

            In addition to the popular observer, there exists a substantial body of academics who specialize in Gypsy Studies, and who have established scholarly reputations for themselves by doing so. The opinions of these individuals are perhaps even more important than those of the untutored, since these are the specialists who, if it is sought at all, are approached for information about Gypsies. Romani scholarship rests upon the work of these people: Grellmann, Pott, Miklosich, Ascoli and others have laid the foundation for what we know of Romani language and history.

            The Victorian preoccupation with the “purity” of the noble savage is understandable in the light of those times, and the attitudes of 19th century “Gypsy buffs” whom Dougherty says “tended to be either superficial sentimentalists or genteel snobs looking for a feudal relic to coddle and patronize” (1980:273), must be interpreted with that in mind. But it is a singular characteristic among some of the contemporary students of Gypsies that the same attitudes persist. Where these people could do more than any other outsiders to help the Romani cause, they stubbornly refuse to disturb their anthropologists’ and folklorists’ perception of the Gypsy. We may compare 19^th century statements made by such specialists with those made in the 20^th century: Paspati maintained that “it is in the tent that the Gypsy must be studied, and not in the villages of the bastardized sedentary Gypsies” (1880:14), and Pischel believed that “the Gypsy ceases to be a Gypsy as soon as he is domiciled and follows some trade” (1883:358).

            Twentieth century investigators have sometimes challenged reality in the light of direct evidence. Jaroslav Sus, a Czech, claimed that it was an “utterly mistaken opinion that Gypsies form a nationality or a nation, that they have their own national culture, their own national language” (1961:89). The former sub-editor of the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, scorned the Romani nationalist movement as “romantic twaddle” (The Birmingham Post for July 14th, 1973, p.2), echoing the words of Dora Yates, honorary secretary of the same society, to which she belonged for 63 years and who, referring to the same movement, asked “except in a fairy tale, could any hope ever have been more fantastic?” (1953:140). Another member, Werner Cohn, believes that

     

  The Gypsies have no leaders, no executive committees, no nationalist movement ... I know of no authenticated case of genuine Gypsy allegiance to political or religious causes (1973:66).

     

            The most recent denial of the nationalist movement has come from yet another member of the Gypsy Lore Society, Jiri Lipa:

     

  To be exact, there is no one Gypsy culture nor one Gypsy language ... If in the process of looking for native assistants and for training them [the gypsilorist finds that] literary talents should appear, so much the better ... In reality, however, it is mere toying, a waste of energy and material means which are not abundant for Gypsy studies. While a missing attribute is being artificially contrived, which is supposed to make the Gypsies an ethnic minority in the conventional sense in the eyes of wishful thinkers and bureaucrats, irreplaceable values of Gypsy culture are being lost in our time (1983:4).

 

* * *

 

            These attitudes on the part of the non-Gypsy population, whether academic or popular, are a direct result of centuries of oppression, an oppression which has denied Gypsies the wherewithal to make their voices heard and to challenge discriminatory laws and widespread negative media stereotyping. Other persecuted peoples have begun to redress the wrongs being perpetrated against them; there are now no laws operating against American Indians or Afro-Americans in this country, nor are they maligned and misrepresented in the press. Books presenting them in a defamatory light are removed from school libraries now as a matter of course. Not so for Gypsies, however, who continue to provide a source of romantic and other exploitation, and who continue to be taken advantage of because of their traditional  lack of organized political, academic or military strength. Writing of the post-emancipation situation in Moldavia and Wallachia, and of the gains made by other linguistic and cultural minorities in modern Rumania, Beck makes this point well:

     

  Romania’s German-speaking populations have received support from the West German state, Magyars are supported by the Hungarian state, and Jews by Israel. Groups like the Tsigani did not have such an advantage.  Lacking a protective state they have no one to turn to when discrimination is inflicted upon them as a group. Unlike ethnic groups represented by states, Tsigani are not recognized as having a history that could legitimize them (1985:103).

