21- On some day between the 5th and the 12th the newborn baby is named and the mother is purified.
22- In some communities the impurity of the mother last for a month during which time she is not allowed to cook food and no one touches her.
23- Nicknames are given to children as they grow up and they use them throughout their lives.
24- After a burial, the attendees are served a meal and can drink liquor.
25- At a convenient time after death a stone from a clean river is placed on the grave so the dead will have water.
26- It is believed that the spirit of the death survives and that many come back to hang around the house and village where they try to exert influence on the lives and fortunes of their successors often in a negative way. In the past they were called “mulos” (Gypsy ghosts); today they are called “vampires.”
27- The sun is the household deity.
28- The belief in witchcraft is in full force and vigor.
29- Donations are made to the goddess Kali (in the Balkans to the Christian black Madonna although most Gypsies there today are Muslim).
30- They have a proverb that says man is a king as long as he has a pot of grain in the house, meaning that while he has food for a day or two he will not work.
31- When building a house, a pole with grass or another object is buried in a corner of the foundation. Then a little food (or lamb’s blood) is scattered over the place. This protects the house from harm.
32- The people believe that man is only clean in the rains. The Gond have many more traditions but these are the ones that still survive today among the Balkan Roma that I have lived with.
Chapter 17 THE HOUSE SNAKE There is one common story/tradition among all Balkan Gypsies that I have not yet been able to trace back to Old India. It is the story of the house snake.
According to legend (and still believed by most Balkan Gypsies I have interviewed), every Gypsy home has a snake that lives in the foundations. It comes out at night to protect you and your family. Some Gypsies know it by name (Sabija) and color (black). Some Gypsies have even seen it. But the strong belief is that if you kill your house snake some member of your family will die and the whole family will have bad luck for life.32
Of course, there are castes in India such as the Kalbelia of Rajasthan that are associated with snakes. And most Indians especially the nomadic and semi-nomadic castes believe it is good luck to see a snake, especially a cobra. But it is bad luck if you kill it.
I have never read in my 15 books on the old castes of India the house snake story.
In the Balkans there are many different kinds of Gypsies that don’t intermarry and seldom associate. They have different traditions and different oral histories. Some sell their brides, some don’t. Some pay for mother’s milk, some have never heard of the tradition. Some put clean river stones on the graves of their dead, most don’t.
Some Balkan Gypsies dispute the story that their ancestors swore their oaths on the sun. Many say their ancestors mainly swore their oaths on bread, the Koran or their children’s heads. But all the different Gypsy groups in the Balkans know the house snake story and most still believe in it.
I have also heard the house snake story from several Serbs who believe it was at one time part of their folklore. So perhaps the house snake story is a Balkan legend that the Gypsies adopted. But for all Balkan Gypsies to believe in the house snake story seems to indicate they were not nomadic; that they all had a house.33
32- I did not find any Gypsy in Turkey that had ever heard of the house snake story, but all believed it was good luck to see a snake, the same response I got in Punjab and Rajasthan.
33- The only house snake story I found known in India was another Sansis scam. They secretly let loose a tame snake in a home and then go to the owner and declare that they have smelled a snake in the guy’s house. For a monetary reward, they then play a flute to call the snake and then capture it. This story would tend to suggest that people in Old India did not want snakes in their house. Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, vol. 6, p. 133,
1912/1913.
Chapter 18 THE GYPSY LANGUAGE Most Gypsy research to date has concentrated on the origins of the Gypsy language, called Romanes and/or Sinti in most of Europe, and Kalo in Spain. Although there are more than 30 different dialects just for Romanes, 34 some linguists have tried to unify the languages, making a universal one-tongue language although, in my opinion, the original Gypsies to the Middle East and Europe came from many different castes and areas in Old India, each with their own distinct dialect if not outright different language. There are some common words in most of the different Gypsy dialects but many don’t have the same grammar.
Many mistakes have been made in trying to find the so-called original language of the European Gypsies. The English civil servant O’Brien certainly led most linguists astray from Multan as one of the real origins of the Gypsies when he wrote that Romanes was not related to the Jat language of Multan in the 1840s. But all around Multan, the ancient capital of Punjab, were many castes and tribes that didn’t speak Jat (what O’Brien wrongly called “Multani”) but several dialects of Punjabi, considered one of the closest related languages of present day Romanes/Sinti.
But linguists and genealogists seldom see eye to eye. If there is one thing that can be readily borrowed by a migrating people it is language. Parts of oral histories are often saved, as are some traditions in cooking. Religious customs get diluted but not entirely forgotten. Words and grammar seem to suffer the most, especially when modern day linguists try to invent new meanings to old traditional words.
If there is one word that most Gypsies know from their origins in Old India it is the word for stranger, gadjo. It is also probably the easiest word to trace back to the nomadic and semi-nomadic Dom castes that lived around Multan for thousands of years. Yet many so-called linguistic scholars in their search to trace back the origins of the European Gypsies have come up with countless interpretations of the word. Like O’Brien, these scholars didn’t get off their horse to interview the blacksmiths and basket makers and beggars who had/have preserved the Gypsy culture for thousands of years right up to today.
But the worst linguistic manipulation for me and for all Gypsy survivors of WWII has been to reinvent the word porajmos to describe the Gypsy tragedy of WWII.
Probably as an attempt to join the Jewish and Gypsy tragedies of WWII as the same horrific story (because they were both targeted for extermination by the Nazis), porajmos has been encouraged by some to be used as a synonym for “Gypsy holocaust.”
I have collected more than 300 oral histories from Gypsy survivors of WWII. Most of them are filmed interviews usually lasting about an hour. Although most survivors were aware of the tragedies their people suffered, none ever heard the word holocaust. When interviewed they didn’t know what it meant. When we mentioned the word porajmos, all got extremely upset that we would swear in front of them and their children. For Gypsy survivors of WWII, esp. the women, the word porajmos means oral sex, a blow job.
You cannot imagine how upset the Gypsy women survivors of WWII got when we mentioned this word, because this was the real tragedy for many Gypsy women during WWII who were sexually abused by the occupiers.
As our oral history interviews reveal, in many Gypsy communities during WWII there were small groups of women who volunteered to go with the occupiers to save the younger Gypsy girls.35 Often the sexual service was porajmos. For a linguist not familiar with what many Gypsy women had to endure during the war at the hands of the occupiers (Germans, Italians, and Bulgarians) he might have thought the original meaning of “devouring” might serve as a symbol of the Gypsy suffering in WWII. But the Jewish holocaust was not the same as the Gypsy suffering. Although there were some death camps for Gypsies such as Jasenovac in Croatia (the worst, and I have interviews from some survivors), Auschwitz in Poland, Belgrade and Nish in Serbia and Lety, in Czech Republic (where the real story is still being denied and cover
ed up by the present-day government), the Gypsy tragedy in WWII was not the same as the Jewish tragedy. Ninety percent of the European Jews died during WWII; ninety percent of the European Gypsies survived according to their oral histories, census records and demographics.
Although Gypsy survivors of WWII experienced or heard about mass murders of their people, the most frequent complaint from survivors was about fear and the pain of hunger during the war. Those were the two things mentioned the most in their oral histories. Fear and pain of hunger was what they wanted to be compensated for.
This is not my interpretation of the Gypsy tragedy of WWII. This is their story, in their own words. If you really want to know about the Gypsy catastrophe of WWII read their oral histories, read their words, not the interpretation of historians and linguists who weren’t there.
34- Linguistic scholar Donald Kenrick (1929-2015) believed there were at least 80 different Romani dialects. Thomas Acton.
35- In Old India the Kanjar-Sansis women when necessary surrendered themselves (for the good of their tribe) to men of power or men who could do harm to their people. Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, vol. 6, page 42, 1912/1913
Chapter 19 GYPSY DNA In the past ten years it has become fashionable to check your DNA, to see where people live today that have some of your DNA. The results can be mind blowing.
I always thought my paternal ancestors came from Czech Republic. But when I had my DNA tested I found that 23% of my DNA today can be found in Northwest India! That really surprised my dark-skinned, black-eyed domestic Romani partner, that I a blonde haired (when I was young!), blue-eyed, white-skinned gadjo might have a common ancestor with her people. She then demanded I pay to have her DNA tested.
Although she had read that “her Roma” had their origins in Old India, she hoped that a DNA test might pinpoint exactly where in India her ancestors came from.
When the results arrived a month later she was devastated. The majority of her DNA was not in present day India. Seventy-two percent of her DNA was found today in… Central Mexico! And 15% of her DNA was actually shared by the people in Chihuahua, Mexico!
Of course, we immediately contacted the lab and demanded a retest. There had to have been a mistake. She had never heard about relatives ever going to Mexico. As was her people’s tradition, her father and mother knew all their relatives for the past five generations, a tradition that prevented cousins from marrying cousins. No one in her immediate and distant family had ever heard of relatives in Mexico.
In the end she became a non-believer in DNA. But over the years, long after she left, I pursued the literature on Mexican DNA. I also checked out the photos of every tribe in Central Mexico to see if I could see a resemblance in the people there and my former Romni. Well, I must admit, I saw on the Internet many young Mayan women that could have been her identical twin. So then I checked into the DNA results of the Mayan people. Was I surprised at the results I found? Yes and no. No, because I knew the human race had a profound history of migration. But yes, I was surprised to learn that part of the Mayan DNA had been traced back to the Indus Valley in Old India, the same area that the European Gypsies have often considered their homeland.
Wow! Maybe the story that the American Indians in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show knew what they were talking about when they arrived in Paris in 1889 and met some local Gypsies and declared “These are our people. We have the same blood!”
From time to time I have encouraged many of my Gypsy friends to do their DNA just to compare results. In 2003, I started an English teaching program in the city of Peja (Kosovo) for the Roma and Egyptians there, funded by the Swiss Development Corporation. During the course of the program I met a proud Egyptian who already spoke good English. Although he never became one of my students, he became a good friend. Later he won a scholarship to a university in the United States and after graduation obtained a job there as an engineer. Despite not seeing him for many years we kept in contact. He was always intrigued by my “Gypsy studies”.
I was never convinced that his Gypsy ancestors had come from Egypt although his father had told him stories of his Egyptian ancestors coming from Albania. Finally to convince me or probably more likely himself, he took a DNA test. This is what he wrote to me about the results:
I attached my DNA study [map]. I haven't done any additional historical research on it. I don't need more than this. I don't think I have Egyptian ancestry. I am of a European-Asian mixture. At the end of the day it is not critical for me anymore as it is for folks in the Balkans.
Where people live today that have his DNA. The trail from Old India (and not just NE India) shows the migration to the west. But no one in Egypt shares his DNA! Some other comments he made: I have been pushing a lot in my communication with Roma Egyptian activists in Europe for a DNA project. I happened to gain some support here and there, but nobody wants to do it as a project. I think they are afraid, but also no funding. Some have stated that it would be good to do it, but that does not conclude the ancestry of Egyptian community. Even in my discussion to folks (Egyptians) living in Europe (like Switzerland) they don’t support the DNA idea. They simply want to state that “We are Egyptians” and that’s it. I offered a few folks to do individual DNA test, but they never responded back. They claim they are skeptic about the DNA test idea.
I noticed that there are two schools of thoughts. (1) Those who promote the idea that Egyptians come from Egypt and (2) those who think that today’s Egyptians in Balkan don’t have necessarily any connection with today’s Egypt. The second school of thought just want to use Egyptian term more like a cultural term as oppose to an ethnical term.
As you know the theory of Egyptians ancestry by Vatican documents promoted by Dr. Marcel is well accepted within Egyptian community. They use Marcel’s paper a lot since it was promoted by a Rom scientist and not Egyptian. As I had mentioned earlier I found out that Dr. Hugh Poulton who published this fact about Vatican documents states in a footnote that this info was reported by Serbian news agency Tanjug in early 1990 when Milosevic was in power. Hence, I would not consider this as a reliable source.
All Egyptians within Kosovo and out of Kosovo are against the term REA (Roma Egyptian and Ashkali). A lot of international organizations refer to this term REA in their reports. However, Egyptians try to fight it as much as they can. I do feel there is some kind of nationalism in this fight as well. They try to separate themselves from Roma as much as they can.
From what I have heard and read, the Gypsy Egyptians contend that their ancestors came from Egypt because there are records and archeological finds spread across the Balkans that show Egyptians were here thousands of years ago. But as we have seen with Multan, the ancient capital of Punjab in Old India, Egyptians migrated to almost every known corner of the old world. They did not arrive as slaves/settlers/pioneers but as rulers and administrators to the local population. And wherever they went they usually named their new home after their old home, i.e. “Little Egypt.” After the destruction of the Hindu sun temple in Multan in 985 AD, some Indians from Multan fled north, south, east and west. Today many of their descendants claim their ancestors came from Little Egypt. But neither their customs, traditions, language nor DNA shows they were Egyptian. 36, 37
When it comes to ancestors many people have a very active imagination of their family history. Maybe we are all descended from Kings… and Egyptians!
But one last word on migration. Asian Indians have been documented in Europe since the time of Alexander the Great when he took many Indian archers back to the Middle East and Europe with his army. Jat laborers have been migrating to the Mediterranean countries for more than a thousand years as agricultural works. So it is not surprising to read about “Indian” DNA reported in Europe long before the Gypsies supposedly arrived. Gypsies, after all, have Indian DNA even if their old caste system tried to segregate them from “the pure blood” of higher caste Indians. So I personally am leery of DNA reports that claim the “Gypsies” arri
ved as one body at one time before breaking up and going their separate ways in Europe and the Middle East. In the history of migration people seldom travel as one body at one time. It is usually chain migration. Family following family, neighbor following neighbor, seeking a better life, trying to survive. One only has to look at Gypsy migration today out of the Balkans to see how the Roma, Ashkali and Egyptians continue to follow their relatives to Italy, Germany, France and the Nordic countries. They never go as one group at one time. Their tradition and custom has always been half go, half stay. That is the history of our Gypsies… and that is why it is possible to do their genealogy… to trace them back to their origins by their traditions and customs... village by village.
36- Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, vol. 6, 1912/13 p. 69 according to M. Srabyan, French vice-consul, at Erzurum [today eastern Turkey] dozen of Gypsy families of the Christian faith live in the Erzurum area speaking an Armenian dialect mixed with a number of Sanskrit and Parthian words and according to their tradition they come originally from Egypt.
37- In 1763, Mr. Stefan Valayi, a Hungarian student of theology met three Indian students in Leydon, Holland, and found that their language had much in common with the Gypsies in his own part of Hungary who claimed their ancestors were from Egypt. Valayi drew up a list of 1,000 words from the Indian students which he put before the Egyptian Gypsies in Raab and was extremely glad to see that the major part of their language was an Indian language connected with the original Sanskrit. This discovery shattered the long held theory that Gypsies were originally Egyptian. Later this discovery was put on a more scientific footing by Prof. Pott when he published his two volume work Die Zigeuner in Europa und Asien (1844-45).
Chapter 20 MAKING SENSE OUT OF A FAMILY ORAL HISTORY In the 1980s I used to take an aid convoy where I lived in southern Spain to my maternal grandfather’s village in Bukovina in north Romania. Despite being harassed by Ceausescu’s Securitate I managed to deliver two or three truck loads of aid to the people in the villages of Cacica, Arbora, and Solka, the area where my maternal grandfather was born in 1877 (he emigrated with his parents and siblings to Colorado in 1886).
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