The Story of the Gypsies
By Konrad Bercovici 1928
Oct. 13, 2023 5 Stars
Enjoyed the book for the style of the author, the abundance of well documented research, and the interesting lives of Gypsies throughout history.
I Am Gypsy
From reading this book you get a sense maybe our modern-day lifestyle of working and indoor living and all surrounding it are the causes of our sickness and depressing mental conditions. To live the freestyle, naturalistic life of a gypsy is to be constantly in-tune with ones physical, mental, spiritual health and the external forces capable of enhancing or debilitating it.
This book has confirmed to me the secret of life being Song, Dance, Enjoyment of families and community, Celebration of life.
Growing up in a joyous family surrounded by a closeknit community molded me into a person who cherishes love, laughter, celebration, sorrow.
So many parts in this book I should have committed to notes. But an uninterrupted read was just what this book deserved. It gave me so much confirmation of the detachment from material things I try to practice. My belief that a Home is felt internally with a persons’ concept of life, then it spreads out to whatever he or she chooses to embrace.
Pg282 They train their children, female and male, from earliest youth to such things, just as they train them to sing, deceive, lie, steal, cheat, and flatter: everything needed to lead the life of an undesired wanderer, everywhere, in the marts of London, Paris, Rome, and at Bagdad, at the entrance of mosques.
Taking what the Arabs say about Gypsies with a grain of salt. But then, Arab investigators have said the same things of Jews and Christians. If some people don’t believe what they know, Arabs always know what they believe.
Nomads in Asia speaking a language akin to that of Gypsies call themselves Siyah Hindu, “Black Hindus.”pg287
In the year 1860, the Gypsies in England elected as their queen a woman called Esther Faa.
Beginning of chapter XIII, final chapter (The Tent in the Wind) pg289
And now the deed is done. I have said all I know, and told what other people know, about the Gypsies. I have sifted my own knowledge and that of others through the sieve of my own temperament and prejudices, and bulked the whole in one lump – formidable in my eyes; slight, perhaps, in the eyes of others.
I have tried to prove that the Gypsies were in Europe long before the year authorities took notice of them; and while I did not go so far as to claim, with Bataillard, that they were the ones who brought bronze to Europe, I do believe that they brought the art of iron-forging, the dance of the East, and orchestral music to the shores of the Black Sea, to the Point Euxine, when they first set foot on European soil.
Did they come two thousand, three hundred years ago, imported by Alexander the Great, or a thousand years later, traveling of their own volition or driven by enemies? Who knows? For the strangest thing is that Gypsies are an even greater mystery to themselves than they are to us.
Pg291 But what has caused the Gypsies to remain an entity outside the pale of influence of the civilized world? It seems to me the fundamental reason for this is to be found in the fact that compared to the other inhabitants the Gypsies were already a superior group when they first appeared in Europe. Considering themselves abler, superior, they refused to adapt themselves to the method of life of the inferior native inhabitants in whose midst they camped, and thus prevented themselves from growning with them. To this day, the Gypsy considers himself superior to all peoples in wisdom of life, in ability, in artistry, in strength and intelligence, and refuses the formal school education, not because he is inferior to it, but because he considers the education of the Gorgio unworthy, ridiculous, and superfluous. Duty – private property – reduction of individual freedom . . .
But you will tell him:
“Look at yourself. You are poor, bedraggled, uncomfortable, ignorant.”
And his answer, ready and prompt, will be:
“Yes, but I am happy. The contrary of ‘poor, bedraggled, uncomfortable, ignorant’ does not spell happiness!” And this answer is irrefutable. “And as to ‘ignorant.’ The things we know cannot be found in books. We know you better than you know yourselves.”
“We live in houses’ cool in summer, warm in winter. When we are ill, we call a doctor to cure us.”
“We live in tents summer and winter. Yet we don’t know the diseases you know. We have no need for doctors – until you compel us to live in houses.”
And this answer is likewise irrefutable. Talk to a Gypsy of industry, and he answers you with talk of freedom. Talk to him of wealth, and he responds with a chant on the elimination of worry: the uncontrollable, unhealable cancer of the soul.
And should you launch forth on pride, he will point out that his tribal pride is of purer metal than any political pride of today. And there is no gainsaying this. He does not have to dress to look respectable. We need beautiful clothes to cover our ugliness. His beautiful body shines through the rags that cover it – to conform to our law. They Gypsy loves nakedness.
The Gypsy lies to preserve his integrity, and steals to maintain his inner honesty, which does not recognize private property. Did Proudhon hear the phrase “La propriete, c’est le vol” from the Gypsies living at the gates of Paris?
The tent-living Gypsies have seen the destruction and disruption of Palestine; and the Jews, once a nomad people, had lived in houses and had founded a civilization of their own that was leaning on what they had borrowed from Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks.
The tent-living Gypsies have seen the crumbling of Darius’ palaces in Persia, the destruction of Babylon and the breaking down of Alexander’s empire. They have seen Macedonia shrink from a cannon ball to an almost invisible grain of bird shot. Greece fell. Rome fell. The Byzantine empire was unglued by its own heat; and in more recent times they have seen the dismembering of empires that had been joined together by the flesh and blood of millions of men through centuries and centuries to give body to the illusion of some ambitious, power-thirsty daydreamer. They have seen the rise and fall of many empires . . . .
“Wind that breaks and scatters the strongest houses is resisted by the bending tent. The wisdom of life is the continuation of life, and so the wisdom of the Gypsy is superior to that of the civilized world.” Pg293
And so unyielding have the Gypsies been that thousands of years of life in surroundings contradicting their manner of life have influenced them but little. Oh, they have changed! They are not exactly what they were three or four thousand years ago. But they have changed according to their own native processes; from within and not without. They have accepted no religion, no customs, no laws, no traditions from the world outside their tents; and they have kept their own language, though they have been subject to a hundred differences in every generation. National entity! No other nation can boast of one as perfect as the national entity of the Gypsies.
Like the tent in the wind, the Gypsy does not stubbornly, openly, oppose the principles and the laws of the peoples he lives with. He bends this way and that. Yet when the wind has blown over, he stands as straight as before – while the wind still blows elsewhere. Moslems while in Turkey, Catholics in Spain, Methodists in England, Greek Orthodox Russia . . .
And what of tomorrow? When shall we have seen the last Gypsy? Civilization, industry, economic pressure, science, hygiene, will they not force the Gypsy to adapt himself to new conditions? To walls, doors, and houses?
A thousand years ago, the world thought that that generation had seen the last Gypsy. Five hundred years ago, the French, the English, the Italians, and the Germans thought they had heard the last of him. George Borrow gave an account of them which reads like a custom-made epitaph for their tomb. Charles Godfrey Leland said the last of the Gypsy had already been seen – and there are a million tent-Gypsies today, as fierce, as passionate, as free as they have ever been – still bending under the wind.
And the Gypsy answers: “The last of the Gypsies will be seen when we return to India, picking our way amidst the scattered ruins of the world.”
For they believe they are eternal; they believe in themselves, and not in us. For they still are convinced that theirs is the superior manner, that they are a superior race of cleaner and better blood – a superior people, oppressed by a hundred inferior ones.
“Bathe as frequently as you may, you only cleanse your skin. Our blood is pure; our breath is sweet.”
But all this I have said. Some of it I believe, and some I do not. Yet what is atavistically* Gypsy in me responds to their claims, to their wisdom, to their passion for untrammeled freedom, and sings the song of the wood and the glen to rhythm of the pebble-bottomed brook and the beat of my tramping feet upon the crust covering the heart of the world.
Yet – will the resist all pressure? Can they? Will history not repeat itself and absorb the Gypsies?
History does not repeat itself. Man repeats himself, and repeats the life of his ancestors, instead of continuing it.
THE END
Pg251 A language is kept in a purer state by an illiterate people than by a literate one. Literature refines and corrupts a language. Literary people only seldom have ears for speech of the people, and invent an idiom of their own, as different from the national one as a city garb is from the national costume.
Spain and Portugal attempted to rid themselves of the TGitano difficulty by exiling these people to Brazil. A Brazilian authority on the subject, Professor Moreno, has come to the conclusion that not one prominent Brazilian family today is free of Gypsy blood.
Pg.207 In May, 1596, under the provision of the statutes against Egyptians or Bohemians (as the Gypsies were then called in England), a company of one hundred and ninety-six persons was brought before the justice in Yorkshire. One hundred and six, being adults, were condemned to death; because as the document set forth, they were idle persons, some of them the queen’s natural-born subjects and descendants of good parentage, who led idle lives wandering about the country in company with these Gypsies, using a speech that was not understood by the other inhabitants of the realm, and obeying laws that were not the laws of the realm.
During the execution of some of those found guilty, the children cried out so piteously, beseeching reprieves for their parents, that the right honorable lords who had condemned them obtained her Grace’s pardon for the offenders, on condition that the company mend it ways and agree to settle down somewhere at the honest pursuit of some trade or occupation; the non-Gypysies who had traveled in their company were to go back to their families. It was also stipulated that the Gypsies should be returned to the last place of habitation where they had dwelled within three years. Then the whole company was charged to one William Portyyngton, who was commissioned to conduct each one to his last place of habitation.
Pg.92 It was in this year -1782- that the charge of cannibalism was brought against the Tziganes. There were no proofs. The charges were brought against them to still their happy laughter. The emperor and his court hated all signs of happiness. They the accusation was only against one tribe, the echo spread over the whole living race of the world. The charge was never proved. The Tziganes who had confessed their guilt recanted, explaining that their confessions had been wrung under duress in the torture chambers. Yet only their confessions were believed. Their recanting found deaf ears. People always believe what they want to believe. Proof . . . bah! There are no proofs. Willing ears, that is important.
The Big Lie of a Stolen 2020 Election
Only deaf people could be really just. The eyes of men have never been trained well enough to check our hearing. The ears are the fake news-gatherers of humanity.
The trial of the Gypsies lasted two months, There were thousands of witnesses. No one dared to witness in favor of the accused. To defend any of the accused was equivalent to suicide. All witnesses not bringing additional proof of guilt against the Tziganes were suspected of being themselves guilty of cannibalism.
The vehemency with which one accused the victims and denounced cannibalism was the measure of his own innocence. Thousands of Gypsies were denounced by whosoever considered their existence an obstacle to his own plans and desires – or just for sport. Two hundred and twenty Gypsies were found guilty of cannibalism and condemned to swing on gibbets. Public opinion, like Moloch at Carthage, demanded victims. The dust of the road to civilization had to be sprinkled with blood.
The whole Gypsy race had been judged and found guilty. Gypsies fled from settled farms and village shops to hide in mountains. (Chapter 5 Gypsies in Hungary)
Pg279-80 Many Gypsies of Asia believe they are Egyptians, while the prophet (a prophet 30 years ago who gathered 30,000 Gypsies in the Arabian desert under one flag to lead them back to their own country and out of slavery.) and those about him were convinced that they came from somewhere in Turkestan, somewhere between the mountains, where the homes their ancestors had left were still vacant and awaiting them –“not tents, but houses dug out in the mountains, and guarded against intruders by tigers and leopards.” Such a thing sounds almost impossible to civilized ears, but one must remember that only a few years ago a band of little, parched, dark-skinned people appeared in Palestine, led by a prophet, who proved to the world they were Yemenites, who had taken refuge in the desert at the fall of Jerusalem, and lived there two-thousand years, unknown to anybody, until he had shown them the way.
For more see Palestine Partition 1948 / Israel established.
Problem with the prophet and his gathering of 30,000 in the Arabian desert was they all couldn’t agree on where ther homeland was.
