Another Darkness, Another Dawn Read online

  ANOTHER DARKNESS,

  ANOTHER DAWN

  Another Darkness,

  Another Dawn:

  A History of Gypsies, Roma

  and Travellers

  Becky Taylor

  REAKTION BOOKS

  To my parents, for their love, so freely given

  Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

  33 Great Sutton Street

  London EC1V 0DX, UK

  www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

  First published 2014

  Copyright © Becky Taylor 2014

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

  Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and

  Index match the printed edition of this book.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain

  by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 9781780232973

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction: In Search of the ‘True Gypsy’?

  ONE

  Out of the Medieval World

  TWO

  Breaking Bodies, Banishing Bodies

  THREE

  The Dark Enlightenment

  FOUR

  Nationalism, Race and Respectability

  FIVE

  Into the Flames

  SIX

  A New Dawn?

  Afterword

  REFERENCES

  FURTHER READING

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INDEX

  PREFACE

  DESPITE THEIR PRESENCE across the world Gypsies, Roma and Travellers are some of the most marginalized and vilified people in society. They are rarely seen as having a place in a country, either geographically or socially, no matter where they live or what they do. Part of their marginalization stems from the fact that they are excluded from mainstream histories. At the same time, they are rarely granted a separate history, but rather seen to exist in a timeless bubble, unchanged and untouched by modern life. It remains that, despite a growing amount of research and writing, overall they are ‘part of the historically inarticulate’.1

  This book aims to serve not only as an introduction to the history of Romani peoples but crucially to show how their history is as intimately tied to the broader sweep of history as the rest of society’s. Understanding their history is to take in the founding and contraction of empires, Reformation and Counter-Reformation, wars, the expansion of law and order and of states, the Enlightenment and the increasing regulation of the world: it is as much a history of ‘ourselves’ as it is of ‘others’. In such a short volume it is not possible to cover all times and all places in the depth demanded by the subject. Instead, what I offer here is a way into understanding both the experiences of Romani peoples, and how settled societies have dealt with their presence. Inevitably this has meant focusing on some areas to the exclusion of others, but always with the aim of revealing the most significant trends and events affecting Gypsy history. The period to the end of the sixteenth century tracks movement across both place and time, taking in possible departures from north-west India, gradual migration to the Balkans and their reception across Europe in the early modern period. From this point onwards the amount of available evidence to historians increases significantly, allowing us to consider how they established themselves in Europe despite banishment and execution, as well as their arrival in the New World.

  The main routes of Gypsies across Europe.

  For the modern period, I have largely focused on the developments in four particular countries – Britain, Germany, France and Bulgaria – as a way of providing some focus and consistency to their history. These countries have been chosen as a way into exploring how different kinds of societies and states may have affected the reception, treatment and experiences of Romani peoples in modern times. Germany’s experience of nationalism has had very different meanings and outcomes to that of the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire from which Bulgaria sprang; while emerging ideas of citizenship and welfare played out differently in republican France, communist Bulgaria or in Britain’s relatively stable liberal democracy. In this way we can see how near universal stereotypes of Gypsies as marginal, criminal, deviant or romantic had diverse outcomes in different national contexts. Consequently this book acts as a springboard into thinking about the history of Gypsies while also opening up the question of how different societies saw themselves and the minorities in their midst. So, rather than implying that the experiences of Spanish, Polish, Scandinavian, American or indeed Argentinian Gypsies are any less worthy of study, I aim to provide a map that might be used by others to explore the countries beyond the scope of this volume.

  Writing this book was a salutatory lesson in the dangers of believing in a progressive view of history: things don’t always get better, especially if you belong to a marginalized ethnic group. But neither were they always necessarily as bad as they first appear. We will see how the institution of slavery for Gypsies coexisted under the Ottomans alongside remarkable cultural diversity and autonomy; how branding, mutilations and ‘Gypsy hunts’ occurred at the same time that Gypsies established themselves across Europe; and how despite developments in education and attitudes towards minorities the modern world has failed to engender anything like acceptance of the place of Romani peoples within its societies. The lack of any simple, linear story of progress is illustrated in an examination of seventeenth-century executions of German Gypsies written in 1932. The writer’s outraged account was prefaced with the following observation:

  It is, perhaps, a difficult matter for the modern mind, moulded by generations of increasing humanistic toleration, to imagine with sufficient realism some of the processes instrumental in the forming of our present European civilization. But here and there glimpses of the past are preserved, presenting vivid evidence of the manner in which Authority enforced Law and Order.2

  The irony of this observation, written at a time when the German National Socialists were poised to tighten anti-Roma and Sinti3 legislation to fatal effect across the Third Reich need not be laboured. More recently, attacks on Roma across the former Soviet bloc since 1989, the expulsion of Roma from Italy and France, as well as high-profile evictions of Irish Travellers from Dale Farm in the UK all serve to demonstrate how, centuries after their first arrival in Europe, Roma, Gypsies and Travellers remain unwelcome, with the legitimacy of their presence highly contested. This is no simple story of progression from brutal repression and marginalization in the early modern period, through attempts at assimilation and settlement in the nineteenth century to an inclusive and open world of early 21st-century multiculturalism.

