The research dedicated to Roma people has been and, every so often, continues to be the ground for fanciful speculation. Nevertheless, from the modern period to the present times this area of research has privileged trans- and interdisciplinary approaches. This volume represents the result of several years of research carried by the historical team (Bogdan Andriescu, Manuela Marin, Cristina Mocanu, Daniela Popescu, Marian Zăloagă) involved in the project “The role of religion and religious actors in Roma social inclusion: towards a participatory approach” (PARI-RO-NO-2019-0586), managed by the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu (Romania) in collaboration with the VID Specialized University of Oslo (Norway). In this international project, the group of historians joined forces with other research teams specializing in social sciences and in theological studies. The composition of the entire team of the project, which was meant to be both an academic investigation and a form of social engagement, brought together specialists coming from a variety of different fields. Contributors from Romania and Norway such as Stefan Tobler, Stephanie Dietrich, Annette Rose Leis-Peters, Inger Marie Lid, Tor Slettebø, Bjorn Hallstein Holte, Alexandru Ioniță, Manuela Marin, Marian Zăloagă, Bogdan Andriescu, Cristina Mocanu, Daniela Popescu, Daniela Stanciu, Sorina Corman, Sabina Luca, Camelia Badea, Ioana-Andrada Brumă, Ioana Gîmbuțanu, Diana Iordache, Radu Lăzureanu, Marin Roxana, Crăciun-Ioan Lăcătuş, worked with commitment for the accomplishment of this multi- and inter-disciplinary project. Other people collaborated for shorter periods of time. Given its anticipated approach, the project was envisioned to be more than just a debate among academics and, in order to achieve that goal, ethnic Roma, elites as well as ordinary believers were invited to join in.
The participatory approach was the central concept around which the entire project revolved, and depending on different variables, it was inspected by all the teams involved. Accordingly, it was sought that Roma people from different communities should be not only intermediaries or sources of information, but also co-producers of knowledge. One of the most important objectives has been to stimulate Roma ethnics to get involved in the elaboration of the final results of the project. Undoubtedly, such a tackling represents a paradigmatic shift and its main purpose was to reduce the recognized inequalities intrinsic to the scientific production. Therefore, a substantial part in the debates was concerned with finding the most suitable approaches which would enable all participants to acknowledge and address the existing disparities associated with the actors involved in the elaboration of the final textual product. Such a solicitude is an attribute of the (co-)/participatory approach, which essentially pursues the reduction of hierarchies derived from the privileged position of the researcher in relation to the subject of research. The main idea was to find a common ground for the actors involved and to kindle reflexivity on aspects such as the influence of the research output in terms of power relations and, at the same time, to strive to make the scientific approach more democratic (Park, 2006, pp. 83–93; Lid, 2021, pp. 41–59). Recognizably this approach has an acknowledged empowering potential, primarily for those groups belonging to voluntarily silent and/or to the intentionally subordinated communities that have been, most of the time, the object of research, but showed little interest and/or were rarely given the chance to answer back. Regardless of their background, the participants in the project were primarily stimulated to challenge and revise previous ways of producing knowledge. Hence, the project members were called to make steps in direction of the decolonization of the (pre-)/existing research of Roma culture (Dunajeva, 2018, pp. 124–143, Costache, 2018, pp. 30–43). A key issue was to tackle the investigated matters in such a manner that would enable the research output to become intelligible not only to the scientific community but also to the members of the Roma communities. At the same time, the intent was to catch the interests of other circles of scholars or of the social workers active outside the field of Romani studies.
One has to admit that the aforementioned theoretical framework has been, in many respects, difficult to adopt. Peculiarities with regard to the data collection or the nature of the information with which each team are often accustomed to work, demanded all the researchers to question basic methodologies of their scientific discipline.
