Historical Comparisons: From Slavery to World War II

Abstract

To properly contextualize Roma rights and explore the parallels with civil rights, we must first trace the history of Romani peoples in CSEE, a history that stretches back over a millennium. Scholars have studied the origins of the Roma as well as their paths into CSEE for centuries. For nearly as long, this scholarship has objectified, exoticized, and marginalized its very subjects – in short, replicating society’s exclusion of the Roma. To highlight and avoid these perils, we begin this Chapter by surveying how Romani studies as a field has evolved to a juncture that now facilitates broader structural comparisons with other minority groups. Since the nineteenth century, scholarship on European Roma has been dominated by the ethnographic approach of “Gypsiology,” or Gypsy lore, which is preoccupied with Roma culture, folklore, and origins. This approach rests on a proposition, often attributed to the German historian Heinrich Mortiz Gottlieb Grellmann (1753–1804), that the itinerant groups scattered across Europe, frequently (and pejoratively) called Gypsies, constitute an ethnic group bound by a common language and land of origin, India. Under the spell of this thesis, successive generations of Gypsiologists attempted to uncover the paths that the first Roma had traveled into Europe, using historical and linguistic evidence to prove or disprove the links to India.Along the way, they classified Roma into intricate categories based on culture, dialect, and geography. Rather than seeing that all the variations challenged a unifying ethnic categorization of “Gypsy,” Gypsiologists bemoaned the imminent extinction of the “trueGypsy,” an archetype that hewed close to the central features of the ethnicity.