In Search of the True Gypsy

From Enlightenment to Final Solution

Wim Willems

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317791898
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

It has only been recognised tardily and with reluctance that during the Second World War hundreds of thousands of itinerants met the same horrendous fate as Jews and other victims of Nazism. Gypsies appear to appeal to the imagination simply as social outcasts and scapegoats or, in a flattering but no more illuminating light, as romantic outsiders. In this study, contemporary notions about Gypsies are traced back as far as possible to their roots, in an attempt to lay bare why stigmatisation of gypsies, or rather groups labelled as such, has continuned from the distant past even to today.

1

Introduction

THE POWER OF LABELLING

In 1991, leafing through a stack of Serbian weeklies, the Dutch cultural anthropologist, Duijzings, stumbled upon a number of articles about a new ethnic minority in the former Yugoslavia: the Egyptians.¹ The previous year they had founded their own association and within no time at all they had received 6,000 applications for membership; they estimated their total number in Yugoslavia at 100,000. A similar organization had been set up in the Macedonian town of Ohrid ten years earlier. It had acquired 5,000 members and, during the Yugoslavian census of 1981, its members had campaigned in vain for official recognition as a ‘nationality’.² The new association appears, in the interval, to have been remarkably successful at mobilizing support from various sides. It brought out a book featuring the folk tales, legends and customs of Egyptians in Macedonia and presented it to the Egyptian ambassador in Belgrade. Egyptian television devoted a documentary to the new countrymen and politicians, academics and journalists in Macedonia, and Serbia as well, supported their demand for recognition as a separate nationality.

Until a short while ago the members of this expanding group were known in their region as Gypsies. They have themselves adduced a number of arguments to demonstrate the fallacy of this label.³ They maintain that they have lived for centuries in the historical heart of cities such as Ohrid and Bitola, whereas most Yugoslavian Gypsies inhabit separate and frequently impoverished peripheral neighbourhoods. They make a point of their relative prosperity and the absence of unemployment in their ranks and they allege that they have always constituted a specific group of artisans – smiths – and that they are currently active in modern, specialized vocations that require considerable schooling, a form of labour mobility said to be beyond the reach of Gypsies. According to their own statements, they are ‘more developed’ and ‘more modern’ than the Gypsies and the Albanians in Yugoslavia. Finally it is argued that their oral traditions indicate that they belong to the oldest inhabitants of the Balkans and that, in the fourth century before Christ, they founded a region called Little Egypt in Greece. From here they later journeyed along trade routes to Macedonia where they were responsible for making the city of Ohrid flourish. In the course of their becoming integrated they are said to have adopted the language of the peoples among whom they lived and to have forgotten their native Egyptian.

In their attempts to provide the history of their own group with the desired ethnic-nationalistic foundation, the Yugo-Egyptians have received support from science.⁴ Serbian doctors have claimed to be able to demonstrate through blood samples that the Egyptians are no Gypsies. An ambitious interdisciplinary research project by an ethnologist-archaeologist and an arabist has been approved with the goal of proving the thesis of Egyptian origin. They claim that archaeological finds in Macedonia point to similarities with the Copts, or Christian Egyptians, and also suggest similarities in religious aspects of popular culture. They consider it possible that the Copts first settled in Greece and subsequently dispersed to other parts of the Balkans. Only many centuries later would the first Gypsies have arrived in Little Egypt, to continue on from there to the north. That would explain why they, also on account of their rather swarthy skin, would have been called Gypsies (Gitanos, Cigani) by the indigenous population, a term which is derived from Egyptian.

Duijzings, in explaining why the Yugo-Egyptians themselves actively engaged in the process of nationalistic or ethnic labelling, refers to fluctuations in the socio-political circumstances in Yugoslavia.⁵ In the 1981 census the majority of them had let themselves be registered as Albanians, with whom, they maintained, they shared a common language, religious observances, and a variety of customs. For their part the Albanians adamantly insisted on distinctions, and identified the others as Albanised Gypsies (Askalije). They were said to have been forced to assimilate during the Ottoman era, then to have migrated to cities where they always had lived separately from most Gypsies who usually enjoyed a lower social status and with whom they forged no marriage ties.⁶ Notwithstanding this situation, the Yugo-Egyptians have been subjected to pressure to let themselves be registered as Albanians during population counts. The underlying motivation for such pressure derives from the use of census data to divide such social goods as jobs, housing and university entrance places proportionately among the different ethnic groups. Considering the fact that until the early 1980s, the Albanians were economically and politically the strongest party in Kosovo, many Gypsies, including today’s Yugo-Egyptians, very pragmatically admitted to this Albanian identity. In the meantime the Albanians did not cease to discriminate against the Gypsies on various grounds.