The sheer familiarization with the framework concept and the literature dedicated to it was far from being a sufficient prerequisite. Ideally, the project expected that the members would go through a variety of studies, as far as possible, from all the fields which were intersecting in the project. However, the context in which the project started was far from being auspicious for such bold interdisciplinary research. COVID crisis and the disruptions caused by the pandemic, respectively, the withdrawal of one of the essential religious actors, were factors that worked against the pursue of a (co-)/participatory approach understood in a holistic and multivocal manner. Such unfortunate obstacles affected seriously each of the teams, as the access to the sources, to the voice and to the knowledge of the partners were irremediably impaired.
The fact that the Romanian Orthodox Church decided to bring to an end any form of collaboration seemed to jeopardize the project. This self-contained attitude was officially motivated by the fact that the Romanian Orthodox Church claimed to have its own experts and these had not been co-opted in the project from the moment of its inception. This positioning may reflect the brushing-off attitude of the Romanian Orthodox Church with regard to particular historical matters. Unlike the Catholic Church which through the voice of the Pope Francis (1936–2025) asked for forgiveness to the Roma people for having been mistreated in the long historical run, a public statement made in front of a Roma Greek-Catholic parish from Blaj in 2012 during the official visit in Romania (Pullella, 2019), the superintendents of the main religious actor in nowadays Romania have not officially condemned the murder of the Jews and the Roma (Schmitt, 2023, p. 187). However, the delicate situation conducted to the revision of the project which, subsequently, opened towards other religious actors from Romania. Stated differently, an unanticipated drawback has turned into an opportunity and it prompted researchers to recalibrate research objectives. In new circumstances, all teams, and particularly the members of the history team were stimulated to recover the perspectives towards Roma shared by other religious actors, such as the Greek-Catholic Church or the neo-Protestant churches.
As some sections of this volume will illustrate the refocusing has been very beneficial because it allowed to present and analyze documents which cover the multiple options of ethnic Roma in terms of religious affiliation and practices. Albeit the predominance of the Orthodox denomination is generally agreed upon, in the modern and later on in the contemporary period, the religious landscapes in the various regions of the present time Romanian state has been defined by diversity (Cf. Bolovan, 2000, pp. 213–219; Negruți, 2014, pp. 31–38). This pluralistic feature of the religious landscape from Romanian lands had not gone unnoticed and Roma, themselves, responded to it in the contexts associated with the process of asserting their ethnic identity. They did so, either in a subordinate position in relation to the hegemonic religious actors within the provinces that became part of the modern Romanian state emerging after the end of the Forst World War, or, when Roma affirmed their ethnic identity, by adhering to the neo-Protestant churches. Noticeably, even in a communist context dominated by atheistic ideas strongly disseminated in the society, members of this ethnic group chose to found separate Roma churches, a movement that started from the grass root level. As it will be demonstrated, in various historical contexts, Roma have shown a disposition for appropriation of certain cultural elements related to the religious practices characterizing the traditional religious actors, respectively, they demonstrated agency manifested by means of religious conversion, to diverse neo-Protestant churches.
It must be conceded that the historical part of the project brought together only non-Roma researchers. Aware of this deficit, members in the history team found it fruitful to consider the scientific and non-scientific literature written by the Romanian Roma intellectual elites who have addressed, in a more or less systematic manner, the topic of religion in their publications. Articles written by Roma researchers investigated the period of the slavery and highlighted that the status of social inferiority imposed to the Roma impacted overwhelmingly on the way they could relate to the traditional religious institutions. This was suggested after a close investigation of the memory of the descendants of the former Roma slaves belonging to the ecclesiastical actors such as the Orthodox monasteries (Furtună, 2022, pp. 168–196). In other writings, scholars of Romanian Roma descent, some of them acting as veritable public intellectuals, reflected on the spiritual dimension of Roma identity and/or exposed the cultural and institutional racism – e.g. secular and religious – conspicuous in the Romanian popular culture. These publications provided with a perspective on the matter as understood by several in-group representatives who have been also playing a role in the coagulation and re-affirmation of a post-Communist Roma collective identity (Burtea, 2007, pp. 241–245; Burtea, 2016, pp. 137–139; Ionescu, 2022; Grigore, 2001; Grigore, 2007, pp. 18–29). Aware of the hetero-identity of the researcher in relation to the Roma group some of the contributors to the present volume found it instructive to take a close look to the works of a Romanian Roma Orthodox theologian who, in his overtly side-taking publications, discussed the particularities of Orthodox missionary activities among Roma (Cf. Căldăraru, 2022). Part of the publications authored by the aforementioned authors, who have proudly assumed their Roma identity, were critically inspected in previous papers. The resulting studies revealed how Roma authors belonging to two generations (e.g. communist respectively post-communist) have articulated their collective identity discourses. It was possible to disclose how the religion has become a veritable territory of contestation and/or affirmation of an ethnic group which is known for displaying very heterogeneous cultural traditions. (Zăloagă, 2022a, pp. 431–460; Zăloagă, 2022b, pp. 129–162; Zăloagă, 2023, pp. 113–148).
By all means, the aforementioned readings were regarded as compulsory steps for trying to reduce the already acknowledged shortcomings. Moreover, it was not enough to simply account for the perspectives of the Roma elites, but it became an impetus for us as non-Roma researchers to reflect on the world and to the practice(s) of science. We learned that carrying research should be more than an engagement with generating data but an effort to learn about the cultures under study (Sarafian, 2024, p. 87). Therefore, the matter of positionality of the researcher has become, implicitly, a serious concern for the contributors to the present volume. More specifically, this can be pursued in the extended essays preceding each bulk of documents, respectively, in the sections where the selected documents were critically commented.
Undeniably, the literature produced by the Romanian Roma authors re-/shaped our understanding of specific issues regarding the religious life of the Roma. Their output persuaded us to incorporate in the analysis a level of cultural sensitivity which has been neglected in previous historical research. Yet, even in the conditions of considering and showing eagerness to appropriate, up to one point, the perspectives of the Romanian Roma elites about the religious life of the in-group, the researcher’s take on the matter will remain far from ever becoming an uncompromised apprehension of the ordinary Roma. In consequence, we embraced the seminal conclusions reached by the adepts of “thick description,” a paradigm coined by the cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz from which historians took a lot of inspiration, and recognized, in full intellectual humility, that such an accomplishment cannot be fully achieved. According to Geertz “the culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong” (Geertz 1973, p. 452) and this realization should be regarded as instructive for both Roma and non-Roma researchers when engaging into deciphering the discourses about the religious life of a marginalized, negatively labeled and/or exoticized ethnic group. Hence, contemporary researchers of any ethnic background or ideological conviction should refrain from fallaciously maintaining that their understating could be one and the same with that of the Roma living in the past. What can be attained, with a degree of trustworthiness, is to critically examine the voices of the knowledge producers which, in various ways, mirror the cultural biases of the issuers, be they non-Roma or Roma.
Acclaimed specialists, who stepped on the footmarks of anthropologists, underlined that even if embracing the “thick description” – as the nearest, yet not the complete manner to obtain a view from the inside – historians will be always constrained by the existing sources. The most balanced approach is to agree that the historical texts available provide access to a “multiplicity and hierarchy of structured meanings [which shall be kept] open for later (and other) interpretations” (Medick, 1995, p. 52). Although, the present volume has declaratively been titled “a sourcebook” it is more than that and, therefore, Medick’s reasoning remains valuable for the way the authors of the volume tackled the matter in the analytical sections.
