From Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society to Romani Studies: Purpose and essence of a modern academic platform

“Our journal, we trust, will thrive without self-commendation”, wrote the Editors of the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, David MacRitchie and Francis Hindes Groome, in the first issue of the journal published in July 1888. They went on to declare the aims of the journal to be “to gather new materials, to rearrange the old, and to formulate results, as little by little to approach the goal – the final solution of the Gypsy problem”.

Those who today are bent on demonising the journal, what it stands for, and the society that owns it, will no doubt feast on that choice of wording, while others might cringe. But MacRitchie and Groome’s use of the phrase ‘Gypsy problem’ was not meant to describe tense relations between the Roma and majority society, nor did the expression ‘final solution’ have anything to do with regulating such relations, least of all through persecution or annihilation. Quite the opposite: In the context of the time, decades before the collocation ‘final solution of the Gypsy problem’ came to symbolise the atrocities of genocide, the pair put forward an agenda of strict enquiry, one that would contribute to knowledge and understanding, as they continue to explain in the same paragraph:

There is Grellmann’s old theory, by which the Gypsies first reached Europe in 1417, Pariahs expelled from India by Tamerlane less than ten years before. There is the Behram Gur theory, by which, about 430 A. D., the Jat ancestors of our Gypsies were summoned from India to Persia, and from Persia gradually wandered westward. And there is the Prehistoric theory, by which there have been Gypsies in Europe for more than two thousand years, by which Europe, or a great portion of Europe, owes to the Gypsies its knowledge of metallurgy. These are but three out of many theories, besides which there are a number of minor questions, as, when did the Gypsies first set foot in England, or in North and South America? Then there are the language, the manners, the folklore of the Gypsies. Much as has been written on these subjects, as much remains to be written, if we are ever to decide whether Romany is an early or a late descendant of Sanskrit; whether the Gypsies derived their metallurgical terms from Greek, or the Greeks theirs from Romany; whether the Gypsies have always been dwellers in tents; and whether they got their arts, music, and folk-tales from the Gaujios, or whether the Gaujios have borrowed from the ‘Egyptians’.”

Some contemporary colleagues like to depict this programme as an ‘obsession with origins’ or a ‘collector’s thrill’. That is, to my mind, negativity by choice, for MacRitchie and Groome’s mission statement can just as well be described as a quest for discovery and a commitment to documentation and as such as a way of producing “accounts that are rigorous, the validity of which can be assessed by others whose world view differs from our own”, as Michael Stewart eloquently defines the modern scientific agenda in his contribution to the current issue.

That first issue of the journal, to which the above quote from MacRitchie and Groome served as an editorial Preface, contained, among other contributions, a survey article on ‘Turkish Gypsies’ by Alexandre Paspati, featuring casual observations, which might be considered to be a forerunner of modern descriptive ethnographies such as Marushiakova and Popov’s (2016) overview of ‘Gypsies in Central Asia and the Caucasus’; it included a paper on the ‘Annals of the Gypsies in England’ by Henry Crofton, presenting pioneering archive research that would set the ground for contemporary works such as those by Fricke (1996) on Gypsies under German Absolutism, by Pym (2007) on the Gypsies in Early Modern Spain or for Taylor’s (2014) History of Roma, Gypsies and Travellers; and it had a contribution on the ‘Statistical Account of Gypsies in the German Empire’ by Rudolf von Sowa, which might be compared with a modern descendant in the form of Szelény and Ladányi’s (2006) census-based...