When political relations shifted with the advent to power of the Serbs in Kosovo in the late 1980s, the Gypsies landed in an identity vacuum. Against this background, Duijzings portrays the decision of the Yugo-Egyptians to reach back and reclaim an old, alternative identity, hoping, meanwhile, to acquire in the near future the status of a recognized nationality (with Egypt as their motherland). In principle the Serbs harbour no objection whatsoever against the numerical decline of registered Albanians, although it is uncertain whether they will ever recognize the political claims of the Yugo-Egyptians.

Some leaders of Gypsy communities in Yugoslavia speak of a divide-and-rule policy involving manipulation of statistics – of which Gypsies are the dupes. They emphasize the communal identity of all ‘Gypsy-groups’, including the Yugo-Egyptians, and cite the massive cumulative figure as an argument for ethnic recognition. Duijzings remarks that while it might be true that only 168,000 Gypsies let themselves be marked down as such during the most recent census, the real number is likely to be four times as great.⁷ Ethnic identities, however, are not permanently fixed and peoples and nations do not comprise closed entities in themselves.⁸ Duijzings seems unwilling to take account of the notion that ‘Gypsy’ is a collective ethnic designation for all segments of a single people. He regards the Yugo-Egyptians’ claim to an Egyptian origin as an emergency tactical manoeuvre, the historical justification of which needs to be called into doubt.⁹

ARE ‘GYPSIES’ ONE PEOPLE?

Contention about the proper label for Yugo-Egyptians in Kosovo and Macedonia illustrates the tension that can arise during the framing of ethnic definitions between the wishes of the members of the group in question and the wishes of other concerned parties. In the instance under consideration, the Yugo-Egyptians’ emphasis on cultural and social differences from other ‘Gypsies’ and their claims to a history of their own did not win immediate acceptance. Yet it is important to note that this strategy for promoting their own emancipation and for acquiring more social status under contemporary circumstances did appear in advance to have a chance of succeeding. Such a process certainly also depends upon the interests of other parties concerned – in this case politicians, judicial authorities, academics, authorities from the Gypsy community or communities, Egyptian diplomats, and those representing the interests of the Yugo-Egyptians themselves. What matters is how they all interpret the label ‘Gypsies’: as a collective term for diverse (ethnic) groups or as the designation of a single people living scattered in groups throughout the world.

In trying to analyse this process we find ourselves facing two questions that recur as a motif throughout the following study. Do all those designated as Gypsies constitute one people? And who ultimately determines who is a Gypsy? The first question is usually answered in the affirmative in the academic literature, as in Angus Fraser’s historical handbook published in 1992. In keeping with the views of authoritative authors writing about Gypsies, Fraser posits, on grounds of linguistic correspondences between Romani (the ‘Gypsy language’) and Hindi (the language of north-eastern India), that they came originally from India, departing from that homeland somewhere after the ninth century for reasons about which there is still ongoing speculation. Like the Jews, they subsequently spread over the globe, arriving in west and central Europe at the turn of the fifteenth century. There, comparatively unharried, they lived for decades as nomads, later to be confronted with continuous stigmatization by government officials as the result of the inevitable burden to the sedentary population that they came to represent. The social exclusion and persecution of Gypsies may be explained in this perspective as the consequence of the incompatibility of settled (agrarian and/or industrial) and nomadic communities. A consensus appears to exist about the common language and origins of Gypsies and about their original itinerant way of life. The notion is also dominant that demonstrable physical and ethnic differences exist distinguishing Gypsies from non-Gypsies, such as physical traits, codes of purity, endogamy and tribal laws.¹⁰ For those who subscribe to this ethnographic viewpoint, it is assumed that the Gypsies constitute a single people with a number of specific characteristics of their own. In other words, Gypsy studies are dominated by a primordial standpoint that interprets their ethnic identity as, in essence, an incontestable given.¹¹

The extent to which this postulation is justified has seldom been the subject of study. It seems, rather, that the idea ‘Gypsy’ dominates, obscuring both the historical and ethnic variety which may be lurking behind the monolithic concept.¹² I will illustrate where this can lead by using the findings of the American anthropologist Miriam Lee Kaprow who did fieldwork in the late 1970s among the Gitanos in the Spanish city of Zaragoza.¹³ Her observations ultimately culminated in confusion because these people lived normally among other Spaniards in a neighbourhood where they visited the same shops, hospitals, cafés and movie theatres. They were physically indistinguishable from the others, they spoke only Spanish, and they lived in houses. As far as work was concerned, moreover, there appeared to be no specific vocational specialization, although they were usually self-employed, they seldom worked for wages and, economically, they belonged to the lower or middle class. Kaprow had essentially found that there was a group of people who, it was true, were known as Gypsies – who even called themselves ‘Gitanos’ – but who did not possess any of the characteristics of Gypsies identified in the literature. The single stereotype that she thought she could recognize had to do with style. Having reached that point she thought she had penetrated to the essence of ‘the Gypsy’:

The vitality, the zest – the sheer energy with which they embarked on anything, gossiped about anyone, ate, cleaned the house, met at the cafes – was remarkable. There was a dash, a vividness, a gusto, that has made me, along with others who have worked with Gypsies, miss them terribly when we are away. Their flair, their elan, intensified everything.¹⁴

According to Kaprow, her Gitanos had an anti-conservative attitude towards life. They observed no traditions of their own, had no specific moral code, customs or marriage rituals, no ideology or group laws, no special cuisine or stories.¹⁵ Continuity was said to be alien to them; celebration of the moment was of central importance. None the less, she regarded them as a social group with internal cohesion arising from a rather loose structure. She had no doubts that these Gitanos were related to Gypsy groups elsewhere in the world. Indeed the loose structure – she even goes so far as to speak of the lack of structure – was in her opinion a characteristic of all Gypsy-like groups.¹⁶

She overlooks, however, the fact that other contemporary anthropologists have reached opposite conclusions and have encountered social structures such as purity codes among the Gypsy clans which they have studied in England and the United States.¹⁷ With respect to the available evidence it is too bad that only a limited number of monographs concerning Gypsy communities have appeared and, in the last analysis, they offer insufficient grounds for making general statements about Gypsies and any possible characteristics they might have in common.

The term ‘Gypsies’ appears to embrace different ethnic groups with their own designations, such as Gitanos, Sinti, Rom and Kalderas, while in some countries, including England and Ireland, native travellers are also called ‘Gypsies’. To what extent these groups share a common descent remains to be seen. There seem to be mutual ties on only a modest scale and the groups do not appear to feel united by any awareness of a common history.

This prompts the question of whether such unity may have existed a century or longer ago. It is not very likely. Although no publications are available to settle the matter, there are more than enough indications that make the idea of a single Gypsy people a dubious one. Thus the Quaker philanthropist John Hoyland wrote a book in 1816 about ‘Gypsies’ in England and Scotland with the intention of goading the social conscience of prosperous citizens into their ameliorating the living conditions of these ‘roaming heathens’ and bringing about their religious conversion. He had lists of questions distributed among provincial authorities, who checked their data with the leaders of various itinerant groups. From the group portrait of 18,000 Gypsies that was put together in this way, it turned out that there was no internal community structure. The people had no idea where their ancestors came from, were not organized among themselves, and were not at all aware of Gypsy groups elsewhere in Europe. They had no concept of a shared past and there didn’t appear to be any solidarity among the groups. Their sense of being part of a group stopped at the level of the clan. No one spoke at all about belonging to ‘one people’.¹⁸

A questionnaire commissioned by the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior and administered among Gypsies in 1893 revealed similar results. The government wanted to tackle vigorously the problem of these ‘groups on the move’, which they regarded as an anachronism in a modern, centralized state. The results from the official survey, however, did not harmonize with existing ideas about Gypsies: 90 per cent did not appear to be itinerant but rather seemed to live sedentarily and only one third of all those questioned used Romani as their mother tongue. Coppersmiths and musicians, two leading occupational groups in the circles under scrutiny, earned a comfortable living; further proof that they were better integrated than the government had supposed. The actual implementation of the research also proved that the interviewers could not rely on objective criteria such as language, lifestyle, physical characteristics or self-definition to find out who was a member of the Gypsy population. It was presumed that they would differ from others with respect to racial characteristics, but what happened as a rule was simply that the people who were asked questions were known by others as ‘Gypsies’.¹⁹ The text does not mention what they called themselves.

What we know about the still scarcely written history of Gypsies obliges...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Heinrich Moritz Gottlieb Grellmann (1753–1804): an enlightened historian and his sources
• 3. George Borrow (1803–81): the walking lord of Gypsy lore
• 4. The heirs of George Borrow
• 5. Robert Ritter (1901–51): eugenist and criminological biologist
• 6. Conclusions
• Annex 1: the publications of H.M.G. Grellmann
• Annex 2: reviews of H.M.G. Grellmann’s book on Gypsies
• Annex 3: sources for The Zincali
• Annex 4: reviews of the works of George Borrow
• Annex 5: summary of Robert Ritter’s publications and lectures
• Annex 6: reviews of Robert Ritter’s Ein Menschenschlag
• Archives
• Bibliography
• Index