  Europe in the sixteenth century.

  INTRODUCTION

  In Search of the ‘True Gypsy’?

  BEFORE I GO ANY FURTHER it is worth making plain that there is no one word that can cover the multitude of peoples who have been called, or might call themselves Roma, Gypsy or Traveller, or any of the national variations of these words over time and place. Recent work has confirmed exactly how problematic it is to label ‘people known as Gypsies’, with meanings often heavily contested and certainly not ‘politically neutral’.1 This is not simply a matter of semantics, since individuals and whole communities are still routinely deported, moved on or discriminated against on the grounds that they are, or are not, Gypsies/Roma/Travellers.

  When Gypsies first arrived in Europe they were known fairly consistently throughout the Continent as ‘
Egyptians’, having been believed to originate in ‘Little Egypt’ in Greece, hence the consequent term ‘Gypsy’. Over time variations on the Greek appellation ‘Astigani’, such as ‘Tsigane’ and ‘Gitano’ also became current. However, as Gypsies established themselves in different national contexts and became entwined in these societies, new names emerged reflecting this. So, in France, they also became known as ‘Bohemians’ owing to their supposed origins in Bohemia in the Czech Republic, with particular groups such as the Manouches arising, who had ties in Belgium and Germany. Similarly in Germany and northern Italy the Sinti and Jenische emerged as separate groups from the sixteenth century, with their Romani dialects containing many loan words from German. In contrast, the Irish and Scots Travellers do not claim Romani heritage, but rather an indigenous nomadic tradition, but nevertheless have often maintained close family ties with English and Welsh Romanies who do. In addition, as we shall see time and time again, governments and legislators often lumped them together with other social groups seen as undesirable – ‘counterfeit Egyptians’, vagabonds, vagrants, errants, nomads, those of no fixed abode, travelling people – in order to control, assimilate or remove them from society.

  Broadly, although national variations of the word ‘Gypsy’ have been traditionally used to describe these communities, because of the strongly pejorative overtones – most often tied to associations of dirt, thieving and antisocial activities – recent waves of Roma activists have challenged the use of this term, proffering the alternative Rom/Rrom (‘man’ or ‘person’ in Romani) for an individual, and Roma for the collective identity. However, this term remains most closely associated with the communities of southeastern and eastern Europe, so in Britain, for example, the rather clunky term Roma/Gypsy/Traveller (or Romani when referring specifically to English and Welsh Gypsies) is often used in preference, and as a way of making explicit the heritages of the different communities.

  While these developments are helpful in raising the profile of different communities with linked but dispersed heritages, they create a number of difficulties for historians. As we shall see, much of the evidence of the very early years is either genetic or linguistic, which presents us with a problem: while we may be able to chart the development of language across time and place, what we cannot know is how those who used the different variations of these languages thought of themselves. Indeed, this extends beyond the use of linguistic evidence to take in the written accounts we have of Gypsies’ interactions with others. Essentially, whenever we look at a source, whether an account from the Byzantine Empire of ‘Astigani’ acrobats, seventeenth-century descriptions of ‘Gypsy hunts’ or twentieth-century police reports of ‘Gypsy’ evictions, we are usually dealing with outsiders’ definitions and impressions rather than those of the people being written about. While sometimes we are told that the people concerned ‘called themselves “Egyptians”, mostly we are left with the fact that it is the outside observer who was describing the subjects in a particular way and using a particular label. The people in question may well have thought of themselves as ‘Gypsies’, but we also need to be aware that they might have thought of themselves in a range of different ways – by their occupation (as travelling horse traders or knife grinders, for example), or in relation to their extended family group – while at the same time possibly accepting, or rejecting the fact that others saw them as ‘Gypsies’. Added to this is the fact that there were clearly times across history when hiding Gypsy identity was a matter of life or death, as well as times – for example when presenting oneself as a fortune teller – when emphasizing ‘Gypsyness’ was a distinct advantage.

  Overlaid onto the puzzle of outsider definition versus self-ascription is a further difficulty, that of the ‘impure’ or ‘half-bred’ Gypsy. Already by the sixteenth century, legislators were grappling with the idea of ‘counterfeit Egyptians’, suspect both for living as Gypsies and for not actually being Gypsies: vagrants and others from settled society who ‘became’ Gypsies were seen as presenting a profound threat to social hierarchy, as they opened up the possibility of another way of being. In order to understand the genesis and significance of this we need to look at the history of writing on Gypsies itself. While Gypsies attracted attention from commentators and legislators from the outset, evidence about them tends to be patchy until the late eighteenth century, when Enlightenment scholars such as Hermann Grellmann started exploring both their origins and their place in European society. From this point there is a veritable flood of writing, much of it stimulated by members of the Gypsy Lore Society and made accessible through the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society.