    

            Gypsies use their language and core-culture as a kind of moveable country; wherever they have gone, ethnic identity has usually been maintained despite fragmentation and, until recently, a lack of international cohesiveness. Whether the three branches of Gypsy discussed at the beginning of this book prove to belong to one migratory stock or not, it is clear that the Western Romani people were united linguistically and culturally at the time of entry into Europe.  Whatever factors divided the contemporary populations, and they are not inconsiderable, they are overwhelmingly the result of involvement with the non-Gypsy, and are directly relatable to the oppression here described. If Romani Gypsies are to regain that unity, the causes and nature of the oppression which destroyed it have to be understood and challenged.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

XVI. Afterword

                                  

 

In the preceding chapters, an attempt has been made to describe the prejudicial treatment of the Romanies in non-Romani societies, both in North America and throughout Europe, and to propose an explanation for the origin of antigypsyism in history and its perpetuation in the present day.

            That such bigotry exists at all levels is clearly evident; the very people appointed at the official level to deal with this ethnic minority work from the assumption that there is no such thing as a decent Gypsy: “To Jose Alcantara, one of two officers permanently assigned to the so-called Gypsy detail [in Los Angeles], there is no such thing as an honest Gypsy fortune-teller. Or an honest Gypsy, for that matter” (Stumbo, 1984:1). Gypsies are routinely blamed for their own condition; a Czechoslovakian spokesman defended his government’s program of taking Romani children from their families and placing them in foster homes, by saying that it was “the Gypsies’ fault for refusing to let their children be civilized” (Rosenblum, 1984:6C).

            The two attributes seen to be lacking here are honesty and civilization, and in such arguments, both are perceived of as corollaries to the “nomadic” way of life of the Gypsy people. Individuals who are here today and gone tomorrow, are potentially prime suspects in cases of theft, for example - especially if they already have a reputation as thieves, and if they can be accused with little likelihood of that accusation’s being challenged.

            I have also discussed the various arguments, such as those of Cohn, Sibley and Crawford, which in one way or another maintain that non-Gypsy societies need an outsider group such as the Rom upon whom to project their fantasies, or else to serve as scapegoats, or to help maintain the boundaries of their own cultural perception. All of these, I believe, have some merit; the extent to which such rationales are reflected in the folklore and the popular culture of the countries dealt with here testifies to this.

            Although it has been demonstrated that the mobility of the Romani population has been the result of historical circumstance, which in most countries left no option other than torture or death, and which forced such mobile families into a way of life and livelihood compatible with a stop-and-start existence, this mobility has been romanticized in fiction and has become a mainstay of the Gypsy stereotype. Much of Europe’s Romani population was held in slavery until the middle of the last century, and never left the estates at all, except perhaps to be driven to the slave auctions to be exhibited for sale. Those in northern and western Europe, paying the price for having been confused with the “Tatars” and “heathens” who threatened Christianity and the whole of the western economy, were subjected to the extremes of oppression dealt with in earlier chapters.

            Most of the American Romanies descend from the Gypsies freed from slavery in south-eastern Europe between 1855 and 1864. As Acton has pointed out, this places the modern population only four or five generations from a sedentary existence which stretches back to the Middle Ages, and which hardly qualifies that population as “nomadic.” An FBI crime squad investigating an alleged case of racketeering by a group of Romanies in Virginia was designated “Operation Nomade”, however, indicative of the kind of preconception most commonly held about Gypsies (The Seattle Times for September 27th, 1986). During the time of emancipation and arrival in North America, Gypsies, like many other immigrant groups, came fleeing persecution, but met anti-Gypsy laws which were designed, as in Europe, to keep them on the move and out of the way. American Gypsies have learned to hide their identity in  order to avoid discrimination, and since the end of the Second World War in particular, as Gropper (1975) has shown, the American Romani population has become increasingly urban and increasingly settled, though living invisibly in order to be able to do so free of harassment.

 

            This gradual integration has not been easy; integration leads in time to assimilation and the loss of one’s traditional language, culture and identity, and among the Romanies this is strenuously resisted. At the Romani tribunals, or krisa Rromane, the continuance of tradition and the Romani language frequently become serious issues, as are discussions of dress, marriage and territorial jurisdiction.

            Such fierce adherence to the ethnic identity seems to annoy some non-Gypsies. Jews have experienced the same kind of resentment, as though this exclusivity were a threat to the outside world. People who have been traditionally uncommunicative are perceived as secretive, and if they are secretive, they cannot be trusted. And if they remain on the move, never mind why, they must have something to hide. Another common reaction is that such groups must feel themselves to be superior and aloof from the rest of the world - and this, too, does little to enhance their image.

