by Becky Taylor
THE FIRST YEARS of the 21st century saw growing numbers of Roma, Gypsies and Travellers literate, with access to a language of human rights and cultural dignity that stemmed from the Gypsy Power movements of the 1960s as much as it did from a more general shift in society towards multiculturalism. And yet, despite these changes, and alongside official acceptance that assimilatory strategies were neither appropriate nor particularly effective, materially and socially their position seemed little better than in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. By 2005 an opinion poll revealed that Gypsy Travellers were the minority group British people found most threatening and were most likely to feel negatively towards.111 This was indicative of how antipathy towards Gypsies, always present in settled society, had increased across the Continent over the course of the late twentieth century. Despite belated developments in legislation giving some limited protection to Roma, Gypsies and Travellers, their position remained vulnerable. A widening gap between their style of living and the mainstream, a reduction in everyday, economic and unproblematic interactions and their growing physical isolation on ghettoized official sites or shanty areas, all reinforced a sense of alienation. In popular imagination Gypsies became delinquent predators on settled communities, bringing criminality, rubbish and antisocial behaviour, with their presence to be resisted at any price. Across Europe the presence of Roma asylum seekers and migrants became emblematic of the uncertainties, economic chaos and explosion of migration brought on by the collapse of the Soviet bloc. More than five centuries after their first arrival on the Continent, in the minds of the mass of the population Gypsies were apparently no more European citizens than when they first presented their letters of penance to the authorities guarding Hildesheim city gates in 1417.
AFTERWORD
IT STARTED WITH A DEATH: on 16 July 2012 a gens du voyage was killed by police near Saint-Romain-sur-Cher in central France, prompting rioting from his community and a military force of several hundred being deployed against them. A few days later, in Grenoble, a robbery and shooting at a casino by ‘foreign-born French nationals’ resulted in two deaths, including that of a policeman. These two events formed the backdrop of Sarkozy’s speech talking of the ‘failure of a fifty-year period of unregulated immigration’: he called for foreigners who killed police officers to be stripped of French citizenship, and for the dismantling of the more than 500 illegal Roma camps across the country. In the time leading up to the evictions and deportations tensions continued to mount on both sides, including high-profile resistance to the eviction of a large camp outside Bordeaux and the leaking of government plans revealing how foreign Roma camps were the focus for the crack-down. In October a further leak confirmed the existence of a database used by the police and maintained by the ‘Interministerial task force against travelling crime’.1 It had been created in 1997 and collected information on three categories of people – ‘travelling people (Gypsies)’, ‘teams from rough urban areas’ and ‘travelling criminals from eastern Europe (Roma . . .)’ – on the grounds that their nomadism allowed them to evade traditional policing and legal borders.
Throughout, the rhetoric of the right-wing government and the popular press conflated Roma and gens du voyage, illegal immigration, criminality and nomadism and questioned the basis of all camps in France. Not only were Roma, who were eu citizens and eligible to travel to every Schengen country, positioned as ‘illegal immigrants’, but the net was cast so wide as to condemn anyone with links to ‘Gypsy’ communities. By October the clearance of camps had resulted in 1,230 Roma being deported despite protests from Roma activists and the EU, which criticized France for contravening principles of freedom of movement and for singling out the Roma for racist and discriminatory measures.2
After going through over 1,000 years of Gypsy and Roma history, this ‘summer of shame’ holds few surprises, as it contained many of the threads we have followed: fears of nomadism and its ability to evade controls; the idea of ‘the Gypsy’ as the perpetual foreigner; the willingness of governments to conflate different ‘deviant’ populations and target repressive measures at them. The interministerial task force was strongly reminiscent of Munich’s Gypsy police force, and we have seen how deportations have been one of the state’s weapons since the early modern period. But the events were also revealing of some more recent trends: an assertive Roma political voice, and a new Europe-wide regulatory framework accepting both that movement beyond national borders was in principle part of ‘normal’ behaviour and that ethnic minorities should not be the target of discrimination.
