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  • Juden und Zigeuner im europäischen Geschichtstheater: “Jewish Spaces”/ “Gypsy Spaces” – Kazimierz und Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in der neuen Folklore Europas by Monica Rüthers
  • Bernhard Streck (bio)
    Translated by Andreas Hemming
Juden und Zigeuner im europäischen Geschichtstheater: “Jewish Spaces”/ “Gypsy Spaces” – Kazimierz und Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in der neuen Folklore Europas [Jews and Gypsies in European historical theatre: “Jewish Spaces”/“Gypsy Spaces” – Kazimierz and Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the new European folklore]. Monica Rüthers. Bielefeld: transcript. 2012. 252pages. ISBN 978-3-8376-2062-7.

Jews and Gypsies – what a controversial twinning. The two main victims of a modernisation process that failed terribly, especially in Central Europe, 67 years after the fact, observed at the two focal points of their respective cultures: Kazimierz in Cracow and Saintes-Maries in the French Camargue. But Monica Rüthers, Professor of East European History at the University of Hamburg, found, above all, performers and imitators. Where are the “real” Jews and Gypsies?

In 1994 the Swiss psychoanalyst Franz Maciejewski argued that while the Gypsies were desperately trying to catch up with the process of modernisation, the Jews were at its vanguard (Maciejewski 1994: 30). Rüthers describes the difference in similar terms: “In contrast to the Roma/Gypsies, the Jews have sought out and found access to majority societies since the Enlightenment. Because they were well educated and adaptable in comparison to other parts of the population, they often had a decisive role to play in modernisation processes. The Roma/Gypsies, however, never overcame the threshold of literacy and remained at the margins” (p. 53, this and all further citations have been translated by Andreas Hemming).

It is quite possibly due to this extreme difference between the two groups of victims that the Jews continue to be called Jews while the Gypsies ever more frequently are denied their practiced “state of imprecision”. Rüthers argues with good reason for its maintenance, not for ethnopolitical reasons but for the purpose of staging places of longing on the eastern and the western margins of Central Europe; destinations for the majority population in search of the authentic, of endangered or bygone ways of life. Annual festive occasions are here ideal opportunities, as are sites such as Cracow and Saintes-Maries. Not only goyim (non-Jews) and gadjé or payos (non-Gypsies) can be found there. Scattered, displaced and persecuted Jews and Gypsies and their descendants search out these sites for the purpose of inner restoration.

Here the author notes a fundamental imbalance. While the Holocaust dominates the European – indeed global – culture of remembrance and its institutions, Roma studies are left to eke out an existence on the margins. Is this [End Page 262] because the Gypsies – much like the Sephardic Jews – were less affected by the Holocaust, asks the author, before moving on to discuss the commonalities in the romantic, almost Orientalist images and self-images of these two unequal groups. In Cracow klezmer and Gitan flamenco, both groups work at an image that makes them attractive to the majority.

Visitors, performers and that being performed on both sites are tied by their mobility: “the abbreviated form of dropping out is travelling” (p. 30). The goals of these travels are “dressed up,” ready-made sites of history, perfected cultures of memory – full-service and highly profitable. But “anyone who generally denigrates historical theatre fails to recognise that here new traditions emerge in interactive processes” (p. 33) so the author in reference to Aleida Assmann, who, in brushing over the opposition of mise en scène and authenticity appears almost to want to provide a key to the historical theatre of the Jews and Gypsies.

Memory is celebrated at both sites, and the long and, again, unequal history of persecution of both global cultures made forgotten: music and dance around the campfire. Heritage production being practiced here, joint Polish–Jewish and German–Jewish cultural tradition is being created with a clear preference of Ashkenazim over Sephardim. The Gypsies are not granted this success. Scholarship, according to Rüthers, has not managed to move beyond arrows on maps showing migration routes. Antitziganism studies, however, create a homogeneous group...

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