            American Gypsies make a distinction between themselves and more recently arrived immigrant groups and maintain, rightly or wrongly, that it is the criminal activity of these people which gives them a bad name. Despite the situation in the United States, it is a much better place to live for Gypsies than any European country, and given that the Vlax Romani population arrived here illiterate and legislated against, many have done remarkably well. But some groups who came here, from Poland, or Czechoslovakia, say, left incredibly oppressive environments where schooling, or access to shops or even churches has been denied them, and where any means possible to survive were necessary. Part of a letter smuggled out of Rumania to the West and received in November, 1986, describes the situation of Romanies in that country today:

 

 

  Every time we request our rights as citizens, and the rights of our minority, we are arrested by the police and detained for many days without food, violently beaten, interrogated and threatened with expulsion from the town. Because of all these reasons, we crossed the Rumanian border illegally, but were sent back to Rumania where we were sentenced and imprisoned for one year. Since our release, we have found that the social and political situation of our minority is worse ...

 

 

            Like such behavior among other older immigrant populations, who shun more newly-arrived members of their own group, little is done either on the part of the established Romani community to help the themenge Rroma or “foreign” Gypsies coming here, although it is widely known that the situation in Europe is a drastic one. Among third- and fourth-generation American Romani families, the lessons of history have ensured that the plight of those in trouble with the law, or elsewhere in the world, or even in the Holocaust, be regarded with fatalism. Perpetuation of a family has meant breaking up into smaller groups, each one for itself, either to escape and survive, or else to be tracked down and destroyed or transported.

            Although the distinction between American and foreign-born Gypsies is an important one within the Romani population itself, it is not one recognized by the larger society, which remains unaware, in fact, that there even exist wide differences of ethnic type within the overall American-born Gypsy population. The word “gypsy” is often applied to any people who conform to the perceived image, whether they are ethnic Romanies or not. It is paradoxical that while this great land was settled by men and women crossing its vast expanses with horse and wagon, and American society remains the most mobile in the world today, the inherent distrust of the non-sedentary population, of which Gypsies are believed to be the archtypical members, is everywhere in evidence. An out of town checking account or an out of state driver’s license invite suspicion, and they can certainly hamper one’s daily interactions outside of one’s own settled community.

Populations on the move suffer especially from being subject to laws designed for static communities; the history of the American Indian has similarly been one of violating the laws of another people and paying the price as a result.

            While the situation for Gypsies in the world today is crucial, and according to reports may be getting worse (Rosenblum, 1984), we have moved into a new phase of Romani history. As the true facts of that history become more widely known, and the mystique which clouds the real issues gradually disappears, positive changes are for the first time being brought about. Romani spokesmen are becoming more vocal and more evident as confidence, and the educational ability to be so confident, grow. This is not a trend which is likely to change, but its progress is uneven. We have come a long way from slavery, but while Pope John Paul asked Africans to forgive Christians for their past role in the enslavement of that people (The Easton Express for August 14th, 1984, p.C12), the Romani population has yet to receive the same acknowledgment. The Holocaust is nearly half a century behind us, but the Romani population still waits for the world to recognize its fate under the Nazis, and for a place on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, where it remains (as of November, 1986) an often unnamed category within that Council’s “ethnic outreach” program. The Congressional Caucus on Human Rights sent a petition to the Czechoslovak government in October, 1986, protesting its treatment of Gypsies, yet the coverage by CBS of the kidnapped Gypsy children being trained as thieves in Italy and France by criminals, themselves Gypsies (on 60 Minutes, November 9th, 1986) was needlessly trivial, succeeding only in reinforcing the stereotype of the Gypsy as Thief. The same situation is being exploited in the form of an entire movie, called “Gypsy Caravan”, being made by London-based Saltzman Lowndes Productions, and scheduled to appear in August, 1987. Since the completion of this manuscript, with Congressional intervention, the U.S. office of the Romani Union has been instrumental in bringing about the complete removal of all anti-Gypsy laws in the state of Pennsylvania. It has also begun working with the British legal firm of Bindman and Partners, who have been retained by the Commission for Racial Equality to bring legal proceedings against the businesses in Britain which discriminate against Gypsies and which carry signs outside their premises indicating that Gypsies will not be served.

