Hardly less peculiar is the historical relation of the Jew and the Gypsy. They have many points in common. Both have had their exodus, and are dispersed over the world. Both have peculiarities of countenance which distinguish them from the “Gentiles,” whom they hate, the Goyím and the Busne. Both have their own languages and preserve their racial names.[112] Similarity of conditions, however, which should breed sympathy, as usual amongst men has borne only hatred. But the Jew was wealthy, like his cousin the Morisco. Hence the horrible persecution of the Israelites in Spain (a.d. 1348-98), when a prevailing pest was attributed to their poisoning the water, and which endured till the Hussites drew down upon themselves the earthly “anger of Heaven.” During those dreadful years many of the Hebrews fled to the mountains, the Alpujarras and the Sierras—Morena and de Toledo—and to the wild banks of the Upper Ebro, the Guadiana, and the Tagus. Meanwhile the Gypsies suffered under the conviction that they were Jews who, denying their forefathers, represented themselves to be of Egyptian blood. Presently, when the revenues of the Catholic kings, Henry III. and John II., amounting to 26,550,000 reals (dollars) reduced to our present value, fell under Henry IV. to 3,540,000, the plethoric money-bags of the Israelites led to the establishment of Holy Office and its inquisitorial tribunal (January, 1481). Finally, as if persecution and death were not sufficient, a wholesale expulsion took place in March, 1492. These horrors are still, after the lapse of ages, fresh in the Jewish mind. I have seen at Jerusalem a Khákhám (scribe) so moved by the presence of a Spanish official, that the latter asked me in astonishment how he had managed to offend his host.
But what could the Santa Hermandad alias La Bruja (the witch) find to plunder and pillage in the tent of the Rom? During three centuries of loose wild life, often stained by ferocious crime, and made bestial by the Draconian laws of mediæval Christianity, the Gypsies had their seasons of banishment, torture, and execution; but their poverty and isolation saved them from the horrors of a deliberate and official persecution. Mas pobre que cuerpo de Gitano (Nothing poorer than a Gypsy’s body) is still a proverb in Spain, where men also say, Tan ruin es el conde como los Gitanos. All these barbarities ended in Europe with the close of the eighteenth century, where the new Religion of Humanity had been preached by the encyclopedists whose major prophets were Voltaire and Rousseau, Diderot and D’Alembert.
No Disraeli has hitherto arisen to vindicate the nobility of these “masterful beggars”; and to chronicle their triumphs in court and camp, in arts and arms; to trace them in the genealogies of titled houses, or to strip off the disguises assumed during the intolerant times when the Jew was compelled to swear himself Gentile and the Muslim a Christian. Yet the Gypsies have had their great men, whilst their pure blood has leavened much dull clay and given fresh life to many an effete noble vein. Witness the “King Zindl” or “Zindelo”; the Dukes Michael and Andrew; Counts Ion (Juan) and Panuel (Manuel) of Little Egypt; the Waywodes (Vaivodes) of Dacia; the noble cavalier Pedro, and the chief, Tomas Pulgar, who in a.d. 1496 aided Bishop Sigismund to beat off the Turk invader. Witness, again, the Hungarian Hunyadis, the Russian Tolstoys, and the Scotch Melvilles, not to speak of the Cassilis and the Contis under Louis XIV. Certain Gypsies became soldiers of renown; and John Bunyan, one of the immortals of the earth, is shrewdly suspected of Gypsy descent. Borrow mentions an archbishop and “four dignified ecclesiastics”; while some of the most learned and famed of the priesthood in Spain have been, according to a Gypsy, of the Gypsies, or at least of Gypsy blood.
Such is the Gypsy summed up in a few lines.
These pages have no intention, I repeat, of treating the subject of the Romá generally. My humbler task is confined to showing the affinities between the Gypsies and the great Jat tribe, or rather nation, which extends from the mouths of the Indus to the Steppes of Central Asia. And my first objection must be to a question of precedence with M. Paul Bataillard.
