Dr John Sampson, the leading British authority on Gypsies in the early twentieth century, was essentially the product of Victorian Liverpool in its heyday, when it was the crossroads between the regions of the British Isles, the meeting-place of Irish, Scots, Welsh and English, and the chief link between Britain and America. Every year hundreds of thousands of Europeans sailed from Liverpool: whole communities of Germans, Dutch and Scandinavians settled in the city to profit from the transatlantic trade. The growth of the docks along the Mersey, with miles of quays, forests of masts and queues of sailing ships and...

The collections of ‘Gypsy’ materials at Liverpool University Library comprise two separate but interrelated sections: the Gypsy Lore Society Archive and the Scott Macfie Gypsy Collections. The archive of the Society records not only its members’ scholarship, but also Robert Andrew Scott Macfie’s phenomenal powers of organization and persuasion; Macfie’s ‘personal’ collection, given on his death in 1935, formed a nucleus for continuing donations from members of the Society and later additions. Together they document the interests, research, fieldwork and publications of the main figures in the Gypsy Lore Society from before its revival at Liverpool in 1907 up until...

Some of my earlier work analysed the link between Orientalism and Gypsylorism as discursive formations that constitute the subjects of which they write (Lee 2000). Here I extend that work by examining ways in which Gypsylorists, by suppressing alternative possibilities, reinforced their epistemic control in constituting ‘the Gypsies’. I develop the interlinked notions of travelling theory, belatedness, ‘wild praxis’ and the possibilities that postcolonial theorizing can offer to examine ways in which Romanies can uncover and re-present amnesiac discourses embedded in Gypsylorism. I use two illustrations: Francis Hindes Groome’s hypothesis for the origin of the term ‘Egyptian’ as applied to...

No discovery has been as significant to the understanding of the history of the Gypsies as the illumination of their linguistic connection with India. Having said this, there arises immediately a need to clarify. For the connection between the Romani language and the languages of India has no bearing at all on the history and origin of the Irish Travellers, and probably little and only indirect significance for an understanding of the culture of the German or Swiss Yenish, to name but two examples out of many. At the same time it is impossible to understand the Rom, Romacel, Romanichel,...

In this chapter I shall concentrate on the years 1400–1450 when Gypsies¹ in large numbers first arrived in western Europe. The generally held opinion in the field of Gypsy Studies is that there then occurred an invasion of a large group of Romanies, who pretended to be refugees while indulging in pickpocketing and shoplifting. This view is based on a variety of sources reproduced in the pages of theJournal of the Gypsy Lore Societyduring the last century. But if historians of the future based their research on the popular press, we might get a similar impression of...

To be fair, not all fake Romani culture has been faked deliberately; more often it is simply the result of misguided or misinformed hypotheses finding their way into the conventional account, and being repeated by subsequent writers unchecked. A prime example of deliberately faked tradition, however, is found in Manfri Fred Wood’s much-publicizedIn the Life of a Romany Gypsy, which appeared in 1973. Here, he summarized (1973: 65–69) what was allegedly remembered of the original Romani religion. He begins: ‘Now, as to Romany religion, there is not much anybody remembers of it today. There was a prophet called...

The philosophical problematic of metaphysics dealt with debates around establishing abstract principles of ontology, that is, trying to establish what are the general rules by which we reach decisions about what we shall agree to treat as existent. Much of this debate was abandoned in the second half of the twentieth century under the influence of Wittgenstein’s ‘dissolution’ of metaphysical enquiry as formulated by logical positivists. This dissolution enjoined us all to remain silent about that whereof we cannot speak. We have preferred, instead, more practical and immediate ontologies, direct debate about the existence of contested entities, flurries of construction...

In this essay I shall investigate an aspect of the phenomenology of the Gypsies in European cultural history through an analysis of the European side of the encounter, in a novel by the nineteenth-century English writer Wilkie Collins,The Moonstone: A Romance(1868).¹The Moonstone, as we shall see, is intimately concerned with the problem of Orientalism in British colonial India. I shall argue that Collins’s novel also has something valuable to say in this context about the discourse on Gypsies.

First, some prefatory remarks on the novel’s genre, cultural context and content. Collins, a longtime friend and colleague of...

The representation of so-called ‘Gypsies’ (the term used to refer to Roma, the German Sinti and different travelling groups) in modern European literatures and cultures reads as a somewhat monolithic story: even more than in the case of other ‘minority’ groups, a hegemonic discourse seems to persist almost unchallenged by alternative voices or historical changes throughout the centuries. The exclusion of Roma and Sinti from the dominant culture’s institutions of education has prevented the emergence of an extensive body of self-representations, and the enormous quantity of ‘Gypsy’ texts by non-‘Gypsy’ authors attests not least to the degree to which racial...

Until recently very little was known about the Yenish people who have lived in Switzerland for over 300 years.¹ As a result of media revelations in the early 1970s which exposed a brutal, state-run assimilation programme directed against the Yenish for over half a century, Swiss society was confronted with one of the darkest chapters of its recent history. Since then the Yenish writer Mariella Mehr has ensured that the plight of this minority ethnic group does not vanish from Swiss public consciousness. Along with other Yenish voices,² Mehr’s texts have enabled the silenced Yenish people to participate in the...

No ordinary caption. The words are paradoxical, the combination of the first-person pronoun (‘we’), the present tense (‘are’) and the adverbial phrase (‘in the gas chambers’) shocking. The letters themselves, upper case, spiky, thrown graphically across the entire width of the foreground, look striking, confrontational. In the middle ground we see two trees, their branches bare of leaves, a wagon, a lamp-post. Far away in the distance the tiny spire of a church and the roofs of buildings are silhouetted against the horizon. No ordinary painting.

‘We Sinti are in the gas chambers of Auschwitz’,² painted by Austrian Romany Auschwitz-survivor...

This chapter offers a sketch of a wider project, which attempts to reconstruct the Romani Holocaust as an experience shared by Romani and non-Romani Germans. The project is a regional case study, and the principal documents on which it rests are some 300 photographs, now in the holdings of the Liverpool University Library. The photographs were taken at locations in Central Germany during the 1930s by Hanns Weltzel, an amateur naturalist and freelance writer. Their subjects are Romanies, most of them members of a handful of Sinti families. Along with a small collection of manuscript papers, the photographs record a...

Since the fall of Communism, the Romanies of eastern Europe have become both the subjects and the objects of a process ofethnogenesis: a conscious attempt to achieve the accepted status of a non-territorial, ethnic-national group. One of the most important aspects of this process is the development of an identity that could function in the contemporary world and unite different groups of Romanies. Such an identity must also be powerful enough to counteract the influence of traditions, both internal and external, denying the Roma a distinct national identity and hindering attempts directed towards the formation of such an identity....

Picture the scene. It is a ‘chilly English summer day’ in July 1886 and by a patch of waste ground near Liverpool Lime St. station there are some 100-plus ‘Greek Gypsies’ who have been abandoned by the London train. Their desired progress to New York via a steamer has been delayed; they are eventually moved to a less visible part of Liverpool, an area known as Walton where the Zoological Gardens are. The usual questions are being asked. How long are they to be here? What is to be done with them? It seems they are fixed to remain in...