Gypsies in early-modern Europe

C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/350272/WORKINGFOLDER/ELI/9780521888554C13.3D 13 276 [276–291] 23.5.2009 8:15PM Vagrants or vermin? Attitudes towards Gypsies in early modern Europe Miriam Eliav-Feldon The forgotten group In the heroic age of the “Discovery of Man and the World”, to use Jacob Burckhardt’s capitalized slogan, Europeans were almost incessantly debating the question of attitudes towards hitherto unfamiliar peoples encountered in other continents. The chapters in the last section of this volume presented some of the reactions and consequences of facing, conquering or enslaving the inhabitants of Asia, Africa and America. These encounters were such huge dramas, involving so many millions of human beings and producing such large amounts of records, that they could not but absorb the full attention of scholars searching for the foundations of modern categorizations and classifications of human “races”. In addition, transformations and upheavals in Europe itself were causing the reformulation of attitudes and policies towards those ethnic or religious minorities that had resided in Europe for many centuries. It is therefore not surprising that these revolutionary developments overshadowed the appearance of a small, unfamiliar people in Western Europe itself, the only new ethnic group to enter these countries after long centuries of stability in the composition of their populations. The Gypsies,1 moving gradually westward, arriving in Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands and the Iberian states sometime during the early fifteenth century and in England only in the sixteenth century, were at first no more than small bands of strangers (their relative unimportance symbolized by the fact that the name of their group was often written without an initial capital, “gypsies”, as it is sometimes still 1 Although “Gypsies” is considered today a pejorative name for the Roma and Sinti, I shall continue to use the different variations on “Gypsies” (Egyptians, Gitanos) which were the common names for them in the early-modern period. They themselves claimed at the time to have come out of Egypt, and most Europeans believed that they had originated in Egypt itself or in some place called “Little Egypt” or “Egypt Minor” (which was probably added to the imaginary geography of the Renaissance as a result of a traveler exclaiming when he saw a settlement of Gypsies outside the town of Modon that it was a veritable Little Egypt). 276 C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/350272/WORKINGFOLDER/ELI/9780521888554C13.3D 277 [276–291] 23.5.2009 8:15PM Vagrants or vermin? Attitudes towards Gypsies 277 written today). During the early-modern period, however, they were probably encountered by more Europeans than were Africans, Amerindians or Chinese. And yet, the Gypsies are seldom discussed in studies of early-modern attitudes to minorities or aliens; they are hardly ever mentioned in studies of racism which refer to pre-Nazi periods; in the special issues of two prestigious journals, which were dedicated to pre-modern race and racism,2 not one author discussed attitudes to the Roma; there is not a word about them in the vast literature on the earlymodern encounters of civilizations; and even in the pages of the numerous studies of policies in Spain towards Jews, Muslims and New Christians, there are but rare and brief references to the newly arrived Gitanos as another persecuted ethnic minority on Iberian soil. Life on the margins, in the full sense of the word, led also to the marginalization, if not to the exclusion, of the Gypsies in modern historical scholarship concerned with attitudes to “the Other”. More than the Jews The Gypsies “are a people more scattered than Jews, and more hated”, wrote the English playwright, Thomas Dekker, in his most successful work, Lantern and Candle-Light (1608). He named them “Moon-men” because they appeared, he said, to be mad and changeable.3 From a twenty-first-century viewpoint it is easy to see, despite some important differences, the similarities and parallels between the history of the Jews and that of the Gypsies. Until the first groups of Gypsies appeared in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there were no “alien” populations except the Jews in most parts of Europe. Thus in some places the Gypsies were called at first “pseudo-Jews”, as there was no other group they could be compared to and no other compartment in which they could be placed within the contemporary mental cabinet of curiosities. Andrew Boorde, author of one of the earliest travel guides, The First Book of the Introduction of Knowledge (1547), devotes chapter 38 to “Egypt”, describing in fact the appearance and customs of the Gypsies in Europe, and offers a few phrases in their language with their translation into English (probably the first ever published text of Romani speech). In the very next chapter Boorde writes of Jews and the land of Judah with a sample of 2 3 The William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1) (January 1997), and the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 31 (1) (Winter 2001). Thomas Dekker, “Lantern and Candle-Light”, in A. V. Judges (ed.), The Elizabethan Underworld (London: George Routledge & Sons Ltd., 1930), pp. 312–365, ch. 8: Of Moon-Men, pp. 344–347. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/350272/WORKINGFOLDER/ELI/9780521888554C13.3D 278 278 [276–291] 23.5.2009 8:15PM Miriam Eliav-Feldon Hebrew sentences.4 His descriptions indicate that he did not actually visit the Middle East but rather met both Jews and Gypsies on his travels in Europe, and regarded them equally as representatives of ancient nations which had somehow wandered into contemporary Europe. A wandering people with a widespread diaspora were indeed attributes of both groups, although obviously on a different scale and with a different history. At the time discussed here, the two groups were moving in fact in opposite directions: as the Gypsies were slowly making their way westward, the Jews, as a result of policies of expulsion and forced conversion, were practically disappearing from most parts of Western and Central Europe and migrating mostly eastward – towards Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. But in both cases, being a “scattered” nation helped to feed similar stereotypes and prejudices against its members. Rootlessness, faithlessness, suspicious liaisons and contacts abroad, sympathies for the Turks, willingness to serve as enemy spies or even as saboteurs – all these were accusations hurled equally at both Gypsy and Jew. Both communities were perceived as voluntarily keeping themselves apart, avoiding exogamic marriages, dressing differently, maintaining strange customs and using a foreign language. This refusal to assimilate emphasized and prolonged their otherness in the eyes of authorities and the local population. It also increased the resentment of neighbors who believed that these “aliens” regarded themselves as superior to the gentile or the gadje. Fear, suspicion, hatred, resentment and stigmatization, mixed with some envy and admiration, would accompany the history of Jews and Gypsies in Europe (or in the West – for men and women of both peoples migrated to the New World as well) down to the present, and would cause the holocaust of both nations by the monstrous racist machinery erected by the Nazis. Nevertheless, and without suggesting a hierarchy of suffering, I would like to propose that shortly after their first appearance in Europe, the persecution of the Gypsies and the discourse regarding them contained elements which were more virulent than any other (budding) racist attitude towards minorities in Europe or towards peoples on other continents. Neither heretics nor witches Yet, before we proceed to the question of how the Gypsies were perceived, it is important to stress in what categories of hounded persons they were not included. 4 Andrew Boorde and Frederick J. Furnivall (eds.), The First Book of the Introduction to Knowledge (London: N. T. Trübner & Co., 1870), pp. 217–221. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/350272/WORKINGFOLDER/ELI/9780521888554C13.3D 279 [276–291] 23.5.2009 8:15PM Vagrants or vermin? Attitudes towards Gypsies 279 Contrary to what one would expect when looking at Reformation Europe, neither the Catholic inquisitions nor the Protestant consistories were concerned with the Gypsies. In an era obsessed with minute differences in faith, with attempts to impose religious uniformity and to extirpate anything which could be regarded as heresy by the dominant church, the indifference of the authorities to the religious affiliation and behavior of the – nominally Christian – Gypsies is quite surprising. Admittedly in certain areas of Europe they were named “heathens” (heiden) – despite the facts that they presented themselves as Christians and that, when there was an advantage in being known as indigenous, they were careful to baptize their children in local churches with non-Gypsies serving as godparents. Here and there we hear of church dignitaries forbidding church services to the Gypsies, but little else. And it seems that neither authorities at the time nor scholars nowadays were too concerned with what these nomads believed or how they practiced their version of Christianity. As a result of large numbers of forced conversions and feigned conversions – first of Jews and Muslims in Spain and then of all manner of Christians across Reformation Europe, particularly after it had accepted the cuius regio, eius religio principle – both church and secular authorities became obsessed with dissimulation, investing enormous efforts in ferreting out religious impostors. But there is no indication that this collective paranoia influenced policies towards the Gypsies. Although their adherence to the official faith was worn very lightly, they were neither listed in public warnings against secret heretics (such as the Edicts of Faith in Spain), nor branded as Nicodemites or hidden enemies of the true church. Marginality could be one possible explanation for the indifference shown towards the Gypsies’ beliefs: the various inquisitions had their hands full with intellectuals, merchants and other leading citizens effectively spreading pernicious ideas; they had no time to worry about the creed and practices of the riffraff. But perhaps more important was precisely the overriding concern with pretence and deception: since these travelers were so clearly and visibly different, no one could suspect they were disguised heretics. Both the powers-that-be and the population soon stopped believing the Gypsies’ “cover story” (or the “Great Trick” as Angus Fraser calls it5) – that they were Christian pilgrims (from Egypt or from somewhere in the East) who for some obscure sin had to embark on a seven-year journey of penance. The exposure or the fading out of the lie, however, although it 5 Angus Fraser, The Gypsies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), ch. 4: The Great Trick, pp. 60–83. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/350272/WORKINGFOLDER/ELI/9780521888554C13.3D 280 280 [276–291] 23.5.2009 8:15PM Miriam Eliav-Feldon reduced the amount of alms and protection they received, did not seem to increase the concern about their true identity – no one seemed to be asking who or what these so-called Egyptians “really” were from the religious point of view. If at all, Gypsies entered the discourse on imposture and dissimulation by another door altogether. Oddly, we find numerous expressions of concern that some vagabonds were pretending to be Gypsies: legislation in England, for example, often referred to “Egyptians” and “counterfeit Egyptians”.6 Was this suspicion part of the obsession with fraud and deception on the part of the authorities? Or were there indeed people who pretended to be Gypsies? Were Irish tinkers and perhaps other “undesirables” joining the Gypsy bands at this early date? These are questions which are difficult to answer on the basis of existing documentation, but they do emphasize the vagueness of the notions regarding the identity of these newcomers to the scene. Even more surprising perhaps than the fact that they were not persecuted as heretics is the absence of accusations of witchcraft against the Gypsies. After all, the appearance of the Gypsies in the West coincided with the “witch-craze”, i.e. with the waves of persecutions in most European countries which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people who were tried and executed for signing pacts with the Devil and for maleficium. One would have thought that these exotic men and women – known for trickery, palm reading, fortune-telling and other magic – would loom large among those indicted for witchcraft. Some modern-day scholars turn assumption into fact by simply stating that the Gypsies were often prosecuted in witch trials.7 But in the vast amount of research on the subject published in recent decades, which has brought to light most of the extant records on witch persecutions, there is no real evidence that this was the case. In fact, modern-day research has revealed that persons accused of witchcraft were practically always members of the local community, not passing strangers. Moreover, maleficium was seldom attributed to known magicians, healers or wise women. Satanic witchcraft was considered so dangerous precisely because it was practiced in secret by people who outwardly had nothing to do with magic. Some histories of the Gypsies in the British Isles refer to a book by Samuel Rid, The Art of Juggling (1612), as evidence of the association of Gypsies with witchcraft. Rid plagiarized the well-known book by Reginald 6 7 Compare Thomas W. Thompson, “Consorting with and Counterfeiting Egyptians”, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 3 (2) (1923), 81–93. See, for example, Henry Kamen, Early Modern European Society (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 171. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/350272/WORKINGFOLDER/ELI/9780521888554C13.3D 281 [276–291] 23.5.2009 8:15PM Vagrants or vermin? Attitudes towards Gypsies 281 Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), but turned it into a pseudo-history of the Gypsies and attributed all of Scot’s descriptions of the witches’ activities to feats of the “Egyptians”. Scot’s book, however, was a skeptic’s attack on witch beliefs and persecutions. He set out to prove that every supernatural wonder attributed to them was mere trickery and fraud, not satanic magic. Thus Rid, by borrowing from Scot, was in fact disassociating the Gypsies from witchcraft and not vice versa.8 Vagrants The main context in which Gypsies were discussed in Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was that of vagrancy – without doubt the most acute social problem of those days. No one disputes, I believe, that there was a gradual process of criminalization of poverty in both Protestant and Catholic countries: i.e., towns and states throughout Europe adopted policies that were intended to restrict charity and poor relief only to the “deserving” poor, and, more specifically, to the local deserving poor, while applying the severest measures of exclusion and punishment to all other beggars. Gypsies, obviously, were the ultimate alien vagrants, and thus were deemed undesirable everywhere (cajoux, as they were defined in Paris in the early fifteenth century, when they were confined to La Chapelle9). Laws and statutes referring to the vagrant Gypsies were draconian: calling for flogging, branding, expulsion and execution of the “Egyptians”, sometimes labeled “Land-Pirates”10 – but measures just as harsh were proclaimed against all rogues and vagabonds. Thus, some say, these nomadic groups of people simply chose a bad time to appear in Western Europe. Not only were Protestantism and budding capitalism limiting charity everywhere, even towards those who succeeded in convincing the locals that they were pilgrims doing penance; not only did they roam among 8 9 10 Samuel Rid, “The Art of Juggling”, in Arthur F. Kinney (ed.), Rogues, Vagabonds and Sturdy Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature Exposing the Lives, Times, and Cozening Tricks of the Elizabethan Underworld, reprinted edition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), pp. 265–291. Colette Beaune (ed.), Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris (1405–1449) (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1990). Comparing the Gypsies to pirates, in addition to including them with all other vagrants, helped to emphasize their association with what were considered the worst economic and social problems of the time. The term “Land-Pirates” was first used as a description of Gypsies by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II) c. 1461 (see Leonardo Piasere, “De Origine Cinganorum”, Études et Documents Balkaniques et Mediterranéens 14 [1989],105–126, here 107), and this epithet would later appear in several documents in different European countries, including Dekker’s chapter on the Moon-Men. Dekker, “Lantern and Candle-Light”, p. 346. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/350272/WORKINGFOLDER/ELI/9780521888554C13.3D 282 282 [276–291] 23.5.2009 8:15PM Miriam Eliav-Feldon a settled population that viewed foreigners, particularly mendicants, with suspicion, but they happened to enter Western Europe precisely when the fight against masterless men – sometimes named “sons of Cain” (later to be confused with Canaan)11 – was at its peak. If Gypsies were to be found in all prisons and in disproportionate numbers on the galleys12 – as most historians of the period claim – it was because they indeed stole and cheated, were regarded as rabble, and because all European countries were conducting at the time a systematic campaign to rid their territories of the parasitic poor. A. L. Beier summarizes: “The Gypsies … were covered by a distinct body of legislation [in England], but were essentially viewed as vagabonds”.13 This is the position taken by practically all historians of the poor and the marginal in early-modern Europe, beginning with R. H. Tawney and continuing more recently with Bronislaw Geremek, Henry Kamen, Robert Jütte, Paul Slack, Piero Camporesi, Jan Lucassen and many others.14 And if that was the case, if they were universally viewed only as a category of vagabonds, simply part of the rabble, then anti-Gypsy attitudes had nothing to do with racism. More evidence could be cited to argue the “not racism” case further. For example, the notorious “Act against certain persons calling themselves Egyptians” (England, 1554) declared that, because of their “abominable living” or “devilish and naughty practices and devices”, they would not be allowed to enter the kingdom; those already in England were to be 11 12 13 14 The biblical verse, in which Cain says: “I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass that every one that findeth me shall slay me” (Genesis 4:14) was often quoted in connection with the vagrants in general and with the Gypsies in particular. In some cases the two figures to be eternally punished, Cain and Canaan (Genesis 9:25) were confused and vagabonds or Gypsies became the accursed “sons of Canaan” – which would be presented as biblical justification for enslavement or banishment. On the identification of Africans with the sons of Canaan see David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). For Gypsies sent to prisons and the galleys see, for example, I. A. A. Thompson, “A Map of Crime in Sixteenth-Century Spain”, The Economic History Review 21 (1968), 244–267. A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985). Piero Camporesi (ed.), Il libro dei vagabondi (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1973); Bronislaw Geremek, Poverty: A History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), and The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Kamen, Early Modern European Society; Jan and Leo Lucassen (eds.), Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (Bern: P. Lang, 1997); Leo Lucassen, Wim Willems and Annemarie Cottaar, Gypsies and Other Itinerant Groups: A Socio-Historical Approach (London: Macmillan Press, 1998); Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988); Richard. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Longman, 1912). C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/350272/WORKINGFOLDER/ELI/9780521888554C13.3D 283 [276–291] 23.5.2009 8:15PM Vagrants or vermin? Attitudes towards Gypsies 283 expelled; and if they remained, they would be executed. The law, however, did not extend to those “Egyptians” who “shall leave that naughty, idle and ungodly Life and Company, and be placed in the Service of some honest inhabitant”, implying that it was their way of life, not their nature, which was abhorrent.15 Furthermore, the law did not extend to Gypsy children under thirteen, who apparently could be saved by re-training which would correct their “naughty, idle and ungodly” tendencies (a vision similar to the policy adopted in Australia towards the Aborigines as late as the 1960s). And in addition, a parliamentary act in 1562 emphasized that the harsh laws of the previous reign applied to the same extent to “real” Egyptians as to those who disguised themselves as Egyptians and led the same kind of life: “commonly called or calling themselves Egyptians, or counterfeiting, transforming or disguising themselves by their apparel, speech or other behaviour, like unto such Vagabonds, commonly called or calling themselves Egyptians”16 – an emphasis which also made it very clear that the fight was against vagabonds and their behavior, not against an ethnic group whose members were inherently bad. In a similar manner the law in Spain of 1619, which ordered all the Gypsies to leave the peninsula on pain of death, also stated that they would be allowed to remain if they settled and abandoned the dress, name and language of the Gitanos.17 This was an option resembling the one offered over a century earlier to Jews and to Muslims – convert and abandon all your customs, or leave – but a choice which was not offered to the Moriscos who were expelled en masse from all of Spain between 1609 and 1614, regardless of how assimilated they were willing to become. In certain cases, it seems, belief in the possibility of assimilation overcame racist views that attributed irredeemable qualities to a stigmatized group. In sum, Gypsies in early-modern Europe were often viewed, as they are still viewed today by most historians, not as a religious minority, not as witches, not as an ethnic group (they were not defined as a “race” until the 1938 Nazi decree “Combating the Gypsy Plague”), but rather as a social or a socio-economic problem. 