Unquestionably, the interests paid to the positionality and the power relations is prerequisite in the present-day research on the Roma because such a “movement recognizes the colonial biases in this academic field: essentialising, objectifying and romanticizing Roma was commonplace in academia in the past, while knowledge was almost exclusively produced by non-Roma “outsiders”. Interpretation of cultures, traditions, identities and aspects of everyday life was done by foreigners/outsiders/out-of-group members who belonged to the dominant group; often with no consideration of uneven power dynamics, with resulting research often reinforcing existing discrimination” (Jekatyerina & Vajda, 2021, p. 236, 238). However, even when dealing with the univocal and the hegemonic sources from the past, which are frequently external to various disempowered social or cultural groups, it should be emphasized that these subjects shall be regarded “not only [as] victims but also [as] actors [which] can suffer under the historical conditions but can also take advantage of them” (Dülmen, 2000, p. 100). Else said, incomplete, contradicting and, undeniably biased as they may be, the historical sources referring to the Roma religious life can unveil a certain degree of agency from the part of the Roma.
The scholarly publications which explore the relations between religious actors and Roma from Romania, from a historical perspective, are not exactly numerous (Cf. Keul, 2002, pp. 195–221; Petre, 2010, pp. 159–173; Zăloagă, 2015, pp. 127–176; Ploscariu, 2020, pp. 316–326; Achim, 2021, pp. 117–142; Rotaru, 2021, pp. 75–92; Marin, 2022, pp. 405–430; Cupcea, 2023, pp. 205–219). On this matter, the studies of sociologists and cultural anthropologists are more diverse and worth to be taken into consideration (Cf. Ries, 2007; Gog & Roth, 2012, pp. 388–401; Popoviciu & Popoviciu, 2012, pp. 123–144; Fosztó, 2009; Marushiakova & Popov, 2017, pp. 109–123; Bănică, 2019; Kotics, 2019, pp. 263–279). They should be seriously considered alongside with those signed by authors with theological training (Cf. Haupt, 2009; Geantă, 2022). With all the abundance of social studies focusing on religion in Roma life, it must be underscored that only a few addressed the historical aspect of the topic. One can also observe that the studies undertook were not (co-)participative, but rather researchers preferred to employ the classic method of the interview and participatory observation. However, unlike the research undertook by the Gypsolorist scholars from the long 19th century, the aforementioned studies paid particular attention to the emic and ethical dimensions of research.
One cannot ignore that most of the specialists in the field of social studies, the authors with theological training or those with pastoral practice have inspected the subject, primarily, within the chronological context in which they circumscribed their research. Most of the time, they focused on the post-1989 period, a period that witnessed a revival of religious experience. Undeniably, this phenomenon substantively marked the destinies of many Roma communities. In numerous cases, the interest in the topic has been related to the identification of ways to integrate/control the members of this ethnic group. Such an observation allows to emphasize that the action of producing knowledge about Roma, has continued to be a process that, inevitably, betrays a relatively disguised, yet, intrinsic exercise of power. This observation applies also to those aspects concerning the religious life and denominational options of various Roma communities.
The contributors to this volume decided to cover a time span staring in the 18th century and ending in the year 1989. In essence, the decision was motivated by the professional expertise of the members of the history team, scholars who have dedicated their careers to studying topics relevant for the modern and contemporary Romanian history. For reasons justified by the absence of colleagues having different ethnic (e.g. Hungarian and German) and confessional (e.g. Catholic, Reformed, or Lutheran) backgrounds, we decided to narrow our research to the discourses and practices of the Romanian and Roma-speaking religious actors. An additional argument for our choice was that, in the long run, the majority of Roma living in the territories between the borders of today’s Romanian state have chosen to religiously affiliate to faith communities adopted, in particular, by the ethnic Romanians. (Burtea, 2007, p. 243; Crowe, 2007, pp. 130, 134; Fosztó, 2009, p. 49.)
