International Research Workshop  Romani Responses to Persecution: Transnational Histories of Repression and Resistance (1850–1950)

The Mandel Center will co-convene this workshop with Adrian-Nicolae Furtună, Romanian Academy and National Centre of Roma Culture, and Verena Meier, Research Center on Antigypsyism at the University of Heidelberg. The workshop is scheduled for July 13–24, 2026, and will take place at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This workshop investigates the longue durée of the persecution of Romani people from 1850 to 1950, a century anchored by the emancipation of Roma from enslavement in the Romanian principalities and culminating in the genocidal violence of the Holocaust. This period, marked by the upheavals of World War I and the collapse of empires, saw the rise of racial science and eugenics, the consolidation of modern state apparatuses of surveillance and control, intensified border regulation, and the emergence of international policing networks—developments that fundamentally transformed the trajectory of anti-Roma persecution. Applying the paradigms of both integrated and entangled history, this workshop seeks to illuminate the transnational evolution of state repression and Romani agency across time periods and political contexts. It also contributes to a history of the Holocaust as—in Michael Wildt’s —an event in which the violence directed at Jews, Roma, people with disabilities and others was “complex, intertwined, and mutually radicalizing,” fully intelligible only when studied as a shared and relational history of violence.

Across Europe in this period, Romani people were systematically racialized, criminalized, and excluded through legal frameworks, policing practices, and academic discourses that legitimated their oppression. The dissemination and intensification of these policies and practices was often galvanized by transnational exchanges: biopolitical, eugenic, and “criminal biological” theories circulated widely in European and North American academies, and surveillance techniques such as fingerprinting and registration were shared at international conferences. These connections were pivotal in shaping patterns of persecution and the mechanisms of genocide of Roma and Sinti during the Holocaust. The transfer of personnel, knowledge, and practices within the Nazi sphere of influence further radicalized violence across Europe with the outbreak of the war. In turn, the eugenic and racialized discourses and practices that underpinned this persecution—rooted in the prewar period—continued to marginalize survivors and their descendants long after 1945, as state institutions re-hired eugenicists, police officers, and other perpetrators and histories of the period obscured their crimes.

Throughout, Romani communities developed diverse strategies of survival and resistance that transcended national borders and contested their racialization. Economic adaptation through niche occupations and crafts enabled everyday survival, while strategic mobility, both within states and across their borders, served to evade persecution and to build local, regional and transnational networks of mutual aid, information exchange, and solidarity. The practice of petitioning authorities—ranging from requests for trade licenses to appeals against deportation or internment—can be found across different political, social, and economic systems throughout the mid-19th and 20th centuries and represents a particularly underexplored form of agency. Examined transnationally, these petitions reveal how Romani people navigated multiple state bureaucracies, deployed legal arguments to challenge their categorization as racially inferior or inherently criminal, and asserted claims to identity, citizenship, economic rights, and legal protection across different national contexts.