From Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society to Romani Studies: Purpose and essence of a modern academic platform

Abstract

“Our journal, we trust, will thrive without self-commendation”, wrote the Editors of the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, David MacRitchie and Francis Hindes Groome, in the first issue of the journal published in July 1888. They went on to declare the aims of the journal to be “to gather new materials, to rearrange the old, and to formulate results, as little by little to approach the goal – the final solution of the Gypsy problem”. Those who today are bent on demonising the journal, what it stands for, and the society that owns it, will no doubt feast on that choice of wording, while others might cringe. But MacRitchie and Groome’s use of the phrase ‘Gypsy problem’ was not meant to describe tense relations between the Roma and majority society, nor did the expression ‘final solution’ have anything to do with regulating such relations, least of all through persecution or annihilation. Quite the opposite: In the context of the time, decades before the collocation ‘final solution of the Gypsy problem’ came to symbolise the atrocities of genocide, the pair put forward an agenda of strict enquiry, one that would contribute to knowledge and understanding, as they continue to explain in the same paragraph: