The Anabaptists who left Switzerland for quiet farms to the north may have escaped harassment from Swiss state authorities, but their migration soon produced intense quarreling within their ranks. Seeking solace, they floundered into division.
Jakob Ammann: Infected with Anabaptism
The Swiss and south German Anabaptist worlds of the late 1600s provided the seedbed that germinated the Amish movement.6 In Switzerland, Anabaptists continued to face round after round of edicts aimed at stamping out their churches. Although Swiss authorities had ended executions in 1614, they repeatedly ordered local officials to hound, imprison, or exile Anabaptists. In a few cases, captured Anabaptists were sold as galley slaves on Adriatic ships, condemned to work themselves to death. Individual mandates saddled Swiss Anabaptists with heavy fines, took away their children’s right to inherit property, and banned them from burial in community cemeteries. In an effort to flush out hidden pacifists, one mandate even required Bernese men to appear in public wearing a sidearm, such as a sword.
The Anabaptist world in Switzerland did, however, contain paradoxes. First, despite their outlaw status, Anabaptists, known for their honesty and morality, earned the respect and quiet admiration of their state-church neighbors. An investigation in 1692 even turned up sentiments suggesting that some Reformed Church members regarded Anabaptists as model Christians. Said one woman, “No, indeed, I am not worthy to be [an Anabaptist] … because [they] are a completely holy people.”7 Sympathetic members of the state church, known as the “true-hearted,” protected Anabaptists in various ways by providing warnings or hiding places when authorities sent dragnets through rural regions.
Indeed, these friendly neighbors, also known as “half-Anabaptists,” irritated the state-church clergy, who preached against the “Anabaptist heresy.” In 1693 a Swiss Reformed pastor named Georg Thormann published a thick book denouncing the Anabaptists because so many of his own parishioners thought of them “as saints, as the salt of the earth, as the true and chosen people and the proper core of all Christians.” Some of his congregants were even attending Anabaptist worship services on the sly or neglecting Reformed services.8
A related paradox was that despite the ongoing persecution Swiss Anabaptism was undergoing something of a religious revival and attracting new converts who, unlike the true-hearted, actually joined the Anabaptists through baptism. Such conversions lay behind Pastor Thormann’s frustration because they had been increasing for some time. For example, in June 1680 a Bernese court with jurisdiction over religious matters noted that a resident of the village of Erlenbach had become “infected with the Anabaptist sect.” That convert was a tailor named Jakob Ammann.9
A son of Michael and Anna (Rupp) Ammann, Jakob Ammann was born in February 1644 near Erlenbach.10 He married Verena Stüdler and, as an adult, probably lived in the area of Steffisburg. Little information survives about his wife and children, although he had at least one daughter. Ammann likely joined the Anabaptists in 1679, and at some point was ordained a preacher and, later, an elder (bishop) with the authority to baptize and ordain.
It is likely that Ammann’s parents also became Anabaptists in the late 1600s, and it is clear that his younger brother, Uli Ammann, converted. Around 1693 Jakob Ammann and his family left Switzerland and moved north, settling in the Alsatian lowlands (present-day France) near the town of Heidolsheim. By 1695 he had moved again, this time up into the Alsatian highlands, near the village of Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines (also known as Markirch) in the Lièpvre valley. (See fig. 2.1 for the two areas of Amish origin.)
Ammann’s move from Switzerland to Alsace was not unusual. During the second half of the seventeenth century, a growing number of Swiss Anabaptists fled harassment by moving north into the Palatinate or Alsace to the estates of nobles happy to trade religious toleration for an obedient and dependent labor force. Tolerant French noblemen who governed the Lièpvre valley and other Alsatian regions welcomed the refugees. In time, Mennonites in Alsace and the Palatinate gained a reputation as skilled and innovative farm managers who invested in livestock and experimented with cattle breeding and land fertilization.11 The immigrants were not permitted to engage in profitable guild crafts, enter universities, or seek converts, but the freedom they did enjoy was remarkable compared with their situation in Switzerland. By the early 1690s, some fifty-two Anabaptist refugee families were managing estates and mills and comprising up to half the population in some villages.12
This Anabaptist diaspora faced new challenges. Back in Switzerland, persecution had provided them with both a sharp sense of alienation from the world and grateful reliance on true-hearted neighbors, whose friendship blurred the lines between the Anabaptist church and the evil world. But in the more tolerant air of Alsace and across the Rhine River in the Palatinate, those old patterns no longer made sense. The new atmosphere of forbearance meant that Anabaptists there did not need to rely on sympathetic state-church allies. It also meant, however, that the Anabaptists themselves would have to be vigilant if they were to remain separate from the world. This difference lay at the heart of Amish origins.
