Yenish people


The Yenish are an itinerant group in Western Europe, living mostly in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium and parts of France, roughly centred on the Rhineland. They are descended from members of the marginalized and vagrant poor classes of society of the early modern period, and emerged as a distinct group by the early 19th century. In this regard, and also in their lifestyle, they resemble the Scottish and Irish Travellers.
Most of the Yenish have become sedentary in the course of the mid-19th to 20th centuries.

Name

The Yenish people as a distinct group, as opposed to the generic class of vagrants of the early modern period, emerge towards the end of the 18th century. The adjective jenisch is first recorded in the early 18th century in the sense of "cant, argot". A self-designation Jauner is recorded in 1793.
Jenisch remains strictly an adjective referencing the language, not the people, until the first half of the 19th century. Jean Paul glosses jänische Sprache with so nennt man in Schwaben die aus fast allen sprachen zusammengeschleppte spitzbubensprache.
An anonymous author in 1810 argues that Jauner is a deprecating term, equivalent to "cardsharp", and that the proper designation for the people should be jenische Gasche.

Germany

Many Yenish people in Germany became sedentary in the second half of the 19th century.
The Kingdom of Prussia in 1842 introduced a law forcing municipalities to provide social welfare to permanent residents without citizenship.
As a consequence, there were attempts to prevent Yenish people from taking permanent residence.
Recently-established settlements of Yenish, Sinti and Roma, dubbed "gypsy colonies", were discouraged and attempts were made to incite the settlers to move away, in the form of various forms of harassment, and in some cases physical attacks.
By the late 19th century, many recently sedentary Yenish were nevertheless integrated into local populations, gradually moving away from their tradition of endogamy thus being absorbed into the general German population. Those Yenish who did not become sedentary by the late 19th century took to living in trailers.
The persecution of gypsies under Nazi Germany beginning in 1933 were directed not exclusively against the Romani people
but also targeted "vagrants who travel around after the manner of the gypsies", which included the Yenish and people without permanent residence in general.
Travellers were scheduled for internment in Buchenwald, Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Neuengamme.
Yenish families began to be registered in a Landfahrersippenarchiv, but this effort incomplete by the end of World War II.
It appears that only very limited numbers of Yenish were actually deported: five Yenish individuals are on record as having been deported from Cologne,
and a total of 279 woonwagenbewoners are known to have been deported from the Netherlands in 1944.
Lewy has discovered one case of the deportation of a Yenish woman in 1939. Another documented Yenish victim of the Nazi policies is Ernst Lossa, who was interned and euthanized for mental illness. The Yenish people are mentioned as a persecuted group in the text of the 2012 Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism in Berlin.

Switzerland

In 2001, Swiss National Councillor Remo Galli as speaker of the foundation "Zukunft für Schweizer Fahrende" reported an estimate of 35,000 "travellers", both sedentary and non-sedentary, in Switzerland, among them an estimated 20,000 Yenish people.
From the 1920s until the 1970s, the Swiss government had a semi-official policy of institutionalizing Yenish parents and having their children adopted by members of the sedentary Swiss population. The name of this program was Kinder der Landstrasse.
What was ostensibly intended as a charitable effort to remove children from what was perceived as precarious conditions in a criminal milieu of homelessness and vagrancy
was later criticized as a violation of the fundamental rights of the Yenishe to family life, with children separated from parents by force without due criminal procedure, and resulting in many of the children suffering an ordeal of successive foster homes and orphanages.
In all, 590 children were taken from their parents and institutionalized in orphanages, mental institutions, and even prisons.
Child removals peaked in the 1930s to 1940s, in the years leading up to and during World War II. After public criticism in 1972, the program was discontinued in 1973.
An organisation for the political representation of travellers was founded in 1975, named Radgenossenschaft der Landstrasse.
The Swiss federal authorities have officially recognized the "Swiss Yenish and Sinti" as a "national minority".
With the ratification of the European language charter in 1997, Switzerland has given the status of a "territorial non-tied language" to the Yenish language.

Yenish organisations