CHAPTER TWO
Amish Roots
Most Amish families own a thick book—more than a thousand pages in length—entitled Martyrs Mirror (or Martyr Spiegel, in the German edition). This hefty tome offers an account of church history, beginning with the death of Jesus Christ and continuing through the 1600s. But it’s not just any account of religious history. Martyrs Mirror focuses on the persecution of religious dissenters, faithful minorities who suffered at the hands of the powerful, and those who were scorned by “the world” as they sought to follow the humble and nonviolent example of Jesus.
Few Amish households read aloud from Martyrs Mirror on a regular basis (the language in both the German edition and in the English translation is a bit archaic), but Amish people know the stories and often measure themselves against the example of the martyrs. The stories convey the message that there is suffering in this life, that Christian faithfulness is not popular, and that the world is not to be fully trusted.
Although Amish people in contemporary North America have not been beheaded or burned at the stake like those whose stories appear in the thick martyr book, some Amish in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have sat in jail or paid stiff fines for refusing to serve in the military, send their children to high school, install smoke detectors in their homes, or place orange slow-moving-vehicle emblems on their buggies. And when they pay a price for going against the grain, they believe they are aligning themselves with their spiritual ancestors.
A Radical Heritage
When the Amish tell their story, they often begin with the Protestant Reformation that shook sixteenth-century Europe. In the early 1500s many things that Europeans had long taken for granted seemed up for grabs. Conquistadors told stories of unknown continents to the west, the printing press circulated new ideas with uncommon speed, inflation destabilized local economies, and vocal critics condemned social institutions as rotten to the core.1
The Roman Catholic Church that had long held Western European society together on earth and assured one’s journey to heaven also came in for its share of criticism. Figures such as Martin Luther and John Calvin questioned church doctrine and structure and eventually split with Rome, establishing groups that became known as Protestant churches.
At this point, the Amish story focuses on a small group of radical dissenters who questioned the whole premise of the medieval state-church system in which the government mandated correct belief and the church blessed civil and military activity. The dissenters, who gathered in small groups in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and German-speaking central Europe, insisted that a true church would be composed only of those who separated themselves from the corrupting influence of the world and obediently followed the teachings of Jesus, including his commands to live humbly and to reject violence even in self-defense.
The radicals dismissed the long-standing practice of routinely baptizing infants, a practice that made virtually everyone a church member and linked Christianity with citizenship. Instead they proposed that baptism—the Christian rite of initiation into the church—should be a mark of voluntary commitment and therefore fitting only for those who understood the implications of a disciplined life. As a result, these dissenters received the nickname Anabaptists (re-baptizers) because they had already been baptized as infants years before the Reformation began and now were advocating baptizing adults. In time, some Anabaptists became known as Mennonites, thanks to the notoriety of Menno Simons, an influential Anabaptist leader in the Netherlands.
Anabaptists affirmed the basic theological beliefs that other Christians did. But the Anabaptist conviction that the true church was an alternative community, distinct from larger society and not responsible for morally propping up the political order, sharply distinguished them from both Catholics and mainstream Protestants. Despite the fact that Anabaptists numbered only a few thousand, their presence threatened the established order of religious and civic life. Officials condemned them as subversives and used condemnation, imprisonment, and execution to stem the growth of the community. Between 1527 and 1614 as many as twenty-five hundred Anabaptists were killed—many of their stories fill the last half of the Martyrs Mirror—and their deaths served to confirm, for the Anabaptists, the wisdom of renouncing “worldly” society with its brutality and inhumanity.
To this day, stories of these martyr ancestors figure in some of the hymns the Amish sing in their Sunday morning worship. The Ausbund hymnal, published as early as 1564, includes songs written by Anabaptists jailed in Passau, Bavaria, and awaiting execution. Other Ausbund hymns recount the suffering of the faithful, such as the thirty-two-stanza ballad about Hans Haslibacher, an Anabaptist who was beheaded in 1571.
Now when he was apprehended,
Tormented and tortured severely,
Because of his faith alone,
Nevertheless he remained steadfast
In his torture, anguish, and pain, [saying]:
“I am willing and prepared,
My death certainly brings me great joy,
That I should depart from [here].
But may God be merciful
To those who sentenced me to death.”2
For the Amish, Hans Haslibacher is a model of faith not simply because he was a martyr, but because he embraced suffering in joy and asked for mercy for his persecutors.
Jakob Ammann and the Birth of the Amish
Persecution—or, more accurately, the waning of persecution—provided the context for the emergence of the Amish as a distinct Anabaptist group. For a century and a half, Anabaptist identity had been nurtured in the fires of opposition. Then, in the later 1600s as Europeans grew weary of wars over religion, the possibility of toleration dawned for once-harried Anabaptists. For those who had long been leery of “the world,” how were they to respond when that world now seemed on the brink of accepting them? For some Anabaptists, the advent of toleration was a welcome reprieve for which they had long hoped and prayed. For others, the possibility of social acceptance was a dangerous temptation that needed to be resisted. These differing responses to changing circumstances lay at the heart of Amish origins.3
By the mid-1600s Swiss and German Anabaptists had learned to survive by moving to more remote Alpine valleys or by heading north to the Rhine River Valley where they farmed the land of nobles seeking to rebuild estates ruined in the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). These nobles were willing to extend a haven to religious dissenters in exchange for their labor as loyal tenants.
Although Swiss authorities continued to issue edicts against the Anabaptists and kept them from taking up most trades and professions, there is considerable evidence that the Anabaptists’ neighbors were coming to admire and befriend them, often shielding them from official harassment and angering state church pastors by saying that the Anabaptists were model Christians. Indeed, in the 1670s and 1680s some of these Swiss admirers converted to the Anabaptist fold, which resulted in much hand-wringing on the part of Protestant officials in the Swiss city-state of Bern. One report from 1680 on such converts noted that a tailor named Jakob Ammann from near the village of Erlenbach had become “infected with the Anabaptist sect.”4
Village near Erlenbach, Switzerland, where Jakob Ammann was likely born in 1644. He was baptized as an infant into the Reformed Church, converted to Anabaptism by 1680, and about 1693 left Switzerland to move to Alsace. Credit: Donald B. Kraybill
Ammann had been born in 1644. Little information survives about his wife, Verena Stüdler, or their children. Sometime after Ammann converted to Anabaptism he was ordained as a church leader with the authority to baptize others and preside at communion, a Christian ritual sometimes known as the Lord’s Supper or eucharist that memorializes the death of Jesus Christ.
Around 1693 the Ammann household left Switzerland and moved north to Alsace, in what is today eastern France, eventually settling near the village of Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines. The Ammanns were not alone. By the early 1690s more than fifty Anabaptist families were l
iving in the area and benefitting from the benign neglect of tolerant lords who overlooked religious dissent.
Pleasant as Alsatian life may have been, the comfortable religious situation made Ammann uneasy. He soon began calling for sharper distinction between Anabaptists and members of “worldly” society, and he criticized fellow Anabaptists who tried to boost their status by making appearances at state-sanctioned churches. Indeed, it seems that by 1693 Ammann had become the most articulate spokesperson for a vigorous Anabaptist renewal movement.5 Among other things, Ammann called for a more frequent observation of the Lord’s Supper, and he insisted that the ritual include a ceremony in which church members literally washed one another’s feet, imitating Jesus who had washed his disciples’ feet as an act of service and humility.