            Pariah status means not belonging; the syndrome, or multiplicity of factors, which underlies this status as outcast as described in this volume has led to Gypsies’ having become locked into a cycle of anti-social behavior which is the result of a continuum of centuries of oppression, but which has ensured the perpetuation of that oppression.  More and more, Romanies themselves are initiating, and participating in, moves to end this situation, and to challenge discrimination in the news and in the media. The cycle is at last being broken [NB: This was written before the collapse of communism in 1989, completely unforeseen at the time.  The situation has deteriorated drastically since that time–ifh].

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

XVII. Appendix: Definition of Terms

                                   

 

ATHINGANOI           A heretic Byzantine group with which Gypsies were confused, hence the various names such as Zigeuner, Cigan, &c. Greek).

 

ANGLOROMANI      The variety of Romani spoken by the Romanichals or British Gypsies, wherever they have gone to live. It differs considerably from the inflected Romani of the Vlax Rom, and is not mutually intelligible with it.

 

AURARI                     Goldwashers. Also called ZLATARI (Rumanian).

 

BALKAN                   As applied to dialects of Romani, includes those which developed south of Moldavia and Wallachia. They are spoken today mainly in Greece and Bulgaria.

 

BALKANS                 An area of south-eastern Europe which includes continental Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, Jugoslavia, Rumania and sometimes Hungary.

 

BITCHADY PAWDEL (or BITCHENO PAWDEL)             Transported to the American or Australian penal colonies, lit. ‘sent across’. A term used by the Romanichals or British Gypsies (Angloromani).

 

BITCHERIN’ MUSH             Magistrate, lit. ‘sending man’. A term used by the Romanichals or British Gypsies (Angloromani).

 

BOSHA                     Gypsies in Armenia who call themselves LOM; speakers of Central Gypsy dialects (Armenian).

 

BOYARS (also BOIARS, BOYARDS)          The landed gentry; barons (Rumanian).

 

BOYASH (also BAYASH, BEYASH, BEASH)        A Vlax Romani population, wide spread throughout Europe and the Americas, who descend from the RUDARI and who have a Rumanian dialect as their native language instead of Romani (deriv. from preceding).

 

BYZANTINE EMPIRE          A Christian empire incorporating what are today Turkey and parts of south-eastern Europe, which lasted from the sixth to the fifteenth century.

 

BYZANTIUM (later CONSTANTINOPOLIS, CONSTANTINOPLE, ISTANBUL)  The capital of the Byzantine Empire; sometimes wrongly applied to the empire itself.

 

CALDERARI (or KALDERASHA)   Makers of copper vessels (Rumanian).

 

CANGUE       A spiked harness used as a restraining device around the neck (French).

 

CETE              A group of Gypsies to be sold in a single lot (Rumanian).

 

CHIVUTSE (CHIVUTSELE, SPOITORESELE)       Whitewashers (Rumanian).

 

CIOCOI (also VATAVE)                   An overseer (Rumanian).

 

COSTORARI             Tinners (Rumanian).

 

CHURARI                  Sievemakers (Rumanian).

 

DANUBIAN               A branch of European or Western Romani: also called VLAX.

 

DESROBIREJA          Emancipation from slavery (Romani, from Rumanian).

 

DOM                          Speakers of Eastern Gypsy dialects.

 

DOM                          A menial class in India whose occupations include musicians, slaughterers, janitors, &c., and members of the SHUDRA caste. Believed by some to be the ancestors of the Gypsies.

 

DOMARI                    The language of the DOM; speakers of the dialects of Eastern Gypsy, inhabiting Syria and other parts of the Middle East (Domari).

 

DOMBA                     Hypothesized ancestors of all three branches of Gypsy.

 

DOMBARI                 The Proto-Gypsy language.

 

ENDLÖSUNG           During Hitler’s Nazi regime, his policy of exterminating all unwanted racial, ethnic and social elements from his new society. The ‘Final Solution’ (German).

 

FALAGUE                  Flaying the soles of the feet as a means of punishment (French).

 

FERARI (or HERARI)            Workers in iron (Rumanian).

 

GADZHIKANO         Masculine singular adjective meaning “non-Gypsy” (Romani).

