Europe and 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, they appeared to be in complete contradiction with their own culture, because of their mysterious origins, their unknown language and their 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. It is impossible to conceive of the culture of Spain, southern France and much of Central Europe without this pervasive Romani influence.

Europe and the Roma brilliantly describes the 'fascination and fear' which have marked Europeans' response to the Romani presence. Countless composers, artists and writers have responded to Romani culture and to fantasies thereof. Their projections onto a group whose illiteracy and marginalization gave it so little direct voice of its own has always been a very uneasy mixture of the inspired, the patronizing and the frighteningly ignorant. But it also shows the link between cultural violence, social discrimination and racist policies that paved the way for the genocide of the Roma.