Why have the Romani been scapegoated for a thousand years?
Why have the Romani been scapegoated for a thousand years?
The “Gypsies” versus “civilized society”
Over a thousand years ago, scores of people left Ancient India and haven’t felt at home since.
They traveled through Asia, the Middle East, Byzantium, the Balkans, and Europe. As George Borrow wrote in his 1841 book The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies of Spain,
“There is scarcely a place of the habitable world where they are not to be found; their tents are alike pitched on the heaths of Brazil and the ridges of the Himalayan hills, and their language is heard at Moscow and Madrid, in the streets of London and Stamboul.”
And everywhere, they became scapegoats.
The reviled Gypsies
The Romani people — also known as Gypsies in the Western world — have not been able to fit in for over a millennium.
The earliest historical accounts of their arrival in Europe sound a lot like the modern-day stereotypes against them: Thieves. Liars. Given every opportunity to participate in society and they reject it.
For centuries, the Romani have been facing unrelenting pressure to assimilate. We’ve outlawed their nomadic lifestyle. We’ve torn apart their communities. We’ve forbidden their language and forcibly changed their names. We’ve murdered them. For a long time, we enslaved them.
Countries across Europe that otherwise differ much from each other have all been united in their attitude towards the Romani: They should either stay far away or disappear entirely. Violence against Romani individuals, families, and entire communities has plagued our shared history.
The Romani were the second-largest group that filled the gas chambers in the Holocaust.
In her book, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, Isabel Fonseca describes her visit to Auschwitz in the early 1990s.
“The Polish guide, whose batch of Swedish tourists I tagged along with, never once mentioned the Gypsies. After the tour, when the Swedes had retired to the cafeteria, I asked her.
‘Even here in Oswiecim, the Gypsies didn’t work.’
That was all she had to say about the twenty-one thousand Gypsies murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
The Balkans, known as “the second home” of the Romani, are also the place where they are most despised and disenfranchised. In our home country, Bulgaria, it’s not unusual to hear people wishing “Hitler had finished the job” or criticize government shortcomings with the simple “We’re a Gypsy country.”
The hatred runs deep. But who are the real people who evoke it?
Who are the Romani?
Stereotypes against the Romani describe them as a smudge on human civilization: a wild hive without culture, faith, or morals.
This idea starts to crack as soon as you look more carefully.
The Romani organized themselves, before all else, in groups that are defined by craft. Brick-makers, comb-makers, basket-makers, blacksmiths, locksmiths, herb-gatherers, horse-traders, musicians, to name just a few.
Having honed their skills generation after generation, the Romani were considered master craftsmen and artists in the Middle Ages. They have forged weapons for armies, built houses for villagers, played music at innumerable weddings.
The Nomadic lifestyle was not the aimless wandering painted by stereotypes. It was rooted in rich cultural and geographic knowledge. Travel routes were carefully negotiated and planned during annual meetings between the Nomadic groups.
The Romani language, having barely changed from ancient Sanskrit, is still alive and unaltered today — just like the Romani identity, which has remained intact after a millennium of persecution.
If we look past the stereotypes and into historical records, the Romani emerge as warm, peaceful people. Craftsmen, storytellers, and artisans who you might see occasionally in your village. People who come for a few days and offer to sell you unique jewelry, beautiful scarves, painted wooden spoons, or even music.
The Romani have never waged a war, tried to enslave or otherwise subdue other people, imposed their beliefs onto anyone else, or planted a flag on someone else’s land and called it theirs.
In fact, the Romani didn’t have a flag until 1933 — and the one they designed shows a wheel as a symbol of their Nomadic traditions.
So what did these peaceful, talented people do to us that for centuries we have wanted them either devoured by our society or annihilated from it?
They have been a constant reminder that what we uphold as solid reality is a big shared illusion. They have never seen us as the superior human beings we’ve believed ourselves to be. They have been consistently refusing to bow to our values.
Now, a thousand years after their arrival, we are finally facing up to the consequences of our way of life and we’re slowly starting to seek what the Romani have been doing for centuries.
The Romani wisdom we have always rejected
The Roma culture, by its very existence, defies three core values of traditional societies: work, ownership, and identity.
Why do we work?
History shows that the Romani are very hard-working. Why, then, have they been consistently portrayed as the opposite?
This is best answered with a quote by an angry Romanian villager, who Isabel Fonseca interviewed for her book, Bury Me Standing:
“Here I am, picking plums for someone else. The Gypsies pick these same plums to eat and the rest to sell for themselves.”
The Romani don’t mind hard work. They just prefer to work for themselves.
Regimented labor has always been praised as the backbone of civilized society, as the thing that propels us forward. The two opposing doctrines of Communism and Capitalism both uphold hard work as the highest virtue — when you do it for someone else.
The Romani have never been seduced by prestige, security, or any other of the standard promises given either by land-owners or corporations.
Instead, they have always been entrepreneurs. Honing their craft, seeking and carving out market niches, adapting to the changing world.
For centuries, this made them look suspicious. Today, we’re thirsty for it. Fatigued by industrialized products and monopolized markets that shove unskippable ads down our throat, we crave for things “with a soul.” Things that are “custom” and “hand-made.”
A lot of us crave to make those things. To not be “pinned down,” to be the masters of our own destinies. The “Digital Nomad” lifestyle is booming as “the dream” in the same Western countries that outlawed the true Nomadic lifestyle centuries ago.
What do we leave behind?
Europe has been cut up between its inhabitants for centuries. When the first settlers arrived in the Americas, they similarly started claiming lands and pitching flags.
As nations, we derive an immense sense of pride from physical symbols of our heritage. How can an Italian look at the St. Peter’s Basilica and not feel proud? As individuals, we are similarly preoccupied with what we come to own. The more we own, the better. Same with what we leave behind. Houses for our children and grandchildren, savings, tea sets, jewelry.
For the Romani, this is all dust in the wind. The fact that they have never built a state of their own, nor monuments, nor left behind acceptable tangible markers of culture, has always been used against them as proof that they are inferior.
And yet, the Romani have managed to preserve one of the most ancient languages in the world, as well as the core of their philosophies and culture, despite being dispersed all over the world and being persecuted for centuries.
The Romani are not concerned with ownership the same way everyone else is. They don’t fetishize it. What they own does not define who they are. What they leave behind for their descendants is knowledge, myths and stories, craftsmanship, a strong tribe.
For centuries this made them look inferior in the eyes of the nations who built cathedrals, stadiums, libraries, rockets, factories, shopping malls, and fast-food chains.
Today, after having destroyed half of the forests on the planet to accommodate all the things we wanted to build, what we’re leaving behind looks less like a sophisticated cultural legacy and more like an environmental crisis.
We were never superior to the Romani. They just stood in stark contrast to our greed.
The sense of identity
In Europe, the history of countries squabbling to establish one as better than the other is long and rich. And America has taken this chest-beating to an even higher level.
It’s the same, if not worse, with religion. Christians feel superior to Muslims and vice versa, Protestants feel superior to Catholics and vice versa.
How many wars have been waged in the name of all these labels?
For the Romani, identity is an internal experience. In the book The Gypsies in Bulgaria, Elena Marushiakova explains that the Romani identify primarily with their group but they don’t share with outsiders which group they belong to. Why not?
“The Gypsy considers the question of his group belonging relevant only to himself.”
In the same book, an Ottoman scholar is quoted as criticizing the Romani for being faithless.
“They celebrate Easter with the Christians, Eid al-Adha with the Muslims, and Purim with the Jews.”
The Romani have been continuously written out as “Godless” for adopting customs from the religions they encounter. In reality, their core beliefs and values have remained unchanged. They just don’t vilify different cultures. They embrace and celebrate them.
Why have the Romani been scapegoated for a thousand years? If you look at all of the negative stereotypes against them, you might see a tinge of envy: They celebrate all religions. They work for themselves. They are too free, too joyful, too resilient. Even the Nazis couldn’t force them to conform.
Maybe in the next one thousand years, we will stop demonizing them and start learning from their wisdom.
(originally published by Martina Petkova in the Medium publication History of Yesterday in February 2021)