from Mennonite Weekly Review, February 21, 2011

Event recalls 1711 deportation of Swiss Anabaptists
By Lowell Brown

EPHRATA, Pa. — More than 400 Mennonites and Amish commemorated the 300th anniversary of a 1711 deportation of Anabaptists from Bern, Switzerland, with presentations by historians James Lowry and John Ruth at Christian Aid Ministries.
 
The Feb. 7 event was sponsored by Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society and Swiss Pioneer Preservation Associates of Ephrata.

Among those who attended were members of Lancaster and Atlantic Coast conferences of Mennonite Church USA and the Weaverland and Groffdale Old Order Mennonite conferences.

Lowry read from two letters he recently translated as part of the Amsterdam Archives Project, an inter-Mennonite effort to transcribe Dutch documents related to Anabaptist migrations to America.

“The 1711 exodus didn’t contribute to settlements in the New World, but later, forced emigrations from Switzerland became one of the major sources of Amish and Mennonite communities in North America,” Lowry said.

The Reformed Church government in Bern objected to Anabaptists for four reasons, he said. 

First, Anabaptists believed the church needed to be disciplined. Second, they refused to swear oaths of loyalty. Third, they believed Christians should not be soldiers. And fourth, they refused to hold government office.

Seventy miles away, the Canton of Zurich had already expelled all Anabaptists from its territory. But despite a Commission for Anabaptist Matters and a campaign of imprisonment, slavery, flogging and branding, the Canton of Bern couldn’t stop the radical religious movement.

At times even their sympathizers seemed frustrated, Lowry said. He read from a June 13, 1711, letter written by Johann Ludwig Runckel, a Dutch ambassador to Bern who argued for fair treatment of the Bernese Anabaptists.

“The so-called oberlanders, or Amish, show up in an orderly manner,” Runckel wrote, “but those of the lower country remain steadfast in their obstinacy.” No one knows “what kind of grief these wretched people heap upon my soul.”

Under armed guard
Exactly a month later, Runckel oversaw the departure of four boatloads of Anabaptists bound for the Netherlands.

According to the amnesty that Runckel negotiated, imprisoned Anabaptists were released on bail. Spouses and children who belonged to the Reformed Church were allowed to emigrate with their families but lost their Swiss citizenship. Authorities waived an emigration tax but charged the deportees for the cost of the trip.

To complicate matters, Anabaptist divisions were so bitter that the “lower country” Anabaptists — later known as Mennonites — refused to ride in the same boat with the Amish “oberlanders.” When the ships stopped in Mannheim, Germany, most of the Mennonite party escaped, returned to Bern and were eventually imprisoned.

Many of the Mennonites had come from prison, Lowry said, and they were put on the boats under armed guard. They probably felt no obligation to their captors and continued evangelism in Bern.

But some of the Amish had been forced to promise they would not return to Bern, Lowry said, and they probably believed breaking that promise would be sinful. The Amish may have decided to emigrate together in solidarity with those members. 

The deportees who arrived in the Netherlands in August were mostly Amish, and for more than 80 years afterward three separate Amish churches worshiped in the Netherlands, Lowry said.

Though no one from the 1711 migration ended up in America, “in the end, the Swiss government succeeded in promoting the Anabaptist faith around the world — exactly what they were trying not to do,” Lowry said.

In 2007, Lowry and Ruth released Documents of Brotherly Love: Dutch Mennonite Aid to Swiss Anabaptists, Volume I, 1635-1709, co-edited with David J. Rempel Smucker. They are currently working on the second volume of the three-part series, spanning 1710-1711.