Taking into consideration the issues already mentioned, the features of the sources that preserve historical information, and lastly the obstacles encountered by the members of the team when it came to accessing ecclesiastical archivistic founds, one can uphold that a (co-)/participatory analysis in the sense theorized by social scientists and some historians – who acknowledged the importance of research into giving a voice to marginalized groups (Bergold & Stefan, 2012, pp. 191–222; Lempert, 2013, p. 1) – seemed hardly achievable. However, the historians involved in PARI were able to respond to the unpleasant situation caused by the banning of access to the archives held by the main ecclesiastical institution in Romania. Correspondingly, we made use of the sources available in digitized databases (e.g. Arcanum data base and the digitalized collections of “Lucian Blaga” University Library from Cluj-Napoca, The University Library of “Lucian Blaga” University from Sibiu, ASTRA Library from Sibiu) or relied on unpublished documents which are held in the archival fonds of several public secular institutions: The Library of the Romanian Academy – Fond Historical Documents, Jassy County Service of the National Archives – Fond The Monastery of St. Sava in Jassy, Jassy County Service of the National Archives – Fond Documents Collection, Special Collections of ASTRA Library Sibiu – Fond Manuscripts, The Service of the Central National Historical Archives, – Fond of the Council of Ministers – Under-Secretariat of State for Nationalities, The Service of Central National Historical Archives, Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party – The Fund Organizational Section, The Archive of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives – Documentary Fond, Archive of the National Council for the Study of Security Archives – Informative Fond. Furthermore, leaving aside the non-collaborative stance adopted by the main religious actor in Romania, an equally important reason for being unable to carry out a veritable (co-)/participative approach – in the sense of reducing the power differentials intrinsic to the production of historical knowledge –, was bound to the irrefutable fact that the published or unpublished sources available were issued by the ecclesiastical and/or secular institutions external to the Roma group. Admittedly, these institutional actors, external to the Roma culture, created a rich and heterogeneous amount of data, but their purpose was implicitly aimed to justify the practices of subordination, surveillance, forced integration of members of this ethnic group. Considering the nature of the documents identified and commented, it seemed less plausible that they were auspicious for an investigation targeted to map the identity affirmation of the Roma groups. However, through a critical approach of the available materials, the authors of this volume proposed a re-reading of the already dealt with or of the recently identified sources. Accordingly, the objectivity and neutrality claimed by the issuers of the historical sources has been, deliberately, counterbalanced by our efforts as researchers to underline the subjectivities that can be identified within the official lines of argument adopted by the agents/voices who did not belong to the Roma group (Bergold & Thomas, 2012, p. 202).
Through a hermeneutic of the institutional practices (Cf. Shmidt & Jaworsky, 2021; Tauber & Trevisan, 2020, pp. 3–12), contributors to this volume critically addressed, how, through their writings, religious and non- religious actors, from the more or less distant past, have engaged in the production of knowledge about Roma. At the same time, a constant preoccupation was to unravel to what extent their observations have contributed to the emergence and perpetuation of exclusionary attitudes or, on the contrary, how grass root local arrangements have facilitated, more or less, explicit measures of inclusion of Roma believers in mainstream or in the alternative/competing communities of faith. By examining legal texts, family and monastery archives, the press and, last but not least, the documents created by the agents of the communist secret police (e.g. the Securitate), the contributors to this volume sought to analyze the ways in which religious and secular actors tried to apprehend Roma people’s relation to various communities of faith. It should be underscored that an overview of the historical sources can reveal that Roma ethnics were just recently, in erratic scientific research or sometimes in police investigations, dealt with from the perspective of their religious options. Before reaching this point, throughout the long 19th century, there were rare and indirect textual references which allow the historians to gain access to the voices of the Roma (Achim, 2016, pp. 56–67; Mateescu, 2014). Such a remark holds true for religious options and practices that have been recorded, more or less, meticulously and/or equidistantly by the non-Roma, whether they were clergymen or laymen. First and foremost, the reading of the texts selected in this volume is able to highlight, the prejudices that were standing behind the derogatory and excluding discourses. Occasionally, one can distinguish remarks that, in subtext, are able to reveal that the repudiating rhetoric dedicated to the generic Roma, pre-defined as religious deviants per se, could be paralleled and, sometimes, even invalidated by a series of everyday (in-)/voluntarily inclusive practices adopted at local or micro-community level.