Most strikingly, Ammann drew on an older Dutch Anabaptist document to teach the practice of shunning those who were excommunicated from the church. The church was not an otherworldly spiritual club, Ammann pointed out, but a group to which one was committed and accountable in practical, everyday ways. Being part of the church had clear social implications and so did leaving the church. Shunning involved the symbolic social avoidance of those who fell into persistent and unrepentant sin. Shunning did not involve breaking off all communication, but church members would not eat at the same table with someone under discipline. Ammann took pains to explain that excommunication and shunning were not to be punishments but rather a warning and a way of helping stumbling members realize the seriousness of their offense against God and, in turn, prompting repentance and restoration.
Ammann’s efforts at boosting Anabaptist distinctiveness in Alsace, where a lack of persecution might lull them into complacency, stood in contrast to prevailing sentiments back in Switzerland. There, still-stigmatized Anabaptists were open to finding small ways to get in the good graces of their neighbors. In fact, some Anabaptists in the old Swiss communities regarded Ammann’s reforms as abrupt departures from long-standing custom. In reply, Ammann pointed to the Dordrecht Confession, a sixty-year-old Dutch Anabaptist statement that taught both shunning and the footwashing ritual. These were not innovations, Ammann insisted, but practices that stood on clear biblical and Dutch Mennonite precedent. Ammann and his followers may also have been influenced by Pietism—a renewal movement in German Lutheran and Reformed churches. During the late 1600s Radical Pietists in the Rhine Valley were also advocating the practice of shunning and had held up the Dordrecht Confession as a doctrinal blueprint for those in their circles.6
In late summer and fall of 1693, Ammann and several supporters traveled from Alsace to Switzerland to impress upon Swiss Anabaptists the merits of Ammann’s reform agenda. They also chided the Swiss for being too cozy with “the world.” The encounters did not go well. Letters documenting the debates suggest that Ammann and his group were aggressive and demanding, while the Swiss Anabaptists, particularly their senior elder, Hans Reist, were often dismissive and condescending. At one point, when Reist sent word that he was too busy with his farm work to be bothered with the Alsatian delegation, Ammann “almost became enraged and immediately placed Hans Reist, along with six other ministers, under the ban as a heretic,” leaving others at the gathering “horrified” and pleading for reconciliation.7
Later, Ammann said he had acted too rashly and asked for Reist’s forgiveness, but Reist rebuffed the gesture, perpetuating a permanent breach in fellowship between his church and the “Ammann-ish” group that now existed within the wider Anabaptist community. The two most contested issues remained the degree of separation from worldly society and the practice of shunning.
Ammann’s faction eventually became known as Amish. Many of Ammann’s Swiss and Palatinate supporters began moving to the Alsatian valley of Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, where they coalesced into a stronger community. Between 1694 and 1696 alone, some sixty households arrived from the Swiss canton of Bern, and by 1699 Amish families owned many of the valley’s farms and were heavily involved in the local timber and sawmill business. The influx changed the region’s composition and, over time, stirred some local resentment as the Amish became more numerous.
Longtime residents recognized the new group as “the Jakob Ammann Party” or “the Jakob Ammann Group.”8 Indeed, records reveal that Ammann often witnessed legal documents and represented his people to civil authorities. In 1696, for example, he successfully won for his flock exemption from participating in the militia. In 1701 Ammann represented his people to local officials in a case involving orphaned Amish children. Typically, civil authorities appointed guardians for orphans, but Ammann said his church would take responsibility for its own children. Remarkably, the grand bailiff agreed and ordered the town clerk to permit the Amish to act “according to their customary procedures.”9
Fig. 2.1. Anabaptist–Amish Timeline, 1517–1900
In 1712 the political environment suddenly changed when French King Louis XIV ordered the expulsion of Anabaptists from his domains in Alsace, “with no exceptions … [including] even the oldest who have been there for a long time.” The Amish community around Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, which had prospered for two decades was scattered in a matter of months.10 Families ended up in other parts of southern Germany and the Rhine Valley or in territories neighboring royal Alsace. In most cases officials in these new places barred the Amish from buying land, so families became managers or leaseholders on estates owned by absentee landlords.11
Two Waves of Immigration
Despite their desire for separation from “the world,” the Amish were much like their neighbors in at least one respect. In the early 1700s up and down the Rhine Valley the prospect of immigration to North America was alluring. Amish emigrants were a small part of a larger movement of German-speaking people who crossed the Atlantic in the first part of the 1700s and again in the early 1800s.