But illuminating as it was, this cannot tell the whole story. So long positioned as outsiders, in fact genetic mapping as much as the genealogies constructed by the Munich police reveal the extent to which, whether settled or mobile, Romani people’s heritages are as intimately bound to the European population as they are to an original Indian ancestry. And while dominant over the past 200 years, in fact the idea of the nation state encompassing its ‘natural’ population is very recent. For most of history Gypsies lived within relatively fluid imperial systems that were less ambitious in terms of how they might manage their populations, and more open to the idea of outsiders. Evidence from the Venetian as well as Ottoman empires shows how they rapidly became integrated into their feudal and military systems. And indeed, that the Ottoman Empire was quite capable of managing nomadism and taxing nomads is revealing of the paucity of imagination of modern bureaucratic states with their insistence on settled residence as a key indicator of citizenship.
This leads us into reflecting just how important were preconceived ideas and stereotypes of Gypsies in governing their relationship with states. Although this history has demonstrated the importance of national contexts – not just the toxic combination of factors producing the Roma Holocaust, but equally the British focus on ‘respectability’ or the seventeenth-century Spanish preoccupation with blood purity – stereotypes across time and place in fact remained remarkably persistent. Ideas of criminality and foreignness fed into their stigmatization and punishment alongside other deviant groups, most often vagrants, but also other minority peoples such as Jews. In turn, as Europe moved into the modern period and states became surer of their powers, the treatment of Gypsies illustrated both the ambitions of liberal states to ‘reform’ and assimilate marginal groups and a continued and sometimes overwhelming preoccupation with racial determinism.
And within all this, central to Roma experience has been their ability to find gaps and spaces in which they might continue to exist and even sometimes to thrive. We have seen this in their economic activities, where they often exploited niches which settled communities were unable to fulfil; and in their adaption, for example, to the challenges of transportation to the New World. Throughout the early modern period, it was their ability to move to the margins as much as the limitations on state power that enabled them to survive what could have been a devastating wave of legislative repression. And indeed, even at the height of state control over their lives, during Nazism and Communism, testimonies of Roma and Sinti reveal how they were able to evade and sometimes confront repression. These tactics have not been without their costs to communities: everyday resistance in order to evade authoritarian controls or assimilationist policies could also reinforce stereotypes of untrustworthiness and deviance and feed into further justifications for repression or discrimination. The final decades of the twentieth century saw the emergence on the international and national levels of an assertive Roma activism that aimed to give voice and representation to its people. However, long-standing divisions between groups (nomadic/settled, Muslim/Christian, ‘citizen’/ ‘foreigner’), the material difficulties of organizing a highly dispersed and marginalized community, and the wall of prejudice they have needed to surmount, has meant that their effectiveness has been limited. Despite a gradual embracing of literacy and something of a cultural renaissance, manifested in part by the groundswell of Romani evangelism, Gypsies, Roma and Travellers stil
l find their place in the 21st century contested and uncertain.
Appropriately we will end with the words of Ilona Lacková, a Slovakian Roma whose life was bound up with sweep of the twentieth century. An Auschwitz survivor, she returned to face life under Communism, benefiting briefly from the post-war Roma renaissance before being consigned to the margins. Her career as a writer and spokesperson for the Roma flourished after socialism’s collapse in 1989, and she lived to see her memoirs translated into Czech, Slovak, French, Italian and Hungarian: ‘It’s the end of the war, we’ve survived. After darkness comes the dawn. But after every dawn also comes the darkness. Who knows what’s in store for us.’3
REFERENCES
Preface
1 B. Donovan, ‘Changing Perceptions of Social Deviance: Gypsies in Early Modern Portugal and Brazil’, Journal of Social History, XXVI/1 (1992), p. 33.
2 E. M. Hall, ‘Gentile Cruelty to Gypsies’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society (hereafter JGLS), 3rd series, XI/2 (1932), pp. 49–56.
3 Sinti are a traditionally nomadic group whose presence in Germany dates back at least to the sixteenth century. By the late nineteenth century they had extended their presence to Belgium, the Netherlands, northern Italy, France and Russia.
Introduction: In Search of the ‘True Gypsy’?
1 C. Clark, ‘Who are the Gypsies and Travellers of Britain?’, in Here to Stay: The Gypsies and Travellers of Britain, ed. C. Clark and M. Greenfield (Hatfield, 2006), p. 11. The best overview of the debate is contained in D. Mayall, Gypsy Identities, 1500 to 2000: From Egipcyians and Moon-men to the Ethnic Romany (London and New York, 2004).