 

GADZHO                   Male non-Gypsy, plural GADZHE. The feminine form is GADZHI, plural GADZHJA (Romani).

 

GORNIK                    In Hungary, a title meaning Gypsy overseer (Hungarian).

 

HOSPODAR (or GOSPODAR)         A word meaning ‘lord’, formerly born as a title of dignity by the governors of the Ottoman PORTE for the provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia.

 

JEKHIPE (or JEKHETHANIBE)       Unity, lit. ‘one-ness’ (Romani).

 

KIRPACHI                 Basketmakers (Rumanian).

 

KOVACHI                 Blacksmiths (Rumanian).

 

KSHATRIYAS           A member of the military caste, the second highest of the four castes among the Hindus.

 

LAIESHI (or LAIETSI)          Slaves who were allowed to move about on the estates, an who did a variety of jobs (Rumanian).

 

LAUTARI                   Musicians; strictly, fiddlers (Rumanian, from Turkish/Arabic).

 

LINGURARI   Makers of wooden spoons (Rumanian).

 

LOMAVREN  The language of the Bosha (Lomavren).

 

LOWBEY                   A people inhabiting The Gambia in West Africa which, it has been suggested, descended from the French Gypsies abandoned on that coast in 1802. Known locally as Lawbe or Laybe (Peul).

 

MAMALIGA              Cornmeal porridge, commonly eaten throughout Rumania and other parts of eastern Europe. A staple diet for the slaves (Rumanian).

 

MESTERE-LACATUCHI      Makers of keys, locks and burglar-bars (Rumanian).

 

MONGOLS                Invaders from central Asia, some of whom had begun to be converted to Islam by the late 1200s.

 

NAJU (also NAYU, NAIU)    A pan-pipe; musical instrument fashioned from reeds cut to different lengths fastened side by side, the tops of which are blown across.

 

NETOCI (or NETOTSI)         Plural of NETOTO, q.v.

 

NETOTO        A slave who escaped to the mountains and who lived as a

fugitive. The word is said to mean “not complete” (Rumanian).

 

OTTOMAN    The Turkish dynasty belonging to Othman (Osman) I,

founded ca. AD 1300.

 

PORTE           The Ottoman court at Constantinople (French).

 

POTCOVARI             Ironworkers and shoers of horses (Rumanian).

 

RABI GOSPOD         Name given to Gypsy slaves in Russia (Russian).

 

RAJASTHANI            The language of the Rajputs (Indic).

 

RAJPUTANIA (or RAJASTHAN)     Part of north-western India inhabited by the RAJPUTS.

 

RAJPUTS       A predominantly military north-western Indian people, who claim to be descended from the KSHATRIYAS. Believed by some scholars to have been the ancestors of the Gypsies.

 

ROBI              Slaves. In European Vlax Romani, Rrobo means “captive” or “prisoner”; in American Vlax it means “one unwilling to work” (Rumanian, from Slavic. Cf. RABI GOSPOD).

 

RROM            In all varieties of Western Romani this word is found meaning “husband” or “Gypsy man” (as opposed to GADZHO or non-Gypsy man); for Vlax-speaking Gypsies, it is further used to define themselves as opposed to other, non-Vlax-speaking Gypsy groups. The feminine is RROMNI (Romani).

 

RROMANES Adverbial form meaning “in the Gypsy manner”; sometimes used to mean the Romani language.

 

ROMANI        Feminine singular adjective meaning “Gypsy.” Often applied to the language, and used also as a noun (older spelling ROMANY, plural ROMANIES).

 

ROMANICHAL (also ROMNICHAL, ROMNICHEL)        Designation for those Gypsy populations from northern Europe, and especially the British Isles, as opposed to, e.g., the RROM.

 

RUDARI (also RUDARS, LUDARI, BLIDARI, LINGURARI)                     Makers of wooden spoons, troughs, plates, spindles, &c. The name RUDARI was also applied to those engaged in goldwashing.

 

SALAHORI    House-builders (Rumanian).

 

SALASH         A job-lot of slaves sold together (Rumanian).

 

SHATRA        A Gypsy village. Also used to refer to a job-lot of slaves sold together (Rumanian).

 

SCLAVI          Slaves (Rumanian).

