This article deals with migrations during the past five centuries of the three major sixteenth-century Anabaptist reform groups: Swiss Brethren, Dutch Mennonites, and Hutterites. It also includes the migrations of the Amish, a branch of the Swiss Brethren. Most of the focus is on country to country migrations, and therefore does not deal with the inner country migrations in the German states, Russia/USSR, Canada, the United States of America, and Mexico. The stories of the new global Anabaptist Mennonite communities are also not included in this discussion. These new communities, which were begun as a result of mission efforts by the historic Mennonite churches, today constitute about sixty percent of the total global Anabaptist Mennonite membership.

In contrast to other sixteenth-century churches, Anabaptists were non-magisterial, that is, they separated church and state. Except for the short-lived Anabaptist state church in Nikolsburg, Moravia in the 1520s and 1530s, and the brief violent Münster episode in the 1530s, Anabaptist groups were free churches. As such, they practised adult baptism, refused to swear the oath, and were pacifist, often refusing to bear the sword. The governments of the day considered these beliefs threats to the political, economic, and social stability of their states. In 1529, the imperial diet at Speyer threatened with death whoever did not recognize infant baptism.

Migrations usually have reasons that motivate people to move and factors that draw people to another place. In the case of Swiss Brethren, Dutch Mennonites, and Hutterites the reason for migration was religious persecution. Had they converted to the local state churches, no migrations would have been necessary. What drew them were sympathetic rulers who were willing to give the refugee Anabaptists protection, religious freedom or at least tolerance, and the means to make a living. This usually consisted of opportunities to rent land and carry on trades.

The functional definition of migration used in this article is the movement of a significant number of people from one country to another. Most often the migrants formed a new community, or communities. At times, though, such migrants also joined existing Mennonite communities in the new locations.

Swiss Brethren/Swiss Mennonites/Amish

Swiss Anabaptism began with the rebaptism of Conrad Grebel, Georg Blaurock, and others in Zurich in January 1525. These Swiss Brethren were promptly persecuted. The movement spread westward to the Canton of Berne. Persecution from the canton governments continued for years, with Anabaptists imprisoned, executed, or sold as galley slaves. After the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), the availability of land and the possibility of greater religious freedom let to a migration of Swiss Brethren to the Alsace and Palatinate in the late seventeenth century.

In the 1690s, a major controversy over the issue of accommodation to, or separation from, the surrounding society tore the Swiss Brethren communities apart. The more separatist group named itself Amish after its spokesperson, Jacob Ammann. The other group, after making connections with Dutch Mennonites, adopted the named Mennonite, and became known as Swiss Mennonites.

Persecutions and legal restrictions of Swiss Mennonites and Amish in the Alsace and Palatinate intensified in the early eighteenth century. They had difficulty getting exemption from military service and from swearing the oath. Worship services were forbidden. The result was that many Mennonites and Amish were forced to leave. Some Mennonites and Amish, joined by coreligionists from Switzerland, migrated down the Rhine River to the Netherlands in the early eighteenth century.

Starting in 1707, Swiss Mennonites from the Palatinate and Switzerland migrated to Pennsylvania, at that time a British colony. William Penn, a wealthy Quaker, had received a large tract of land from the English king, and to this land Penn invited Quakers and other persecuted people.

With the assistance of Dutch Doopsgezinde, Swiss Mennonites migrated individually and in small groups from 1707 to the American Revolution in the 1770s. Starting in 1736, Amish in the Alsace, who faced the same restrictions, migrated to Pennsylvania, settling near the Mennonites.

Swiss Mennonites were not the first to migrate to Pennsylvania. In 1683, a group of Mennonites, and some Quakers of Mennonite origin, from Krefeld in the lower Rhine region of Germany, responded to William Penn’s invitation. Krefeld was overrun by Mennonite refugees persecuted in neighbouring territories. Many had lost their homes, were not able to make a living, and accepted the offer to move to Pennsylvania. They founded Germantown north of the city of Philadelphia.

Some of the remaining Swiss Mennonites and Amish migrated from Switzerland and the Alsace to Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian empire in the 1760s, and to Volhynia in the Russian empire in the 1790s to avoid persecutions and restrictions. Galicia and Volhynia offered them religious freedom, land, and exemption from military service. In the 1870s, when these privileges were withdrawn, most of the Volhynian settlers migrated to Kansas, U.S.A.

Mennonites and Amish from Switzerland, the Alsace, Palatinate, and south German states continued to migrate to the U.S.A. through much of the nineteenth century. Many Mennonite and Amish communities in the American mid-west and the western plains were founded at this time. The English colonies, and after 1776 the U.S.A., did not provide exemption from military service. However, the generous offer of free or inexpensive land and religious freedom attracted many immigrants.

During the American Revolution (1765–1783), Swiss Mennonites and Amish in Pennsylvania were under pressure to take sides in the war. They largely resisted this pressure, but after the revolution, Mennonites in some communities were considered unpatriotic and unwelcome. Large families and an orientation to agriculture meant they needed more land. Thus, starting in 1786, Swiss Mennonites in Pennsylvania migrated to the British colony of Upper Canada, Ontario today, which was looking for settlers. Mennonites purchased land and founded three major communities: in the Niagara peninsula, near Waterloo, and Markham.

In the 1820s, Amish from the Alsace and Bavaria migrated to Upper Canada and settled west of Waterloo. They were drawn by the opportunity to own land, have religious freedom, and be exempt from military service.

Dutch/Polish/Prussian/Russian Mennonites

In the Low Countries, present-day Netherlands and Belgium, after the defeat of the violent Anabaptists in Münster (1535), Menno Simons became the leader of a peaceful Anabaptist movement. These followers of Menno, or Mennonites, were fiercely persecuted by the Spanish rulers because they were also seen as a political threat. This persecution caused many Mennonites to migrate and find refuge in the Hanseatic city of Danzig (Gdańsk) and the surrounding Polish region along the Vistula River.

Starting in the 1540s, local landowners in the Danzig area, both Catholic and Protestant, allowed Mennonites to rent lands, practice trades, and meet for worship. For two and a half centuries Mennonites lived peacefully in this region under tolerant Polish rule. The Privilegia they negotiated with successive Polish kings exempted them from military service, from swearing the oath, and allowed them to operate their own schools and inheritance organizations.

This situation changed when Prussia took over this area during the partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795. Although the Prussian government offered Mennonites freedom of religion, it was initially not willing to consider exemption from military service for Mennonite men. It finally agreed to exemptions in exchange for a large annual financial contribution to support the officer training school at Culm. In addition, Mennonites were not allowed to buy any new land, since Prussian military recruitment was based on land ownership. This meant Mennonites would soon have a large landless class. The search for more land began.

After considering various options, Mennonites accepted the Russian empress Catherine the Great’s invitation to settle in South Russia (present-day Ukraine). Russia offered Mennonites free land, exemption from military service, and control of their schools, as well as their inheritance and fire insurance organizations. Mennonite migrants from Prussia established the following settlements: Chortitza (1789), Molotschna (1804), Am Trakt (1853) and Alexandertal (Alt Samara) (1859). The first two, the largest, were located in South Russia. The latter two were situated further north on the east side of the upper Volga River. By the 1870s, a number of daughter settlements had been founded, and the total Mennonite population in Russia had increased to about 55,000 people.

In the 1870s, as part of its modernization program, Russia announced it was taking control of all schools, and would require military service from the hundreds of thousands of foreign settlers. Fearing these changes would erode their core beliefs and practices, Mennonites and Hutterites in Russia sent delegations to the U.S.A. and Canada to investigate immigration possibilities. They were joined by a Prussian Mennonite from the Mennonite Church in the Thorn (Toruń) region.

After inspections and negotiations starting in 1873, about ten thousand Mennonites migrated to the American states of Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota. Starting in 1874, another seven thousand migrated to the new province of Manitoba in Canada. Altogether, about a third of Mennonites in Russia migrated. Those who settled in Manitoba were offered freedom of religion, exemption from military service, control of their own schools, and tracts of land large enough to establish their village land-holding system.

In Manitoba the land was free, except for a nominal registration fee. Mennonites who migrated to the U.S.A. received no assurances of military exemption and had to pay for their land. However, they considered the land, markets, and climate to be preferable. Both Canada and the U.S.A. were eager for new immigrants because both countries had taken lands from First Nations people and wanted to develop those lands for agriculture.

Mennonites left the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) in three further major migrations. After World War One and its resulting Russian Revolution, the anarchist Nestor Makhno’s terror campaign, and the establishment of the U.S.S.R., many Mennonites saw only a bleak future. From 1923 to 1929 about a fifth of Mennonites in the U.S.S.R. emigrated, some to Germany, and approximately 20,000 to Canada, 1,200 to Brazil and 1,800 to Paraguay.

A second emigration happened during and after World War Two. When the German army was defeated at Stalingrad in 1943, and the war front collapsed westward, at least thirty-five thousand Mennonites in Ukraine were moved west by the German military. Of these, about twelve thousand were able to avoid repatriation to the U.S.S.R. and settled in West Germany, Canada, and Paraguay.

The last emigration occurred from the 1970s into the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed. Germany allowed anyone with a German connection to immigrate and provided generous financial assistance. More than a hundred thousand people migrated, some with Mennonite affiliation. The motives varied, including family reunification, escape from oppressive conditions, financial or career improvement, and better futures for their children.

Of the Mennonites who settled in Canada in the 1870s, almost 8,000 migrated to Latin America in the 1920s. They moved because they believed Canada had reneged on its commitment to allow them to have their own schools and because they wanted to avoid threatening aspects of nationalism, militarism, and modernity. About 6,000 settled in Mexico and 1,800 in Paraguay. In both countries they were exempted from military service and from swearing the oath, could live in compact villages, and could have their schools, inheritance patterns, and fire insurance organizations.

The majority of the migrants who settled in Mexico were Old Colony Mennonites. In subsequent years, as their population increased, they migrated to Belize, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, the U.S.A., and back to Canada in search of land, jobs, and business opportunities. Those who migrated to Paraguay eventually developed a strong, stable, and prosperous community which largely embraced modernity.

In 1948, three additional groups migrated from Canada to Latin America: the Sommerfeld and Bergthal groups to Paraguay, and a Kleine Gemeinde group to Mexico. Because during World War Two many Canadian Mennonite men defied their churches’ peace position and served in the military, these three groups migrated to escape militarism, public schools which they felt were indoctrinating their children with nationalism, and the creeping, corroding influence of modernity.

From the 1950s to the present, thousands of Mennonites have migrated from Paraguay and Mexico to Canada for better economic opportunities, family unification, and better schools.

Hutterites

In the sixteenth century, Anabaptists were given refuge in Moravia (today Czech Republic) by local Protestant princes. They fled to this area from the south and central German states, Silesia, Austria, the Tyrol, and Switzerland to escape religious persecution. Of the various Anabaptist communal and non-communal groups in Moravia in the mid-sixteenth century, only the communalist Hutterites survived. By the end of the sixteenth century Hutterites numbered more than thirty thousand in Moravia and in neighbouring Hungary, today Slovakia. In the early seventeenth century, persecution by the Jesuits and devastation caused by the Thirty Years’ War destroyed all Hutterite communities in Moravia. The Hutterite communities in Hungary were destroyed by the end of the century.

In 1622, Bethlen Gabor, Prince of Transylvania (today Romania), forcibly transported more than a thousand Hutterites from Moravia eastward to his lands where they lived until the 1760s. In 1690, this group of Hutterites also gave up communal living due to persecution. However, in 1762, a few Hutterites, joined by a small number of Lutheran Pietists, re-established communal living in Transylvania.

In 1767, this group of less than a hundred communal Hutterites, fearing for their lives, fled over the mountains to southern Romania, and from there were taken to Russia by a sympathetic nobleman to settle on his lands north of Kiev. After a few decades, this group of Hutterites was torn apart by internal dissension, gave up communalism, and became economically destitute.

In 1819, Johann Cornies, a Mennonite leader, came to their rescue and settled them in non-communal village settlements close to the Molotschna colony in south Russia. In 1859 a small Hutterite communal group was established called Schmiedeleut. In the following year a second communal group, called Dariusleut, was begun.

In the 1870s, virtually all Hutterites migrated from Russia to South Dakota, U.S.A., for the same reasons Mennonites migrated. Upon arrival, a third communal group, called Lehrerleut was founded. About a third of the 1,200 Hutterites who migrated were now living communally. All communal Hutterites in western Canada and the U.S.A. today are descended from these three groups.

Hutterites migrated from the U.S.A. to Canada in 1918 because of persecution by the American government and their neighbours. During World War One, the American government demanded that Hutterites do military service, which they adamantly refused because of their belief in peace. The result was that four Hutterites were given harsh prison sentences in which two of them were tortured to death. Attacks by neighbours and authorities led all but one Hutterite community to migrate to Canada in 1918. The Schmiedeleut settled in Manitoba. The Lehrerleut and Dariusleut founded new colonies in Alberta.

Conclusion

From this survey it is evident that from the sixteenth century to the present Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites chose to migrate when faced with religious persecution or restrictions. Country after country threatened them, while other countries invited them and offered them refuge from persecution.

The migrations were often for similar reasons: the search for religious freedom and for land to support their families. Over the centuries, farming became their preferred occupation. Living close to nature became their vocation and calling. Farming usually also included the ability to carry on trades related to farming.

For each of the groups, religious freedom usually included a commitment to peace and the right to control their own schools. They believed they were called to be agents of peace not war and they were committed to passing this conviction on to their children.

In their search for land, Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites often played unwitting roles in larger national agendas of nation building and agricultural development. This also meant that when they no longer served those roles, governments evicted them or withdrew concessions.

Frequently, more conservative branches of the Mennonite community were the first to migrate to new locations. Their convictions and community solidarity pushed them to venture into new, often difficult situations and made it possible for them to survive. In a number of cases, they sacrificed quality of land and economic well-being to protect core beliefs.

Many migration studies have identified economic factors as the most important motivator for migration. This study shows that during the first few centuries, although economics was an important motivator for Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterite migrations, it was usually secondary to the quest for religious freedom. In more recent centuries, economic factors loom larger and have often been the primary factor.

Recent migration studies have paid increasing attention to religious factors, but usually these studies have focused on the influence of migration on the religion of the migrants. Less attention has been paid to religion as the motivator for migration.

Studies have also noted that migration often becomes part of the process of modernization, upward mobility, and improvement of economic status. For the groups in this survey, motives of upward mobility and modernization played a relatively minor role in causing migration. Migrations in some cases were rather for the purpose of minimizing the influence of modernity.

Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites have migrated from country to country due to persecution, lack of land, wars, revolutions, threats to core beliefs, and the dangers of modernity. They were drawn by religious freedom, land, a stable society, and control over their community organizations. Their migrations were most often for the purpose of defending the religious vision and commitments with which their churches began.