The Rom:
Walking In The Paths Of The Gypsies

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Note: when referring to an ethnic group, it's impossible to find a word that will please everybody. I have chosen to use the word "Rroma" to refer to the race of people that have been historically known as the Gypsies. Among many people the word "Gypsy" has taken on very, very negative connotations as a vicious racial slur. I acknowledge that not all Gypsies are Rroma--some are Sinti. I also acknowledge that some prefer to use the word "Gypsy" instead of Rroma. But I needed to use something, so I opted for the word with less inflammatory connotations. If you want to read more about why many Gypsies prefer to be called Rom, see the article Please Call Me Rom on Kajira Djoumahna's web site.

This book is partly travelogue, partly glimpses into the history of the Silk Road, and partly anthropological research. The author, Roger Moreau, took time away from his job to spend several months researching the history of the Rroma. In it, he explores the following questions and proposes his answers, based on his research:

• Which of the tribes in northern India produced the ancestors of the Rroma?
• Why did these people leave their homeland and move west?
• What overwhelming forces caused three tribes of Indian people to interbreed, overcoming deeply held cultural taboos against miscegenation, to form a new race?
• Why didn't the Rroma retain the Hindu religion of their Indian homeland?
• What factors led to their arrival in Persia?
• Why did they leave Persia and move on to Constantinople?
• Why did they leave the home they had made for themselves in Constantinople and disperse widely among the lands of Europe?
• Why did the Europeans despise the Rroma so much when they arrived among them?

The best way to describe this book is speculative history. The above questions are not answered in any known historical documents that have survived to this day, and therefore no one can authoritatively state "This is the factual story." So Moreau carefully studied the historical documents that do survive that tell of events in the individual regions, and then he pieced together how those events probably would have affected the people of the kalo rat (dark blood). His speculations are very credible. Although he can't support them with historical documents stating, "The Rroma did this because...." his conclusions are an interesting interpretation of the facts that he was able to substantiate about events affecting the regions as a whole.

After describing his conclusions about the early history of the Rroma, Moreau then led into Book Two, which described what happened to them after they left Constantinople and spread across Europe. This part of the book was very difficult to read, because it told a story of many centuries of persecution, including slavery that was just as heinous as the acts perpetrated on the early African-Americans, persecution during the Spanish Inquisition, and near extinction in the gas chambers of Hitler. But Moreau's story of the Rroma would have been incomplete without covering those horrors, and it helped me understand why I've heard people say that the Rroma lived with many hardships over their history.

In the course of developing his theories about the origins of the Rroma, Moreau reveals much fascinating information about the history of Afghanistan, Persia, and Turkey that I had never known before. For that alone, the book was well worth the time it took to read it for me.

I was very impressed with Moreau's approach to his research. Although I acknowledge that his conclusions were only informed speculation, and not documented fact, I found them to be very credible ways of interpreting the documented data that does exist. He was very systematic, and always put a human face on the historical events that he was looking at.

Book Two, with its stories of the hardships visited upon the Rroma after their dispersion into Europe, was a necessary aspect of telling their complete story. I've heard many times before that the race was persecuted and endured many hardships, but this book served up details and facts.

The thread that binds much of the book together is Moreau's description of his three Indian traveling companions--one from each of the Indian tribes that Moreau believes comprised the ancestors of the Rroma. To some extent, it was fun to read about the exploits of this group as they made their way across India, into Afghanistan, and eventually to Turkey. They definitely added a human element to the book. But at times, I found myself getting a bit impatient because I wanted Moreau to get back to the point of revealing his research, theories, and discoveries.

I wouldn't advise the author to remove his traveling companions from the book, but I would have preferred that he devote a little less space to them and more to the anthropological and cultural histories of the region he researched.

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