 

SCLAVI COEVESHTI           Slaves of the barons, also called SCLAVI BOIARESHTI (Rumanian).

 

SCLAVI CURTE                    Slaves of the court (Rumanian).

 

SCLAVI DE MOSHII            Slaves belonging to the petty landowners (Rumanian).

 

SCLAVI DOMNESHTI         Slaves of the gentry (Rumanian).

 

SCLAVI GOSPOD    Slaves of the householders (Rumanian).

 

SCLAVI MONASTIVESHTI            Slaves of the Church (Rumanian).

 

SCINDROME            Slave (plural SCINDROMI) (Rumanian).

 

SELJUKS                   Members of a Turkish dynasty ruling between the 11th and 13th centuries, prior to the OTTOMANS.

 

SKOPICA (also SCOPITSA, plural SCOPITSI)       A eunuch; one of a caste of coachdrivers castrated as children and used to transport the female gentry (Rumanian).

 

SLOBUZENJA           Freedom (Romani, from Slavic).

 

SPOITORESELE (or CHIVUTSE, KIVOUTSE, CHIVUTSELE)    Whitewashers (Rumanian).

 

SUDRA           Lowest of the four Hindu castes, believed by some to have been the ancestors of the Gypsies (Sanskrit).

 

TATARS (sometimes TARTARS)       Name applied to various Turkic peoples, including the Turki and Kirghiz, who overran the Byzantine Empire. It was also applied indiscriminately to the MONGOLS, who are not a Turkic people.

 

TSIGAN (plural TSIGANI)     Gypsy (Rumanian).

 

TSIGANI DE CASATSI        House slaves (Rumanian).

 

TSIGANI DE OGOR             Field slaves (Rumanian).

 

TRIBUT                      Taxes (Rumanian).

 

URSARI                     Bear trainers (Rumanian).

 

VATAVE (or CIOCOI)          Overseer (Rumanian).

 

VATRASHI (or VATRARI)   Slaves who did a variety of jobs, including those of groom, stable keeper, coachman, &c. (Rumanian).

 

VAXUITORI DE GHETE       Cobblers and leather-workers (Rumanian).

 

VICA (or VITSA; plural VICI, VITSI)           A clan or social division within Vlax Romani society. Literally “vine” or “tendril” (Rumanian, from Slavic).

 

VINZATOARE DE FLORI   Flower-sellers and sellers of sheaves of grain (Rumanian).

 

VLAX (also VLACH, WALLACHIAN or DANUBIAN)      A branch of European Gypsy consisting of those dialects which developed in the Balkans during slavery time. They are characterized by massive lexical and structural influence from Rumanian.

 

VRAJITOARELE (or GICHISORI)               Fortune-tellers. This was not a legitimate category within slavery but provided amusement for the gentry; these women were among the LAIESHI, and moved all over the estates (Rumanian).

 

YANSERS      Name applied to Gypsies in 19th century New York.

 

ZLATARI (also called AURARI)        Goldwashers (Slavic); not slaves.

 

                 

 

 

 

XIX. List of Works Consulted

                                   

 

Ackerley, Frederick George, 1942. [Review of Potra, 1939], Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 21(1):68-71.

 

Acton, Thomas, and Donald Kenrick, (eds.), 1984. Romani rokkeripen to-divvus. London: Romanestan Publications.

 

Alfaro, Antonio Gomez, 1982. “La polemica sobre la deportación de los gitanos a las colonias de América,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 386:308-336.

 

Alfaro, Antonio Gómez, 1993.  The Great Gypsy Round-up.  Madrid: Interface Collection, Editorial Precensia Gitana.

 

Andrews, William, (ed.), 1897. Legal lore: curiosities of law and lawyers. London: Andrews and Co.

 

Anon., 1835. Memorabilia of the City of Glasgow. Glasgow.

 

Anon., 1850. “The Gipsies of Hungary and Transylvania,” Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, 13:348-350.

 

Anon., 1855. “Gipsies.” The Christian Enquirer, for September 29th, p.5.

 

Anon., 1856. “The Gipsies of the Danube.” Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, 122:273-275.

 

Anon., 1862. “Les Tziganes.” Magasin Pittoresque, 33:395-396.

 

Anon., 1894. “An early Gypsey,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 2(l):100.

 

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