The Jew, The Gypsy and El IslamBurton, Richard Francis, Sir
Islamic
The Jew, The Gypsy and El Islam
Burton, Richard Francis, Sir
Islam; Jews; Romanies
“It is not the less interesting to examine any point of the very
complex question of the origin of the Gipsies, and especially one so
important as this appears to be of their connexion with the Jats or
Djatt. But this point itself has, so to speak, several faces. There
is the part belonging to erudition in the strict sense, and I think
that Professor de Goeje has treated it very ably; but there is the
ethnological, anthropological, and even the linguistic part of the
subject, which does not appear to me to be very far advanced up to
the present time. _It is this part that Mr. Burton has handled; and
as he has lived in the midst of the Jats, he was in some respects in
the best condition for throwing great light upon it; but, on the one
hand, he ought perhaps to have been better acquainted with the Gipsies,
and, on the other, it does not appear that the connexion between the
Gipsies and the Jats has occupied him much. He 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._[101] No doubt in occupying
himself specially with the Jats, in giving in 1849 a grammar of their
language (of which I cannot appreciate the value, but which did not
prevent Professor Pott, in 1853, from saying that we were wanting
in information respecting this idiom),[102] in collecting some very
summary data concerning their division into four tribes, and upon their
history and manners, he has furnished some materials, but materials
quite insufficient,[103] for a comparison, _which is still unmade,_
between this race and the Gipsies. He tells us, for example, that the
appearance and other peculiarities of this race authorize as probable
the supposition of a relationship between it and the Gipsies. But he
does not give us even the smallest information respecting the type
(appearance) of the Jats; and the other ‘peculiarities’ which he does
not explain, and which we are obliged to seek in scattered traits,
furnish such fugitive comparisons that one can conclude nothing from
them. In reality nearly every tribe in India (not to speak of certain
tribes in other countries) will furnish, when compared with the
Gipsies, quite as many, if not more, points of resemblance. Indeed this
is, more or less, the defect of nearly all the comparisons which have
been made between the Gipsies and such or such populations of India;
the authors of these comparisons are not sufficiently acquainted with
the Gipsies, and their study of the resemblances is not sufficiently
_specific_.
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