Confrontation and Schism
Soon after arriving in Alsace, Ammann and other Swiss refugees, many from Ammann’s home near Steffisburg, became troubled by the conditions they found in the Alsatian Anabaptist congregations. The new arrivals thought that their Alsatian comrades seemed too comfortable with the relative tolerance of the ruling noblemen. Ammann and his supporters soon began calling for a sharper distinction between their church and the state church, which they regarded as corrupt. Anabaptists should not attend state church services, Ammann argued, nor should they think that true-hearted sympathizers were assured of salvation.13
At the same time, Ammann advocated certain reforms of church life. He proposed observing the Christian ritual of communion (also known as the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper) twice a year instead of annually, the Anabaptist custom at the time. Furthermore, Ammann taught that this special service, which recalls the death of Christ, should include a ritual in which church members washed one another’s feet in imitation of Jesus, who had washed his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper as a sign of service and humility.
FIGURE 2.1. Areas of Amish Origin in Europe ca. 1700. Map prepared by St. Lawrence University Libraries GIS Program
Finally—and most controversially—Ammann insisted that both church membership and church discipline should have clear social implications. If members were expelled because of unrepented sin, other church members should avoid, or shun, the excommunicated members in symbolic ways such as not eating with them. This shunning, known as Meidung, was not to be a punishment but rather a lesson, a means of helping the erring members realize the seriousness of their offense against God and the church and encouraging confession and repentance.
Ammann was an articulate spokesperson for a significant Anabaptist lay movement that included preachers such as Ulrich Müller, whose sermons had been attracting converts to Anabaptism in the Bernese Oberland area since the early 1670s. This renewal movement challenged some of the older Swiss Anabaptist traditions by proposing innovations that Jacob Ammann was able to voice in a forceful manner.14
Although many Anabaptists in Alsace saw Ammann as a reformer, many others back in the old Swiss communities regarded his reforms as abrupt departures from longstanding 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 retorted, but practices that stood on clear biblical and Dutch Mennonite precedent.15 Ammann and his followers may also have been influenced by Pietism—a renewal movement in German Lutheran and Reformed churches. During the late 1600s, this reformist thinking was spreading through many Protestant communities. Apart from the Anabaptists, Radical Pietists active in the Rhine Valley were also advocating the practice of shunning and even had held up the Dordrecht Confession as a doctrinal blueprint for their members.16
In late summer and fall of 1693, Ammann and several supporters traveled from Alsace to Switzerland to impress upon church leaders there the merits of Ammann’s reforms. 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. The Swiss Anabaptists, particularly their senior elder, Hans Reist, did not help matters when they first delayed meeting with Ammann and then simply dismissed his concerns. At one point, when Reist sent word that he was too busy with his farm work to meet 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. The split only deepened in the weeks that followed.17
Efforts to mediate the conflict failed, and by February 1694 a clear breach in fellowship pointed to the emergence of a distinctly “Ammann-ish” group.18 The two most contested issues remained the spiritual status of sympathetic neighbors (the true-hearted) and the practice of shunning. The Swiss Anabaptists, suffering state harassment, often depended for their very survival on sympathetic neighbors. They were not about to condemn the true-hearted or look for new ways, such as shunning, to call public attention to themselves in the face of persecution.
For his part, Ammann pressed for church renewal from a setting outside of Switzerland in which cultural accommodation and lax discipline seemed to threaten faithful Christian living. Certainly he was not alone in his concern for strict moral reform and rigorous church regulations. Nearly all of the Anabaptist ministers in Alsace supported him, as did several ministers from the Palatinate area of Germany along the Rhine River near the Alsace.
Ammann’s Party
Ammann’s faction eventually became known as the Amish Mennonites, or simply the Amish. Most 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.
Longtime residents recognized the new group as “the Jakob Ammann Party” or “the Jakob Ammann Group” and readily identified Jakob Ammann as “the Patriarch.” In 1698 one Alsatian magistrate called him the “leader of the new Anabaptist sect.” 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 and from performing a civic duty involving the collection of local taxes, sometimes by force. In both cases, the Amish agreed to pay special taxes in exchange for their exemptions.19
At other times Ammann engaged in religious arguments—sometimes quite publicly in the village street—with the Catholic priest from Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines’s Saint Louis parish. In several encounters the two men exchanged heated words over reports that an Amish woman was being coerced into converting to Catholicism. 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 children. The village clerk rejected Ammann’s claim, but the Amish apparently appealed to the grand bailiff who, remarkably, sided with them and ordered the clerk to permit the Amish to act “according to their customary procedures.”20
Nicholas Blank, a member of Jakob Ammann’s congregation, owned this homestead near Ste. Marie-aux-Mines in the Alsace region of France in the early 1700s. Inside the barn, Blank’s initials are carved into the interior beams, which suggest that very little has changed since Ammann’s time. Donald B. Kraybill
In September 1712 the congenial political environment ended abruptly when French King Louis XIV ordered the expulsion of Anabaptists from crown lands in Alsace, “with no exceptions … [including] even the oldest who have been there for a long time.” Although the tolerant local ruler of Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines protested the eviction, the Amish were dispersed within months.21 Ammann’s community, which had prospered in the Lièpvre valley for almost twenty years, now scattered to isolated enclaves nearby and to the Palatinate, Hesse, Baden, and Bavaria.22 In these places, officials permitted Amish religious dissent, but typically barred the Amish from buying land. As a result, Amish enterprise shifted, and most households took up work as managers or leaseholders of large estates owned by absentee landlords, where their reputation as skilled farmers served them well.