The Tsiganologue claims, as has been seen, “a still earlier priority” in the identification of Gypsy and Jat; and he proposes to “establish exactly the share belonging to each of us.” This is the normal process of the cabinet savant, who is ever appearing, like the deus ex machinâ, to snatch from the explorer’s hand the meed of originality. The former borrows from his books a dozen different theories; and when one happens to be proved true by the labours of the man of action, he straightway sets himself up as the “theoretical discoverer” of the sources of the Nile, or of any other matter which engages popular attention. But in the present case I deny that my rival has any claim whatever. My personal acquaintance with the Jats began in 1845, and my Grammar and Vocabulary were sent to the Royal Asiatic Society in 1848 before my departure from India. On the other hand, M. Paul Bataillard, I understand, knew nothing of the Indine Jats when he wrote his first paper De l’apparition, etc., in 1844. He honestly owns that he is no Orientalist; and that he required the assistance of the late M. Reinaud, who was a scholar, to identify the Zuth of Hamza Ispahani (tenth century), the Luri musicians of the Shahnameh (eleventh century), and the Zoth or Zutt of the Kamûz dictionary (fourteenth century) with the Zatt or Dyatt of India. This was in 1849. His exposé étendu was accepted by Professor Pott in the same year, and appeared in the Nachtrag before mentioned, which completed the grand travail—Die Zigeuner. Such was the extent of my claimant’s discovery. He had even to learn from Professor Fleischer, of Leipzig, that “the Zigeuner descend from the G’at or G’et, the most ancient inhabitants of North-Western India,”[113] a second-hand opinion, derived from “Gypsy Borrow,” Colonel Sleeman, and other Englishmen. I need hardly say that Professor Pott, the distinguished member of that heroic band which founded comparative philology, knew nothing practically or personally about either the Gypsies or the Jats. And it is evident that Professor de Goeje is in outer darkness when he speaks of “the view propounded by Pott as early as 1853.”
At that time, and indeed until I wrote to the Academy in 1875, M. Paul Bataillard evidently ignored “M. Burton”; and no blame be to him for not knowing a paper published by a colonial society a quarter of a century ago. But he also ignored far more important facts. He applies the term petite population Djatte to the great scattered nation called Jat. He was of course not aware that this people preserve in the Indine Delta, the “Salt Country” of the Sindhis, the purity of its tongue, which, farther north, is corrupted by an admixture of Sindhi, Belochki, and Panjabi. Nor could he be alive to the fact that many points of similarity, anthropological and linguistic, connect the Gypsy and the Jat. There are men who are personally averse to new things, and the easy alternative is to depreciate their value. “He,” I am assured by my rival claimant, “has perceived a probable relation between these two tribes of men, and he has expressed it in half a page; but this is not sufficient.”
Such an assertion, however, is more than sufficient for estimating and appreciating the Bataillard system of treating a literary question. For “half a page” read a dozen pages,[114] which might easily have been extended to many a dozen. But I had hoped that the statement of a traveller who had met the Gypsies at Oxford (Bagley Wood), in England, and on the Continent, and the knowledge of their racial characteristics, general amongst educated Englishmen, justified a conciseness imperiously demanded whilst treating in one volume the geography, history, and ethnology of a country nearly equalling England in length. Again, when M. Bataillard assures his readers that I have “not given even the smallest information respecting the type (appearance) of the Jats,” he once more makes it evident that he should have read me before pretending to write about me. I will quote my description in full,[115] so that the public may judge between him and me:
“We are now in the provinces inhabited by the Jats. Your [i.e. Mr. John Bull’s] eye is scarcely grown critical enough in this short time to see the tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee-like difference between their personal appearance and that of their kinsmen the Scindians; nor can I expect you as yet to distinguish a Jat wandh (village) from a Scinde goth (village). You are certain to take some interest in a race which appears to be the progenitor of the old witch in a red cloak, whose hand, in return for the cunning nonsense to which her tongue gave birth, you once crossed with silver; and of the wiry young light-weight, whose game and sharp hitting you have, in happier days, more than once condescended to admire.