2 Quoted in R. A. Scott Macfie, ‘John Sampson, 1862–1981’, JGLS, 3rd series; VI/1 (1932), pp. 3–23, p. 6. G. Borrow, Romany Rye (London, 1948), p. x.
3 See for example G. Hall, The Gypsy’s Parson, his Experiences and Adventures (London, 1915), pp. 3–4; H. T. Crofton, ‘Affairs of Egypt, 1882–1906’, JGLS, new series, I/4 (1908), pp. 366–7.
4 M. A. Crowther, ‘The Tramp’, in Myths of the English, ed. R. Porter (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 91–113.
5 A. Symons, ‘In Praise of Gypsies’, JGLS, new series, I/4 (1908), pp. 295–9.
6 E. Waugh, ‘Children of the Wilderness’, in J. Sampson, The Wind on the Heath: A Gypsy Anthology (London, 1930), p. 12. See also D. Yates, My Gypsy Days, Recollections of a Romani Rawnie (London, 1953), p. 17; and Symons, ‘In Praise of Gypsies’, p. 296.
7 A. Thesleff, ‘Report on the Gypsy Problem’, trans H. Ehrenborg, JGLS new series, V/2 (1911), pp. 83–85 and continued in JGLS VI/4 (1911), p. 266.
8 D. Mayall, Gypsy-Travellers in Nineteenth Century Society (Cambridge, 1988), p. 78.
9 Quoted in A. Fraser, The Gypsies (Oxford, 1995), pp. 22–3.
10 See J. Sampson, The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales (Oxford, 1926).
11 See for example E. Marushiakova and V. Popov, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire (Hatfield, 2001); D. Kenrick, Gypsies from the Ganges to the Thames (Hatfield, 2004), p. 10.
12 E. Marushiakova and V. Popov, Gypsies (Roma) in Bulgaria (Frankfurt am Main, 1997) and their Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire.
13 Kenrick, Gypsies from the Ganges to the Thames, p. 10.
14 I. Medizabal et al., ‘Reconstructing the Population History of European Romani from Genome-wide Data’, Current Biology, XXII/4 (2012), pp. 2342–9.
15 Two contrasting findings are found in M. Nagy et al., ‘Searching for the Origin of Romanies: Slovakian Romani, Jats of Haryana and Jat Sikhs Y-STR Data in Comparison with Different Romani Populations’, Forensic Science International, CLXIX/1 (2007), pp. 19–26; and I. Mendizabal et al., ‘Reconstructing the Indian Origin and Dispersal of the European Roma: A Maternal Genetic Perspective’, PLOS One, VI/1 (2011); D. Gresham et al., ‘Origins and Divergence of the Roma (Gypsies)’, American Journal of Human Genetics, LXIX/6 (2001), pp. 1314–31.
16 I. Hancock, ‘Mind the Doors! The Contribution of Linguistics’, in All Change! Romani Studies through Romani Eyes, ed. D. le Bas and T. Acton (Hatfield, 2010), p. 6.
17 While they differ in their conclusions, probably the two most thorough linguistic overviews for the non-specialist are Fraser’s The Gypsies, chapter one, and Hancock’s, ‘Mind the Doors!’, pp. 5–26.
18 The different positions may be summed up in Hancock, ‘Mind the Doors!’ and Kenrick Gypsies from the Ganges to the Thames; see also Fraser, The Gypsies, chapter one; and R. Turner, ‘The Position of Romani in Indo-Aryan’, JGLS, 3rd series, I/5 (1926), pp. 145–89 on the specific point of departure from India.
19 G. C. Soulis, ‘The Gypsies in the Byzantine Empire and the Balkans in the Late Middle Ages’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 15 (1961), p. 163.
20 Soulis, ‘Gypsies in the Byzantine Empire’, p. 144. See also I. Hancock, The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution (Ann Arbor, MI, 1987), p. 9.
21 Fraser, The Gypsies, p. 35.
22 See E. Kohen, History of the Byzantine Jews: A Microcosmos in the Thousand Year Empire (Lanham, MD, 2007), pp. 76–7. For a general account of the iconoclastic period of Byzantine history see J. Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (London, 2007), chapter ten.
23 Soulis provides the best account of the etymological discussion surrounding this word in his ‘Gypsies in the Byzantine Empire’, pp. 145–6.