What happened to Jakob Ammann after 1712 remains unknown, as do the place and date of his death. The only later mention of him is in 1730, when his daughter asked to return to the canton of Bern, Switzerland, telling officials there that her father had died outside the canton.23
In the twenty-first century, Amish people have mixed feelings about Ammann. Most Amish know very little about his life and have never read his writings. Some who have read his letters from 1693 are embarrassed by his rancorous tone and combative style. Contemporary Amish people do not take the same uncompromising stance as Ammann did toward those who, in the 1600s, were called true-hearted. Nowadays the Amish are more inclined to say that only God knows the spiritual state of those outside their church, and that it is no one’s place to judge. On the other hand, the Amish have retained key teachings from Ammann’s day, notably the practice of church discipline tied to shunning and the conviction that separation from the world is a critical measure of Christian faithfulness. So in that sense, the Amish remain spiritual heirs of a reform movement that Jakob Ammann had advanced.
Dressing the Part
Although distinctive dress is a highly visible element of Amish identity today, clothing was not a prominent issue in the 1693 debates. That did not mean that clothing styles were unimportant to Ammann and the early Amish. In the 1600s in Switzerland and in many other parts of western Europe, clothing was highly regulated. Governments issued detailed “sumptuary laws” that outlined what type of clothing was permissible for members of each social class. Rules in the canton of Bern, for example, forbade gold embellishments, silk lace, ornamental ribbons and pearls, and the use of extra fabric to make unnecessarily wide sleeves or trousers. Officials justified such rules, in part, with religious arguments, warning that God would judge the canton for the sin of haughtiness if Swiss men wore billowing sleeves or shoes that were too pointy.24
In such a context, early Amish attitudes toward clothing take on new meaning. Ammann was a tailor, so he was intimately familiar with sumptuary laws and would even have had a hand in enforcing them before he converted to Anabaptism. Tailors could be fined if they made clothing that ran afoul of the laws, and they were obligated to tell customers what kinds of garments they were allowed to wear. In short, restrictions on what people could wear—and in Switzerland, religious reasons for doing so—were not uniquely Anabaptist or Amish concerns but widely shared social norms.
Even so, the Amish apparently were recognizable, to some extent, by the way they dressed. In 1702 an Alsatian Catholic priest named Antoine Rice said the Amish were distinguished by the fact that “the men … have a long beard and the men and women wear clothing made only of linen cloth, summer and winter.” In contrast, the Anabaptists who had not sided with Ammann had “shorter beards” and dressed “about like the Catholics.”25
Scholar Mary Ann Miller Bates suggests that early Amish adherence to plain dress may have actually won them some public favor. By scrupulously following laws that required peasants to dress as simply as possible, the Amish appeared to be virtuous citizens, sending a message that the state had nothing to fear from them: they were not social revolutionaries but model subjects. In fact, the Swiss Reformed pastor who had published a lengthy attack on the Anabaptists in 1693 had tried to refute the popul
ar notion that because they dressed simply and obeyed clothing regulations more conscientiously than did state-church members the Anabaptists were moral people.26
Although clothing did not figure prominently at the outset, some of Ammann’s opponents thought he enforced dress rules too strictly. In a letter written in 1693, Ammann defended himself against the charge that he excommunicated people simply because of what they wore. But he did not back away from his basic conviction that those who want “to be conformed to the world with shaved beard … and haughty clothing” should be admonished by the church and banned if they do not change their ways.27
In time, one difference that emerged between the Amish and Mennonites was that Mennonites adopted pockets and buttons, while the Amish continued to close their coats with hook-and-eye fasteners. A folk saying about the difference even emerged:
Die mit Hacken und Ösen wird der Herr erlösen,
Die mit Knöpfen und Taschen wird der Teufel erhaschen.
Those with hooks and eyes, the Lord will save,
Those with buttons and pockets, the devil will snatch.
The rhyme originated with critics of the Amish, who were poking fun at the perceived Amish obsession with minor details.28 Yet the saying did capture the way specific dress patterns, rather than a general preference for plainness, eventually helped shape Amish identity.29 Although distinctively Amish styles of clothing evolved much later in North America, the assumptions underlying Amish views of clothing were present already in the 1600s. The Amish accepted the widely held idea that dress could and should be regulated and that such choices had deeply moral implications. Where the Amish differed from others of the era, however, was in their conviction that the church, not the state, should regulate dress.
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