15 16 17 For the English laws concerning Gypsies see Thompson, “Consorting with and Counterfeiting Egyptians”, 81–93. Ibid., and also in Gamini Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld (London: J. M. Dent, 1977), pp. 151–158. Spanish law of 1619 quoted in Fraser, The Gypsies, p. 161. The Spanish government oscillated for generations between policies of banishment and forced assimilation towards its minorities. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/350272/WORKINGFOLDER/ELI/9780521888554C13.3D 284 284 [276–291] 23.5.2009 8:15PM Miriam Eliav-Feldon Danger signals Nevertheless, when reading early modern texts pertaining to Gypsies it is impossible to ignore certain expressions which indicate that a number of authors and legislators regarded them as different from simple vagrants and as a unique category among the masses of masterless men. I consider such expressions to be black flags – signals that should alert us to the existence of (at least) roots of racism in the discourse about the Gypsies. Let me begin with an example which is sometimes cited in support of the other side of the argument and as evidence of sympathy and admiration for this exotic nation. One of Cervantes’ exemplary tales, “The Little Gipsy Girl” (“La Gitanilla”, 1613), is often presented as the earliest version of the topos of the beautiful and enticing Gypsy girl (a figure best known to us from Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen [1875], which was based on Prosper Mérimée’s novella by that name [1845]). In a recent book on the Novelas ejemplares, Joseph Ricapito, a leading scholar on Golden Age Spanish literature, sets out to re-affirm that Cervantes was a “Cristiano Nuevo”, and therefore felt empathy for other marginalized groups such as the Moriscos and the Gypsies.18 Yet, regardless of the author’s origins, a little black flag can be detected on the very first page of “La Gitanilla”. The story begins: Gipsies seem to have been born into the world for the sole purpose of being thieves: they are born of thieving parents, they are brought up with thieves, they study in order to be thieves, and they end up as past masters in the art of thieving. Thieving and the taste for thieving are inseparable from their existence [emphasis added].19 A devil’s advocate could still argue that these negative words should be interpreted as a variation on the anti-poor propaganda and within the context of anti-vagrant literature. Moreover, one could say, the Gitanos were described by Cervantes in this passage as undesirables not for what they were but because of what they did: they stole. In other places and at other times they were accused of starting fires (for example in Prague in 1541), of spying for the Ottomans, and – as accusations became all the more vicious – of practicing cannibalism, incest, and kidnapping children (the latter charge still believed today in many parts of the world). The useful distinction (made by David Wiesen and quoted in David Goldenberg’s article),20 between doing and being, is probably one of the 18 19 20 Joseph V. Ricapito, Cervantes’s Novelas Ejemplares: Between History and Creativity (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996). Miguel de Cervantes, “The Little Gipsy Girl”, in Exemplary Stories, trans. C. A. Jones (London: Penguin Classics, 1972), p. 19. David Wiesen, “Juvenal and the Blacks”, Classica et Mediaevalia 31 (1970), 132–150, quoted in David Goldenberg’s article, above p. 88. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/350272/WORKINGFOLDER/ELI/9780521888554C13.3D 285 [276–291] 23.5.2009 8:15PM Vagrants or vermin? Attitudes towards Gypsies 285 better yardsticks by which to differentiate racism from other forms of hatred or xenophobia. And stealing was indeed something the Gypsies could be accused of doing. If, however, it was a quality “inseparable from their existence”, did not thieving become something they were, inherent to their nature and not simply a habit or a way of life which they could learn to overcome? Cervantes then went on to describe the beautiful Preciosa, in what was to become the traditional manner of romanticizing the heart-breaking Gypsy dancer. Yet he immediately insisted that this paragon was: the most beautiful and discreet girl to be found, not only among the gypsies, but among all the most famous the world has ever known for their beauty and discretion. The heat of the sun, the winds and every kind of inclement weather, to which gipsies are more exposed than other folk, had failed to spoil the beauty of her face or to harden her hands. Not only that, but despite the rough upbringing she had received, she gave every sign of having been born of better stock than gipsies [emphasis added].21 The white, beautiful, honest, shy, talented and precious young girl – Cervantes first implies and then reveals – was not really a Gypsy at all; she could not be of Gypsy stock.22 More than skin deep Gypsies, according to a consensus among European authors, were black and ugly. One of the earliest descriptions of Gypsies in Western Europe, the Chronicle of Bologna in 1422, stated that “they were the ugliest brood ever seen in these parts”.23 Shortly afterwards, in 1435, Hermann Cornerus concurred: “A certain strange, wandering horde of people, not seen hitherto, came out of eastern lands … they were excessively given to thievery … very ugly in appearance and black as Tartars”.24 Thomas Dekker offered an original explanation for the skin colour of these “tawny devils”: they are “not born so, neither has the sun burnt them so, but they are painted so”.25 One could continue with innumerable quotations about their dark skin, filthy complexion and ugly features. But in themselves, as has been argued in some of the articles in this volume and elsewhere, these were not 21 22 23 25 Cervantes, “The Little Gipsy Girl”, p. 19. David Mayall, Gypsy Identities: From Egypcyans and Moon-Men to the Ethnic Romany (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 18: “such examples [of claiming that those Gypsies who did not fit pre-conceived ideas were stolen] are so frequent that they now appear unremarkable”. Fraser, The Gypsies, p. 72. 24 Ibid., p. 67. Dekker, “Lantern and Candle-Light”, p. 344. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/350272/WORKINGFOLDER/ELI/9780521888554C13.3D 286 286 [276–291] 23.5.2009 8:15PM Miriam Eliav-Feldon necessarily racist pronouncements. Peasants, as Paul Freedman shows,26 could also be described as black, ugly and dumb. Nevertheless to say, as Cervantes did, that white and beautiful must inevitably mean “not Gypsy” is definitely a warning signal. Cervantes adopted the same attitude in his play “The Baths of Algiers” (“Los baños de Argel”), in which the beautiful Moorish girl who helped the protagonist escape from the hands of cruel Muslim pirates, also turned out to be a nice Christian girl who had been kidnapped as a child. According to Cervantes, beauty and virtue, ingrained characteristics, could only indicate that the person did not belong to the tainted groups of Gypsies or Moors. Such assumptions, implicit and perhaps even subconscious, suggest that by the end of the sixteenth century the premise that the people known as Gypsies were, in fact, an inferior “stock”, with certain biological qualities that neither water nor education could erase, was not unknown even among the relatively tolerant literate classes. Hardened racists A further “black flag” which should alert us to the existence of racist attitudes in the sixteenth century is the position taken by persons who went on record to express their fierce hatred towards more than one minority. A letter written in 1658 by a certain Spanish judge (alcalde), Juan de Quiñones, is probably one of the earliest full-fledged anti-Semitic (rather than anti-Jewish) texts. In it Quiñones, worried like so many of his contemporaries about the plague of dissimulation and deception, expressed his gratitude to God for providing indelible bodily signs that could not be faked or removed.27 The Marranos, i.e., New Christians of Jewish extraction and their descendants for all generations, had – according to Quiñones and to the various authorities that he quoted or interpreted to suit his purpose – very distinct physiological characteristics: big noses, a unique smell, a tail, and in addition, the males of the species bled once a month from their posterior. The notion that Jewish men “menstruate” was apparently first suggested in the early thirteenth century (by Jacques 26 27 Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), and also his article, “The Representation of Medieval Peasants as Bestial and as Human”, in Angela N. H. Creager and William Chester Jordan (eds.), The Animal/ Human Boundary: Historical Perspectives, (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), pp. 29–49. “Juan de Quiñones al Antonio de Sotomayor”, MS 868 (Colecção Moreira), fols. 73–89, Biblioteca Nacional Lisbon. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/350272/WORKINGFOLDER/ELI/9780521888554C13.3D 287 [276–291] 23.5.2009 8:15PM Vagrants or vermin? Attitudes towards Gypsies 287 de Vitry).28 Quiñones’ innovation, however, was the claim that baptism would cure them only if their conversion had been sincere, but if they “Judaized” the affliction would return. And, he said, it was precisely this monstrous (or, if you like, feminine) trait which caused the special Jewish smell – and not just the food cooked in olive oil, as some contemporaries suggested. Not much given to hesitation, Quiñones was nevertheless uncertain whether this monthly loss of blood was also the reason why Jews and crypto-Jews needed to imbibe the blood of Christian children, as was asserted by some of his predecessors. In any case, he urged the inquisitors to conduct a thorough physical examination of suspects: first for circumcision in both Marranos and Moriscos, and then for other telltale marks, inborn rather than self-inflicted, which would reveal the true identity of persons attempting to pass themselves off as pure Old Christians. Attributing specific physical characteristics, which could neither be erased nor overcome by any means, to all members of a certain group, was (by all definitions proposed in this volume) a clear and distinct racist conception. Furthermore, the very same Juan de Quiñones, exposed by scholars studying the history of the conversos as one of the earliest exponents of biological anti-Semitism,29 was also known as a “hanging judge” for Gypsies. Early in his career, in 1631, he wrote a fierce diatribe calling on the king not to show them any leniency and to enforce to the letter the law calling for their expulsion, applying it to their children as well since they could never be redeemed. He was one of the first authors in Europe to accuse the Gypsies of practicing incest and cannibalism among other horrific vices.30 Quiñones was not alone in targeting more than one group for branding as undesirable. “In order for Spain to stay clean, it remains to do the same with the Gypsies”, wrote Salazar de Mendoza after the expulsions of the Moriscos in 1609–1614.31 The obsession with purity, the idea that irrespective of their faith or culture, men and women born to certain groups defile and contaminate society, was part of the mentality that bred the “limpieza de sangre” laws pertaining to Marranos, led to the expulsion of 28 29 30 31 For the history of the notion of male menstruation as a Jewish characteristic see, for example, Irven M. Resnick, “Medieval Roots of the Myth of Jewish Male Menses”, The Harvard Theological Review 93 (3) (July 2000), 241–263. See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), pp. 124–133. Quiñones on the Gypsies is quoted in Fraser, The Gypsies, p. 161. Quoted in Anwar G. Chejne, Islam and the West: The Moriscos, A Cultural and Social History (Albany, NY: S.U.N.Y Press, 1983), pp. 13–14. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/350272/WORKINGFOLDER/ELI/9780521888554C13.3D 288 288 [276–291] 23.5.2009 8:15PM Miriam Eliav-Feldon approximately 300,000 Moriscos (despite their formal adherence to Christianity) by the government of Philip III, and was part and parcel of the policies concerning Gitanos. The sixteenth century in Spain witnessed a turn (though far from absolute or universal) from policies of enforced conversion and assimilation to acts of ethnic cleansing. However, one might say, a handful of racists do not Racism make (in the same manner as Lucien Febvre argued about atheists and Atheism in the sixteenth century). This is probably true: there were only occasional manifestations of what we would all agree to define as a racist frame of mind, not a systematic ideology or government policy based wholly on racist premises. Nevertheless, these manifestations should not be ignored, especially when combined with other pronouncements of the supposition that certain characteristics – of Jews, Moriscos or the Gypsies – were “inseparable from their existence”. Verminization Dehumanization, claiming that certain groups of people are not quite human but closer to animals (because they have a different skin color, because they wear no clothes, because they speak a “barbaric” language, because they have no property, because they eat with their hands, because they live in caves, etc.) has always been a tell-tale sign of a fully developed or, at the very least, a nascent racist doctrine. True, bestiality was sometimes applied to peasants, but more often than not putting people on a level below Man served as justification for conquest, enslavement and persecution of foreign peoples. Africans and Amerindians were frequently compared to apes, wild beasts or beasts of burden, or – in a manner typical of the Renaissance – to monstrous creatures culled from classical literature: troglodytes, for example, were a favorite simile for natives of other continents, for they were creatures who dwelled in caves rather than houses. Gypsies were dehumanized in early-modern literature no less than Jews, Moors, Africans or Amerindians. As with the other groups, they were most often described as “swine”, but they were sometimes also compared to wolves: in a plea to the Spanish king in 1619, for example, calling on him not to show leniency towards the Gypsy children, they were said to be “wolf-whelps, to the assured future detriment of the flock”.32 And, again like the other groups, they were sometimes defined as creatures between ape and man. In Italian literary works of the late fifteenth 32 “Sancho de Moncada to King Philip III”, quoted in Fraser, The Gypsies, pp. 160–161. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/350272/WORKINGFOLDER/ELI/9780521888554C13.3D 289 [276–291] 23.5.2009 8:15PM Vagrants or vermin? Attitudes towards Gypsies 289 century Gypsies were depicted as monstrous hybrid creatures,33 while in the most frequently quoted sixteenth-century description of Gypsies, included by the erudite Sebastian Münster in book 6 of his Cosmographia Universalis (1544), Gypsies were said to be frightening and hideous.34 But far more worrying than such comparisons to animals or even to mythological “monstrous races” were, I believe, the vermin similes. “Vermin”, writes historian Mary E. Fissel, “is not a timeless category. It has a history”.35 Not only did the kinds of animals defined as vermin change over time and habitat, but they were not always necessarily associated with dirt and disease. However, she adds, “vermin are animals who it is largely acceptable to kill … these small animals are the enemy, poaching human food rather than decently eating animal food.” Like Jews ever since the Black Death, Gypsies were sometimes accused of being carriers of the plague (as for instance in a Milan decree in 150636). In seventeenth-century Europe quarantine imposed on travelers by authorities in certain towns referred particularly to Gypsies as potential carriers of syphilis and the sweating sickness.37 Such an association with the cause of pestilence, whether as deliberate poisoners or as inadvertent transmitters, was bad enough, but it was not identical to the image of an army of harmful creatures, for prior to the nineteenth century epidemics were not linked to vermin. Thomas Dekker, quoted above comparing his “Moon Men” to Jews, wrote of “Egiptian grasshoppers that eat up the fruits of the earth, and destroy the poor corn fields”, and elsewhere he complained of the “swarming Egiptian lice”.38 Plague might not have been caused by vermin in early modern medical theories, but both epidemics and invasions of harmful creatures spread at the same frightening rate, and the expression “a plague of godless vagabonds infesting the land” seemed to appear only when Gypsies were involved. Although Gypsy companies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seldom numbered more than a few dozen 33 34 35 36 38 Antonio Campigotto and Leonardo Piasere, “From Margutte to Cingar: The Archeology of an Image”, in Matt T. Salo (ed.), 100 Years of Gypsy Studies: Papers from the 10th Annual Meeting of the Gypsy Lore Society (Cheverly, MD: The Society, 1990), p. 19. For similar descriptions of the Jews – as snakes, wolves and a mixed breed – see above in Ronnie Po-chia Hsia’s quotations from Nigrinus’ text. Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia Universalis (Basel: [s.n], 1544), lib. III: De Gentilibus Christiani. The Latin text of this chapter in D. M. M. Bartlett, “Münster’s ‘Cosmographia universalis’ ”, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 31 (3) (1952), 83–90. Mary E. Fissel, “Imagining Vermin in Early Modern England”, in Angela N. H. Creager and William Chester Jordan (eds.), The Animal/Human Boundary: Historical Perspectives (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), pp. 77–114. Fraser, The Gypsies, p. 106. 37 Mayall, Gypsy Identities, p. 60. Dekker, “Lantern and Candle-Light”, p. 346. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/350272/WORKINGFOLDER/ELI/9780521888554C13.3D 290 290 [276–291] 23.5.2009 8:15PM Miriam Eliav-Feldon people, they were “swarming”, and “infesting” and “plaguing” and “flooding” in all published warnings, whether in legislation, in literary texts, or in local chronicles. And like these pests, Gypsies, it was believed, were thieves by nature. They poached on human territory and stole man’s food (at the time when famine was always at the doorstep), and could no more be civilized than locusts or lice. Verminization, if I may coin a term, could serve no purpose if the author wished to justify discrimination, segregation, exploitation, enslavement or control and repression; it could justify however not only expulsion but extermination as well. Twentieth-century experience taught us this lesson only too well: it would suffice to evoke here the Nazi film “The Eternal Jew”, in which Jews were represented as hordes of rats, or the Hutu in Rwanda referring to the Tutsi as “cockroaches” just before the genocide of 1994, to indicate how dangerous verminization could be. “[T]o sweep those swarms out of this kingdom there are no other means but the sharpness of the most infamous and basest kinds of punishment”, wrote Thomas Dekker.39 Such verminization helps to explain why Gypsies were the sole target of organized manhunts in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands from the late sixteenth century well into the eighteenth century.40 Local authorities in these countries either organized official hunts or incited the population to do so by offering rewards on Gypsy men and women, dead or alive. This was happening simultaneously with the campaign for vermin hunts: across Europe parishes and town councils were encouraged to provide payments for the killing of vermin injurious to crops, and bounties were offered for animal heads.41 Beasts of burden, farm animals, performing bears and monkeys, exotic creatures to be placed in cages for people’s delight, cute pets – all these non-human creatures have always had their uses for Man, the Lord of Creation, instructed by God to “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28). But vermin cannot be domesticated and they are by definition dangerous, harmful beings, which Man had been exterminating as best as he could since the world began. Thus defining human beings as vermin is potentially the most lethal form of dehumanization and cannot be regarded as anything but racism. 39 40 41 Ibid., pp. 346–347. On such heidenjachten in Germany, for example, see Robert A. Scott Macfie, “Gypsy Persecutions”, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society 22 (3) (1943), 71–73; and Fraser, The Gypsies, p. 147. Fissel, “Imagining Vermin”, p. 79. C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP/350272/WORKINGFOLDER/ELI/9780521888554C13.3D 291 [276–291] 23.5.2009 8:15PM Vagrants or vermin? Attitudes towards Gypsies 291 The small companies of “Egyptians” that entered Central and Western Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries aroused a whole spectrum of feelings and attitudes among the local population and the authorities, notions and emotions which were mostly also applied to other groups both within and outside the European world. Nevertheless, for a number of reasons, the Gypsies were singled out, and they evoked on occasion reactions which clearly constituted one of the early origins of racism in the West.