"In most contexts, Roma experienced what I would call silent persecution—the kind of targeting that takes place at the level of experts and in local decisions that often leave few traces. By the end of the nineteenth century, their exclusion took its force from the power of administrators to decide that certain Romani individuals or collectives were not entitled to citizenship or legal protections.18 Such decisions met with limited objections. Even those who otherwise proudly upheld constitutional rights —including members of liberal parties and Social Democrats—rarely took exception when administrators decided to exclude “Gypsies” from the right to move across borders in spite of valid identity papers or to detain them as suspicious enemies during wartime.19 To most observers, the surveillance of Romani populations and limitations on their movement and freedom of occupation seemed reasonable. This racism toward “Gypsies,” which few Jews publicly objected to in the prewar era, also motivated and facilitated anti-Romani measures during Nazi rule.20 The Nazis and their allies rarely campaigned with explicitly anti-Romani messages and left local actors a good deal of leeway in determining who qualified as a “Gypsy” for persecution measures.21 These decisions, therefore, left a considerably smaller paper trail than the extended debates over the identification, exclusion, and removal of Jews during Nazi rule. [...]
[A]nti-Jewish activities both before and during World War Two were distinct from anti-Romani policies in so far as they were more likely to produce substantial political noise as well as a substantial paper trail. Parliaments discussed anti-“Gypsy” legislation, but these deliberations largely produced a consensus that transcended left-right divisions. By contrast, legislative debates on Jews were contentious and offered politicians an opportunity to clarify their positions on major social and political issues. In the first two years of the French Revolution, the National Assembly dedicated no less than thirty-two parliamentary sessions to the subject of whether to give Jews—who constituted less than one percent of the population—citizens’ rights.23 One estimate claims that around 2,500 works on Jewish emancipation appeared in German lands between 1815 and 1850.24 Such disproportionate attention to the rights and actions of a small minority only grew by the late nineteenth century, when parties on the right made the threat of Jews, Jewish money, and Jewish liberalism a signature theme.25 Unlike much of the discrimination that was quietly leveled against Roma, with little debate, anti-Jewish sentiment was something people mulled over publicly and vocally—and also something that Jews opposed with just as much debate and ink. The challenge is to think of these dimensions—the relative silence or noise accompanying persecution and the traces it left—without creating hierarchies of suffering."
-- Ari Joskowicz, Rain of Ash: Roma, Jews and the Holocaust, 2023.