This volume can demonstrate that information on the religious choices of members of the Roma ethnic group was not necessarily scarce, although, one needs to admit that the preferred topics visited to sketch Roma otherness were usually of a different nature. The major problem, whether we refer to unpublished or edited sources, is that the available information is not homogenous, but rather ephemeral and fragmentary. Perhaps even more problematic is the fact that it is stored in many library collections and archival holdings. Inevitably, this is the consequence of the subordinate position of the Roma in Romania’s history and, at the same time, it resulted from the maintenance of this ethnic group in an oral tradition. At the same time, the consistency of the presence of the Roma in the archival holdings depended a lot on historical contexts and political regimes. Therefore, one could recognize fluctuations with respect to the attention paid to the Roma issue by the various actors who produced, over time, information about this ethnic group (Anița, 2023, p. 31). This volume can point to the fact that until the capture of political power by the communists, the production of knowledge about Roma was predominantly in the hands of religious actors or of those associated with them. Even when it wasn’t the creation of churchmen, the texts about Roma were infused with religious biases, often having little or no substance. It must be also acknowledged that some discriminatory or even repressive measures adopted by the secular authorities were tacitly appropriated by people who were part of the internal staff of the various denominations around which the Roma gravitated.
Significant differences between the typology and the content of the sources, as well as the particularities related to the chronological timeframe and of political regime, the regional peculiarities and also significant variables related to the importance of religion in society have determined the authors of the volume to group the material into four distinct parts. In the first part, by the contributions of Bogdan Andriescu and Cristina Mocanu, private family respectively monastery archival funds were brought to light. In the second and the third parts, Marian Zăloagă, respectively, Daniela Popescu explored the material published in the cultural, educational, confessional and scientific press during the long 19th century and the inter-war period. Finally, in the fourth part, Manuela Marin investigated the communist period from the perspective of the archival materials produced by the communist secret police and other bodies of the state and party apparatus.
It was the task of each of the above-mentioned co-authors/editors to select and organize, as much as possible, the identified material thematically and to accompany the original texts with insightful explanations. The contributors to the volume also agreed that each section should be accompanied by an essay dedicated to the description of the period and to examine the specificity of the sources and the propensities of the actors involved in their production. The authors of the introductory essays which open each of the four parts agreed that was a mandatory task to dwell on the merits, the potentials and the limitations of the sources they have identified. In addition, each author was entrusted with the freedom to adopt an appropriate theoretical framework so as to further emphasize how the selected documents are helpful for making sense of the Roma religious life in terms of affiliation, practices and, eventually, of spiritual experience. It should be underlined that most of the documents in the present volume have been included in a previous documentary volume (Marin, Zăloagă, Popescu, Mocanu, Andriescu 2024). Various reasons led to the idea of coming with a Romanian version of the volume. Initially, it seemed practical to make the historical materials available to the Roma co-researchers since most of them lacked any command of English language. Furthermore, we foresaw that the volume can be used as an additional material in courses of Roma history and civilization taught at different educational levels in Romania.
In addition, considering the source of funding as well as the academic curiosity of the Norwegian colleagues drove us to deliver a sensibly abridged English version of the aforementioned collection of documents. The materials collected and commented in the present volume are made available in English for the first time, hence, targeting an international reading public. In the process of translation, the language has been modernized and it was a constant struggle to keep up with the accuracy of the content of the document. Unquestionably, this was a daring enterprise provided that even in Romanian version it may be occasionally challenging for the nowadays average reader to comprehend the meaning behind the language of documents, be them manuscripts or printed materials. Each contributor worked closely with Corina Cioltei-Hopârtean, the designated translator, to finally deliver the best translation possible. Nevertheless, the effort put for having an English version will surely serve the international academia for future comparative research. Moreover, an additional peer-reviewing process was helpful to accomplish a more nuanced English language version. Therefore, we express our gratitude for some suggestions made by the anonymous reviewers as their input proved to be extremely relevant and valuable.
