Hot June sunshine flooded the sandhills on the afternoon of my entry into the encampment, which, by the way, was made strategetically from the rear. Thus it was that I lighted upon the retired tent of the oldest occupants of the Gypsyry. Unlike the alert and expectant Romany mothers and maids who hovered about this Gypsy town’s front gate, Ned Boswell’s widow sat drowsing at the tent door, overpowered by the midsummer heat. I was about to turn away, intending to revisit the old lady later on, when her son Alma, the lynx-eyed, popped upon me from round the corner, and in a sandy hollow a little way off we were soon deep in conversation.
“Now, rashai,” said Alma, after we had talked awhile, “there’s one thing I would like to ask you. Where do you think us Romanitshels reely origin’d from?”
Here I was confronted by a question which has been asked throughout the ages, and addressed to myself how many times?
Who are the Gypsies, and where did they come from? Bulky tomes have been filled with scholarly speculations upon these questions, and so varied have been the conclusions arrived at that we appear to be no nearer to the solution of the mystery than when about the year 1777 the German Rudiger first made known to the world that the Gypsies spoke an Indian dialect, which discovery is said “to have injured more than it served in the quest after the origin of the Gypsies, because it has prevented scholars from searching for it.” Taking philology for our guide, we may believe that the ancestors of our Gypsies tarried for centuries in North-West India, a region which they quitted with their faces set towards the west not later than about 1000 A.D. To quote the words of an authority [73] on the linguistic side of the problem: “Their language proves that they once inhabited Northern India, but as no Indian writers have left any documents describing this people, their mode of life in India, and the most interesting point of all, why they emigrated, must for ever remain a matter for conjecture. It is, however, surprising what can be proved from our present knowledge of their language, which, it is generally admitted, must rank as an independent eighth among the seven modern Indian languages of the Aryan stock, based on Sanskrit. To begin with, the grammatical peculiarities of the language of the Gypsies resemble those of the modern Aryan languages of India so closely that it is impossible not to believe that they were developed side by side. Comparing Gypsy and Hindi, for example, we find that their declensions are based exactly on the same principle, that neither has a real genitive case, that both decline their adjectives only when used as nouns. Now it is generally held that these modern forms came slowly into existence throughout the eleventh century, when the old synthetical structure of the Sanskrit was broken up and thrown into confusion, but not quite lost, while the modern auxiliary verbs and prepositions were as yet hardly fully established in their stead. Therefore, it is extremely unlikely that the Gypsies left India before the tenth century, when they could have carried away with them, so to speak, the germs of the new construction, absorbed on Indian soil.”
From the words they borrowed from Persia, Armenia, and Greece, we know that the wanderers passed through these countries on their way westward, but, since no Arabic or Coptic words are found in the Gypsy tongue, we infer that they were never in Egypt. The theory of the Egyptian origin of the Romanitshels probably arose from legends which they themselves set afloat.
Two stories were repeated by the Gypsies. They said that they were Egyptian penitents on a seven years’ pilgrimage. The Saracens had attacked them in Egypt, and, having surrendered to their enemies, they became Saracens themselves and denied Christ. Now, as a penance, they were ordered to travel for seven years without sleeping in a bed. A second story was that their exile was a punishment for the sin of having refused hospitality to Joseph and the Virgin Mary when they fled into Egypt with the newborn Christ-child to escape the anger of Herod.
Associated with the Gypsies are other legends which may have been invented by them for similar purposes. An old tradition asserts that Caspar, one of the three Magi, was a Gypsy, and that it was he who (as their ruler) first converted them to the Christian religion. The Lithuanian Gypsies say that stealing has been permitted in their favour by God because the Gypsies, being present at the Crucifixion, stole one of the four nails, and therefore God allows them to steal, and it is not accounted a sin to them.
Needless to say, the foregoing statements were not delivered to Alma Boswell. Of their actual history the Anglo-Romany folk know nothing, but this does not prevent them from holding some curious notions about themselves. So, in response to Alma’s question about the origin of the Gypsies, I replied that great scholars believed his race to have come from India.
“Oh, I think they’re wrong,” said Alma. “Far more likely we came from the land of Bethlehem. Being a rashai (parson), you’ll know the Bible, I suppose, from cover to cover. Well, you’ve heard of the man called Cain. Now, don’t the Old Book say that he went away and married a black-eyed camper-gal, one of our roving folks? I reckons we sprang from them. We was the first people what the dear Lord made, and mebbe we shall be the last on earth. When all the rest is wore out, there’ll still be a few of our folks travelling with tents and wagons.”