Fig. 2.2. Areas of Amish Origin in Europe ca. 1700 Map prepared by St. Lawrence University Libraries GIS Program
Between 1736 and 1770 about five hundred Amish arrived through the port of Philadelphia and settled in southeastern Pennsylvania. Although the first Amish families made their homes in Berks County, by the time of the American Revolution they had begun concentrating in Lancaster County. In the decades that followed, descendants of these eighteenth-century immigrants formed new settlements in central and western Pennsylvania, and on into the Midwest.12
Between 1815 and 1860 a second wave of some three thousand Amish immigrants came to North America. These newcomers were seeking both economic opportunity and freedom from compulsory military service, which was becoming more common in Europe. Few of these nineteenth-century Amish arrivals settled in Pennsylvania, choosing instead to move directly to the Great Lakes states and to Ontario.
Emigration from Europe weakened the Amish church there, and in the late 1800s the Amish presence in Europe faded. The departure of many young adults for North America undercut the group’s vitality. As membership declined, pressure grew to intermarry with members of more respectable state churches. In 1937 the last European Amish congregation, a small church in the Palatinate village of Ixheim, merged with a nearby Mennonite group.
The Amish story in Europe had come to a close, but it was thriving, under different circumstances, in the midst of modernizing North America. There, by the mid-1800s, Amish immigrants and their descendants had established more than two dozen settlements from Pennsylvania to Iowa. Among those that persist to this day are ones in Lancaster (since the 1760s) and Mifflin (1791) Counties, Pennsylvania; Holmes County, Ohio (1803); LaGrange County, Indiana (1841); Kalona, Iowa (1846); and Arthur, Illinois (1865).
Defining the “Old Order”
Even as the Amish put down roots, the young United States they now called home was rapidly transforming socially, economically, and politically. A competitive and open market with an accent on individual consumption was shaking up long-assumed social habits. Free from the constraints of “old world” social class and able to accumulate property that would ha
ve been unthinkable in Europe, thanks to the removal of Native people, white Americans enjoyed remarkable social mobility. Yeomen farmers could acquire the trappings of genteel society, and many worked long and hard to give the appearance of not having to work at all. Families transformed their homes from centers of production into places of retreat, turning a work space that might have once housed the family loom or cobbler’s tools into a parlor, complete with stuffed furniture and display objects whose only purpose was “for show.”13
In 1862, as Amish bishop David Beiler looked around his Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, neighborhood, the results of this shift were all too clear. Beiler was certain that “whoever has not experienced” the “great changes during these [past] sixty years … can scarcely believe it.” In his youth “there was no talk of fine shoes and boots nor did one know anything of light pleasure vehicles.” Homes did not boast sofas, writing desks, carpets, and decorative dishes, as was now the fashion. “It was customary to hear the spinning wheel hum or sing in almost every farmhouse,” Beiler recalled. Now, “the domestic cotton goods which are to be had at such low price, have almost displaced the home-made materials” and young people hire themselves out for wages so they can buy the latest horse harness or “strange colored fine store clothes.”14
Beiler had a keen eye for social and economic change and for the cultural implications of such change. Life in the young United States had offered religious liberty to harried Anabaptists, but it also promised to replace the wisdom of local tradition with a consumer culture of personal fulfillment and the adoption of patriotic causes. Indeed, America’s Protestant churches, for the most part, blessed the refinement and good taste that marked emerging middle-class mores. Moreover, religious revivalism and denominational organization seemed to cast church in terms of either individual experience or a set of programs and budgets, rather than local relationships and ethical discipline.
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