In the long run, the narratives tackling the religious affiliation and religiosity of the Roma upheld the manifestation of an attitude of mimicry, indifference, opportunism. Broadly speaking, a form of superficiality in responding to the elementary doctrinal content of any faith has always been discursively reiterated. There are rare instances when the sources found and collected evidenced the existence of special forms of religiosity, characterizing exclusively the Roma ethnics. Even in contexts when the non-Roma authors pursued such an argument, they did it in order to emphasize the exoticism of the Roma culture. As the materials collected and discussed in sections two and three of this volume are able to demonstrate, this narrative tradition visited and popularized in the printed sources of the long 19th century persisted during the inter-war period.
However, stepping beyond this cultural narrative – which essentially exculpated the ignorance and/or the low level of interest with which the religious actors took into consideration the spiritual needs of the Roma – it can be noticed that the sources collected in this volume are able to present a series of occurrences developing at the the grass root level which were far more complex. Whether we refer to unpublished sources or to those published in various periodicals, with a varied circulation and thematic coverage, the data provided by the documents collected in this volume can confirm but, in the same time, refute the hypothesis of a religious identity radically different from that of the Romanian believers.
One can observe that the sources collected and commented in the volume may refer to the participation of the clerics in the administration of rites of passage of the Roma, to the acceptance of Roma into church administrative structures, while some of them recorded the success of missionary activities initiated by religious or secular actors. Some documents provide information about the access to or the reception of the Christian religious message, either in oral or printed form, respectively, by means of audio-video recordings. Once the tone of superiority, inherent in the sources produced by secular or ecclesiastical bodies external to the Roma ethnic group is bypassed, it can be noticed that a variety of the sources proposed for publication by the co-authors of this volume dealt directly or only tangentially with aspects of Roma religious life, which shows that this particular matter was not at all insignificant. Even though, often the strangeness has been usually underscored – in itself an approach intended to legitimize the implicit forms of marginalization or even exclusion –, one can recognize that numerous legal, statistical, socio-economic, materials destined to the consumption of the masses or written for a restricted but informed public, along with the internal reports of the institutions concerned with the mass surveillance, actually unveil the porosity of the boundaries between Roma and non-Roma groups. Read in the informed and subtle manner, the documents are able to divulge different forms of inclusion of the Roma in various communities of faith, which had an older or more recent presence in the Romanian milieu, even in the conditions that such a state of affairs could manifest in asymmetrical terms.
From a quantitative perspective, the documents selected from the periods corresponding to the long 19th century and the inter-war period bring evidence for the social relevance of religion, both in terms of identification and from the standpoint of evaluating the (non-)/conformism of Roma individuals or communities. The archival documents and the legal codes reveal that the preoccupation with the moral conduct of the Roma groups caught the attention of the actors who had power of decision, regardless if they were laymen or priests. Essentially, every decree that referred to Roma “civilization” during the long 19th century were articulated on the basis of and in accordance to religious principles. Therefore, in the texts covering state or local realities from the 19th century or the inter-war period, the adoption of religious practices, preferably Christian, were regarded as benchmarks for validating the belonging – either fully or at least to a certain extent – of the Roma to the ambitious project of civilization. The documents presented in the fourth section of this volume attest that even in the context of the atheist communist state, when both the existence of Roma as a recognized nationality and the religious issue were officially repudiated from public debate and public consciousness, the relationship between the two topics remained close. Else formulated, even in a chronological timeframe dominated by a political regime who authoritatively subverted religion – by close surveillance of the public actions of the institutional structures, of the forms of aggregation and social identification and of the eventual emotional expressions ˗, the exploration of Roma identity unveils the effect of prejudices and, at the same time, the intersectionality of different schemes of thought shared by the non-Roma observers and knowledge producers. This observation is supported by reports issued, in part, by the agents active in the structures of the much-feared Securitate. In those files, their producers correlated forms of religiosity, relegated to the domestic space or manifested in a reinterpreted enactment in the public space, with manifestations of political reactionarism. This is noticeable especially in cases when certain actions were understood as forms of affirmation of an ethnic identity.
