Origins

The Hutterites came to Canada from the United States, but they trace their origins to the Protestant Reformation that spread throughout Europe in the sixteenth century. Three major Reformation movements emerged at that time: the Lutheran, the Reformed, and the Anabaptist. The Hutterites, together with the Mennonites and Amish, are peoples who derive from the Anabaptist movement.

The term Anabaptist, or rebaptizer, was a derogatory name given to a wide range of radical religious groups who thought that the major Protestant reformers (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli) did not go far enough. The Anabaptists wanted greater separation of church and state, they advocated adult baptism based on a responsible decision by each individual, and many, basing their position on the New Testament, refused to bear arms. The first adults were rebaptized in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1525. This was a revolutionary act in Catholic states, since adult rebaptism implied that their previous baptism was invalid. Moreover, rebaptism created new fellowships of believers who were not only separated from the state but refused to serve in its political and military structures.

The present-day descendants of the Anabaptists include: the Mennonites from the Netherlands and northern Europe; the Swiss Brethren – a later branch of which became the Amish – from Switzerland and central Europe; and the Hutterites from the east-central European Habsburg lands of the Austrian Empire.

It was in the Habsburg province of Tyrol (presentday western Austria and northern Italy) that the Hutterites emerged. Like Anabaptists elsewhere in central Europe, those in Tyrol were being ruthlessly persecuted by the Austrian Habsburg ruler, Charles V, who as Holy Roman emperor was responsible for protecting the Roman Catholic Church against heretics.

A Tyrolese Anabaptist leader named Jacob Hutter set out in 1529 to look for a place of refuge for his followers. He went northeastward to the Habsburg province of Moravia in what is now the Czech Republic. Aside from practising adult baptism, demanding the separation of church and state, and refusing to bear arms, Hutter’s followers held property in common. This meant that believers banded together to live in self-sustaining economic communities called Bruderhof (colonies) which, visible as they were to outsiders, attracted attention and persecution by local authorities. Such attacks from the outside only increased the group’s internal cohesion and resolve. Hutter convinced his followers to leave Tyrol for Moravia, and, although he himself was killed a few years later (1536), the group was soon to be known to the outside world as Hutterites.

During the first decades of the sixteenth century, Moravia became a land of promise and hope for refugees from many parts of Europe. Even though the local nobles were Roman Catholic, they were opposed to Habsburg imperial policies and so welcomed refugees from central Europe’s religious wars, including the Anabaptists.

Protected by the local nobility, the second half of the sixteenth century became what some historians have called the “Golden Years” of the Hutterites in Moravia. Some fifty to sixty Hutterite communities developed with an estimated total of 20,000–30,000 inhabitants. Refugees continued to flee to Moravia where greater toleration could be found, and the Hutterites were able to establish a flourishing economy whose ceramic industry and handicrafts as well as education and medical expertise were sought out by the nobility and others in the local population.

In 1593 a new period of war lasting thirteen years broke out between the Habsburg Empire and their rapidly encroaching enemy to the south, the Islamic Ottoman Empire. In the course of the conflict, Habsburg troops were quartered in many Hutterite colonies. Some communities were destroyed and their inhabitants killed or enslaved as Ottoman raiding parties reached southern Moravia. No sooner had the Ottomans been defeated (1606) than the Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants began in 1618. This marked the high point of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, when the Habsburg emperor ordered the nobles to expel the Hutterites from Moravia.

By the time of the expulsion order of 1622, a third of the Hutterite population had died because of the wars and accompanying plagues while still others had recanted and became Roman Catholic (the so-called Habaner). The expulsion from Moravia forced the Hutterites to migrate eastward to Transylvania, a semi-independent state ruled by Protestant Hungarian princes who were opposed to Habsburg rule. The refugees from Moravia were joined in Transylvania by others from the Austrian province of Carinthia. The Hutterite community was revived in Transylvania, but communal life was abandoned there after 1690. In Walachia (present-day southern Romania), the next place Hutterites migrated to, communal life was begun again.

Later, the Hutterites moved northeastward towards the Russian Empire, settling at Radichev in what is now north-central Ukraine. The seventy years (1770–1842) they spent in the Radichev area were difficult and they again were forced to abandon communal living. It was not until they moved into the Molochna region of southern Ukraine, where they were aided by the Mennonites, that the Hutterites could once more organize themselves in communes. By this time the Hutterites depended almost exclusively on farming as a livelihood. They stayed in the Molochna region for just over three decades, until 1874, when all Hutterites left Europe for the United States. Their departure was in large part motivated by new reforms instituted by the Russian imperial government which in 1864 required the introduction of the Russian language in elementary schools (the Hutterites and Mennonites had used German exclusively until then) and after 1871 required military service of all male citizens.

The 250-year odyssey between 1622, when the Hutterites were expelled from Moravia, to 1874, when they left the Russian Empire for the United States, was a period marked by such hardship that at one point their community had only forty-three members. They had been uprooted a half-dozen times, forced to flee as refugees to new regions, and twice they had abandoned their basic religious ideal of communal living. On the eve of their departure for the New World, the Hutterite community numbered over 1,200 but was divided into two groups. At one end of Hutterdorf, the village where they lived in Ukraine’s Molochna region, Darius Walter had re-established a communal community called the Dariusleut. Others in the same village who did not take up communal living were known as the Schmiedeleut after the nickname (Schmied-Michael) of their leader, the blacksmith Michael Waldner. Thus, pluralism had come to characterize Hutterite life even before they left for North America in 1874.