An Inquiry into the Ottomans’ Knowledge and Perception of the Gypsies in the late 19^th Century

This paper aims to inquire the knowledge and the perception of the Ottomans on the Gypsy in the late 19th century. Three different texts will be examined in order to shed light on what the Ottomans knew about Gypsies during the aforementioned period. The first one, a fictional one, embodying both popular and scholarly knowledge is the novel GypsyÇingene (1887) of the prolific Ottoman author Ahmet Mithat Efendi. Ahmet Mithat, inspired by Mérimée, attempts to refute the prejudices against the Gypsies in his novel, albeit through the reproduction of the conventional Gypsy image found in the European texts of the 19^th century. The second text, representing scholarly knowledge reclaiming scientific value, belongs to Şemseddin Sami (Fraschery) Efendi and is the “Gypsy-Çingâne” entry in his famous encyclopaedia-Kamûsü l-a،lâm (1891). As a result of modernization and westernization, the text of Şemseddin Sami reproduces the negative image of the Gypsies generated by his European counterparts on whose texts he partially bases his work and on which he transposes his own prejudices. The last text based on practical and personal knowledge as it is claimed by its author, is a lengthy and detailed report (1891) underlining the urgency of improving the living conditions of the Gypsy population, submitted to the authorities by Sa‘di Efendi, an Ottoman-Turkish and Persian teacher at a secondary school in Serres-Greece. The report of Professor Sa‘di, as the only text to be written based on the personal experience of its author, will provide an opportunity to compare the local-eastern perception of Gypsies to the two other western-oriented texts. The analysis of these texts bearing three different kinds of knowledge and having thus three different objectives, will not only offer complementary information on the perception of Gypsies and on their living conditions in the Ottoman Empire, but will also throw light on how they were known and more importantly defined by the Ottomans: a definition more or less common in all three texts which shows how deeply rooted the prejudices against the Gypsies in the Ottoman Empire were.