The research published in this book has a hybrid character replicating, to a certain extent, a pattern already pursued for the investigation of the inter-war history of the Roma in Central and Eastern European countries. It should be underlined that up to the comprehensive approach carried on by the multinational team coordinated by Elena Marushiakova and Veselin Popov (Cf. Marushiakova & Popov, 2021; Marushiakova & Popov, 2022), historical Western research on Roma originating in the eastern Europe has often advanced theses without solid documentary evidence. Research from historical perspective was rather sketched starting from random references to the works of foreign travelers or to historical-ethnographic syntheses which often compiled standardized and stereotypical information. The variables in terms of content and interpretation were often insignificant, underscoring the conservative, even fossilized, nature of knowledge production and explains the oversimplifying assessments resulting from the shallow self-insertion of the authors in a community of citations. Through the present volume the authors aim to deepen the understanding of aspects related to religious affiliation and religiosity of the Roma, hence, adding to the existing body of literature a volume which privileges the historical dimension of such issues.
The edited and commented texts gathered in this volume bring evidence about the articulation of stereotypical derogative narratives that have maintained excluding attitudes, respectively, recover instances that, through banal and random information originating from the parish/community level, can become illustrative for the existence of various forms of Roma inclusion in the religious life of different communities of faith. Fragmentary as they are, some data from the last category may reveal unanticipated manifestations of consistency and zeal in terms of religious practices. They may also highlight forms of politicization of religious identity – manifesting prior to those already acknowledged in the existing literature dedicated to the topic – or attest stratagems of reinterpreting certain religious practices with consequences over the expression of a collective Roma ethnic identity.
The materials presented cannot be completely comprehensible if they are not analyzed in the context of the epoch. In order to be as conclusive as possible, in their commentaries, the co-authors of the volume have provided details about the historical and socio-cultural framework in which certain information or assessments were issued. To a certain extent, a correlation can be established between the typology of the sources used, their content and the intentions of the producer of the documents. In a more or less distinct manner, the interest for the religious life of the Roma often went beyond the sheer provisioning with specific factual details strictly relevant for members of this ethnic group. In many contexts, the discussion around the Roma religion also invited to reflections on broader societal issues, (in-)/directly relating to the challenges encountered by the dominant ethnic groups and/or communities of faith.
Invariably, the literature on Roma in the period under scrutiny in this volume as well as a significant part of the sources published in the following pages have rehearsed a pejorative discourse downgrading Roma religiosity by labeling it as forms of superstition. This line of argument has been a recurrence in the discourse of churchmen or the secular actors associated with them or even of their contestants. Sometimes the ambiguous term of “mysticism” was made use of in the reports of the agents active in the secret police’s apparatus and the accounts of their collaborators when they covered the topic of emerging Roma churches. The co-authors of this volume expect that both the documentary texts and the comments made, as well as the introductory essays accompanying each set of commented historical sources, will be able to reveal that the religious actors have been, in part, responsible for the marginalization and social exclusion of Roma people. At the same time, we want to emphasize that this indisputable tendency represents only one facet of a much more complex reality. As it will be noticed, this volume comprises relevant information showing that religious actors did respond to the spiritual needs of Roma through inclusive actions. To conclude, it needs to be acknowledged that during the period under scrutiny in this volume, the concern of religious actors with Roma was not programmatic and/or systematic, but rather intermittent, this rather sporadic engagement being motivated by a myriad of factors, some local, statal, or transnational.
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