24 Kenrick, Gypsies from the Ganges to the Thames, p. 35.
25 The Life of Saint George the Athonite was written by his disciple George the Small at the Monastery of Iveron in c. 1068. The Latin translation of the relevant portion of text and discussion can be found in Soulis, ‘Gypsies in the Byzantine Empire’, p. 145.
26 This quotation and the subsequent discussion is taken from Soulis, ‘Gypsies in the Byzantine Empire’, p. 147.
27 See Marushiakova and Popov, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire, p. 38.
28 Fraser, The Gypsies, p. 50.
29 Soulis, ‘Gypsies in the Byzantine Empire’, pp. 153 and 158.
30 The Pilgrimage of Arnold von Harff, pp. 82–4, quoted in Soulis, ‘Gypsies in the Byzantine Empire’, p. 155.
31 Ibid.
32 E. O. Winstedt, ‘The Gypsies of Modon and the “Wyne of Romeney”’, JGLS, new series, 3 (1909–10), p. 61.
33 K. Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2008) pp. 12–13.
34 For a general discussion on the emergence of serfdom in the early modern period see K. Kaser, ‘Serfdom in Eastern Europe’, in Family Life in Early Modern Times, 1500–1789, ed. D. Kertzer and M. Barbagli (New Haven, CT, 2001), pp. 24–62.
35 N. Panaitecscu, ‘Gypsies in Wallachia and Moldavia: A Chapter of Economic History’, JGLS, 3rd series, XX/2 (1941), p. 67.
36 Kenrick, Gypsies from the Ganges to the Thames, p. 49.
37 Panaitecscu, ‘Gypsies in Wallachia and Moldavia’, pp. 58–72.
38 Rumelia literally means ‘land of the Romans’ and covered the area of the Balkans that had been Byzantine and stayed largely Christian. It essentially covered present-day Greece, European Turkey (Thrace) and Bulgaria. These documents are held at Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (bboa), the Oriental Department of the St Cyril and Methodius National Library, Turkey, TD120 and TD370. I am indebted to Prof. Tomova at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences who made available an early copy of the English version of S. Ivanova’s article, ‘A Historical Sketch of the Roma in the Bulgarian Lands at the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century’ (2012), a version of which can be found at www.ceeol.com, on which much of the following discussion is based.
39 These figures are based on the analysis of the Macedonian historian Alexander Stojanovsky, who used an average of five persons per household to come to the whole population estimate. See Marushiakova and Popov, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire, p. 29.
40 The extent of their migration is reflected in the register of 1523, which shows that a quarter of the Balkan Gypsy population were Muslim by this date. D. Petrovich, ‘The Social Position of Gypsies in Some Yugoslav
Countries in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, Journal of Yugoslav History (1976), pp. 48–9. Cited in Ivanova, ‘A Historical Sketch’.
41 See BBOA TD 370, с. 109.
42 This analysis is taken from Marushiakova and Popov, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire, pp. 43–4.
43 See A. Stojanovski, The Roma of the Balkan Peninsula (Skopje, 1989), p. 141, cited in Ivanova, ‘A Historical Sketch’.
44 Muselem were a volunteer force that originated in the early period of the Empire that was organized round the principle of the obligations of each ethnic group towards the sultan. Unlike the sipahis or the janissaries who participated in the elite regular army that was formed later, muselem did not receive state money and supported themselves by working. Their military obligations were compensated through tax reliefs. The members of the corps were grouped into oçacs of 25 persons of whom five at any one time were on active service.
45 Petrovich, ‘The Social Position of Gypsies’, cited in Ivanova, ‘A Historical Sketch’.
46 For a broader discussion of the development of the Ottoman bureaucratic system see I. Kunt, The Sultan’s Servants: The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Government 1550–1650 (New York, 1983).
47 E. Ginio, ‘Neither Muslims nor Zimmis. The Gypsies (Roma) in the Ottoman State’, Romani Studies XIV/2 (2004), p. 118.
48 Marushiakova and Popov, Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire, p. 32.
49 See both Kunt, The Sultan’s Servants, p. 14, and F. Çelik, ‘Exploring Marginality in the Ottoman Empire: Gypsies or People of Malice (Ehl-i Fesad) as Viewed by the Ottomans’, EUI Working Paper rscas, 39 (2004), p. 6 on this point.