  This society was established in 1888 and had its home at the University of Liverpool. It published and supported the work of an international body of amateur and academic scholars who styled themselves ‘gypsiologists’ and who carried out field research and archival study across Europe and North America. Central to the identity of many of these scholars was their acceptance as individuals within Gypsy circles as a ‘Romani Rai’ (Gypsy gentleman). An article of 1892 defined a ‘Romany Rai’ as ‘acting as private secretary, legal, medical and spiritual adviser, general arbiter and tobacco jar to his Romany friends’, with one writer comparing ‘a Romany Rye surrounded by a group of eagerly enquiring Gypsies . . . [to] Christ sitting in the midst of his disciples’.2 While it is easy now to wince at the patronizing tone with which Gypsy ‘disciples’ were positioned in relation to the god-like scholars, it is the undoubted case that much of what we know about Gypsies stems from their work. This is, however, a double-edged sword: while gypsiologists have bequeathed us a body of evidence and detail, we need to understand that their scholarship was often conducted through the heaviest of rose-tinted spectacles.

  Along with artistic attempts to capture a lifestyle centring around picturesque caravans, interest in Gypsies focused largely on recording their origins, language and customs. Gypsiologists were largely preoccupied with the ancestry of Gypsies and with developing theories about their ‘pure bred’ nature that often tied pure blood lines to Romani language use and ‘proper’ nomadic living, certain marriage customs and cleanliness taboos. Confinement between four walls was thought to be unendurable to the Gypsy tribe, while wanderlust was transmitted by birth, and death was marked by the superstitious burning of possessions.3 All this was entwined with a quest for understanding their relationship with, or rather separateness from, modern society.

  Gypsiologists were intent on discovering and recording the language and culture of Gypsies before they disappeared. In this they were part of the wider Victorian phenomenon of classifying and understanding the physical and social worlds, but they were equally inspired by a nostalgic desire to capture ways of life apparently threatened by urbanization and industrialization. It was often from a medley of ‘back to the land’, early caravanning and arts and crafts movements, and preservation and conservation societies that many of the supporters of Gypsies and their romantic lifestyle were drawn. A main preoccupation of these groups was the benefits gained from escaping from civilization and its cares, and conversely the joys of becoming at one with nature. Resulting writings glorified ‘the tramp’ as well as Gypsies, assuming that being in the countryside and taking part in ‘simple’ activities such as walking and caravanning automatically brought one closer to nature.4

  At the same time another body of people was becoming increasingly interested in the lives, habits and origins of Gypsies and others who lived on the road. A strong theme in descriptions of Gypsies had always been their foreignness: not simply their appearance, but their lifestyle, religion and morals. The Magdeburg chronicle of 1417 had described the Gypsy acrobats as ‘black and hideous’, with countless subsequent accounts linking their appearance with deviant behaviour, typically including theft, sorcery, promiscuity, child stealing and even cannibalism. The Enlightenment did not remove this thinking, but brought a new sense that all members of the human race had the capacity for improvement, but by the nine
teenth century this had become increasingly overlaid with new ideas of ‘race’. Emerging ideas of evolution combined with attempts to justify social inequalities, colonialism and the differences between nations to produce what became known as social Darwinism. Here ‘survival of the fittest’ was used to explain the ‘naturalness’ of European imperialism, the superior nature of northern Europeans over the ‘Latin races’ and even the dominance of the upper and middle classes over the working class. And indeed, at the very bottom of the social hierarchy was a shifting mass of deviants, threatening to social order and untouched by progress. Such attitudes also found their roots in early-modern concerns about ‘sturdy beggars’ and the vagrant poor that had combined with suspicion of ‘foreigners’ to penalize and often expel outsiders. With changing ideas over the purpose and possibilities of the state brought about by the Enlightenment, expulsion was increasingly replaced by attempts at reform and assimilation. In certain parts of Europe from the late eighteenth century, added to these concerns were anxieties over national identity, with the emerging German state in particular seeking increasingly to define who constituted an ‘undesirable’ individual within its borders.

  So, in contrast to romantics who were concerned with the inevitable loss of Gypsies in the face of modernity, those who saw Gypsies as unwholesome deviants were united in their concern that they would not disappear unless there was concerted action. Where they differed was in what measures were necessary to make this happen. Missionaries saw the Bible and conversion to Christianity as the answer; educationalists saw literacy; reformers, civil servants and communists saw regulation, settlement and assimilation; and eugenicists saw sterilization or even extermination. Crucially, however, what united both the ‘romantics’ and the reformers were two things: how they depicted Gypsies; and an urge to distinguish between the ‘true’ Gypsy and the ‘counterfeit Egyptian’. The desire to see Gypsies as representatives of an earlier, easier world, as much as reformers’ concerns that this earlier world was rather too attractive to maligners, led to depictions of Gypsies as childlike, closer to nature, even as animals. This equation of Gypsies to part of the natural world set them in automatic opposition to civilization: