Europe and the Roma: A History of Fascination and Fear

A cultural history of Europe's response to the Roma.

This remarkable book describes a dark side of European history- the rejection of the Roma from their initial arrival in the late Middle Ages to the present day. To Europeans, the Roma appeared to be in complete contradiction with their own culture, because of their mysterious origins, unknown language and way of life. As representatives of an oral culture, for centuries the Roma have left virtually no written records of their own. Their history has been conveyed to us almost exclusively through the distorted images that European cultures project.

Persecuted and shunned, the Roma nonetheless spread out across the continent and became an important, indeed indispensable element in the European imagination. Countless composers, artists and writers have responded to Romani culture and to fantasies thereof. Their projections onto a group whose illiteracy and marginalisation gave it so little direct voice of its own have always been a very uneasy mixture of the inspired, the patronising and the frighteningly ignorant. The book also shows the link between cultural violence, social discrimination and racist policies that paved the way for the genocide of the Roma.