# What are the religious beliefs of the Roma? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 13, 2002, 9:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-religious-beliefs-of-the-roma/142612 "2002-12-13T21:27:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2002, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-religious-beliefs-of-the-roma/142612/41 "2002-12-21T17:48:43Z")
This may be a really silly curiosity, but the Romany name for God is “Devlesha”, which of course sounds similar to “Devil” (a corruption of “diabolos” and thus some variant of it is pandemic in Europe- “teuffel” in Germany, for example). I wonder if one reason the Romany were hated was a belief they were “devil” worshippers due to semantic confusion? I know I’m always irritated when it’s reported in the press that Saddam Hussein calls America the “Great Satan” when what he is actually calling us is the “great enemy” (Arabic- shaitan- enemy; if he wanted to equate us with Satan he would refer to us as “al-Iblis”). Saddam’s evil enough without adding the supernatural, but the point is that the Actually I don’t think I had a point. ---
**Author:** ![Kal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/9de053/32.png) [@Kal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kal)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2002, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-religious-beliefs-of-the-roma/142612/42 "2002-12-21T22:27:05Z")
> [@](#): > > Actually I don’t think I had a point. Heh. I know that feeling. 😉 I think we were originally hated in Europe because we were so _alien_: Dark skin (we would have been even darker back then), strange language and customs, etc. From _The Pariah Syndrome:_ > [@](#): > > Kenrick and Puxon believe that the present-day hatred of Gypsies in Europe is a folk-memory of this first encounter, stemming from “the conviction that blackness denotes inferiority and evil [which] was well rooted in the western mind. The nearly black skins of many Gypsies marked them out to be victims of this prejudice” (1972:19). European folklore contains a number of references to the Gypsies’ complexion: a Greek proverb says “Go to the Gypsy children and choose the whitest,” and in Yiddish, “The same sun that whitens the linen darkens the Gypsy,” and “No washing ever whitens the black Gypsy.” One word in Romani which Gypsies in some countries use as a name for themselves means ‘black’, and is an Indian word of ultimately Dravidian origin: Caló, among the Spanish Gypsies, and Kalo in Finland. Caucasian non-Gypsies are called Parné or Panorré “whites” in some Romani dialects, even by fair-skinned Gypsies. Hoyland repeats the Elizabethan belief that this dark skin was acquired: “Gypsies would long ago have been divested of their swarthy complexions, had they discontinued their filthy mode of living” (1816:39-40). There’s always been some degree of intermarriage, Romanichals are now virtually indistinguishable from the majority population for example, but some of the liasons (for want of a better term) were not through choice. In Romania, where Roma were enslaved for at least 500 years until the mid 19th century\*, Romni (Romani women) would often be raped by non-Roma. Any children born because of these rapes would be born as slaves, like their mothers. You may find the book I quoted, [The Pariah Syndrome: An account of Gypsy slavery and persecution](http://www.geocities.com/Paris/5121/pariah-contents.htm), interesting if you want to find out more about that aspect of Romani history. Kal \*It’s worth noting that most of the North American Romani population are decended from these Romani slaves. Making the ‘Gypsy’ stereotype of the free-spirited nomad not only false, but also sadly ironic. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-are-the-religious-beliefs-of-the-roma/142612.md?page=2)