The Roma genocide : the roma Pariahs before, during, and after the second world war

Abstract

The term “pariah” was used by Max Weber in his Ancient Judaism (published originally in the years 1917–1919) to describe the Jewish nation which, as he maintained, was “separated, formally or de facto, from their social surroundings.” Inspired by Weber’s work, Hannah Arendt was the first to expand this concept to include the Roma people, albeit unwittingly. In the light of Arendt’s essay “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” the pariah is a “suspect” treated in accordance with the rules of an investigation, examination, or inspection. Constantly watched, spied on, or kept under surveillance, the pariah becomes hypervisible. The Roma pariahs have been immersed in the “ecology of fear” for ages. Never immune to accusations such as theft or fraud, they have always been construed as the criminogenic element of the society. The “suspicion” would all too easily turn into “prevention,” which would frequently take very radical forms. However, it was only in 1987 that the book The Pariah Syndrome: An Account of Gypsy Slavery and Persecution by Ian Hancock cast light directly onto the Roma pariah. The figure of the pariah helps to reveal the essence of the uniqueness of Porajmos – the Roma genocide as a genocide parallel to the Shoah, yet driven by different causes, proceeding along a different course, and burdened with different consequences. One of these consequences was the fact that in the post-war period the extermination of the Roma gradually sank into oblivion and, thereby, into invisibility.