The Hutterites in North America

CHAPTER 7. Identity, Tradition, and Folk Beliefs

g฀฀chapter 7฀฀G Identity, Tradition, and Folk Beliefs A sister here had a spiritual dream. She saw three fountains. One belonged to us [Schmiedeleut], one to Darius Walter [Dariusleut] and the other to Jacob Wipf of the Lehrerleut Community. When they took water out one from the other, they all three ran together. I was joyful about this, interpreting the dream to mean a true unification. —Michael Waldner, Schmiedeleut founder, 1876 Ethnicity and Family Names A s an ethnoreligious group, the Hutterites have developed important sui generis identity markers. In addition to unique religious beliefs and practices, Hutterites speak an Austrian dialect and have developed distinctive styles of dress, culinary practices, and folk traditions . BecausetheHutteriteshavemarriedalmostexclusivelywithinthecommunity , over the course of time they have become a new and unique ethnic group. Most modern Hutterites are the direct descendants of about ninety individuals, a situation brought about by two facts: their minimal emphasis on evangelism since the late eighteenth century and their practice of keeping themselves as separate as possible from non-Hutterites. The result is a closed assembly of clans with fourteen predominant surnames, a group described by Pierre Van den Berghe and Karl Peter as “nepotistic communists .”1 ฀ g฀identity, tradition, and folk beliefs G฀ 139 Because of the limited gene pool, the average Hutterite husband and wife are very closely related, and people bearing the fourteen most common family surnames account for 97 percent of the Hutterites. More specifically , only eleven of the family names are found in the Schmiedeleut, ten among the Lehrerleut, and nine in the Dariusleut. In a genetic and cultural sense, the Hutterites are one of the few new ethnic groups to have evolved during the past five hundred years. In this way they may be compared to members of older ethnoreligions such as Judaism and Armenian Orthodoxy. The creation of a new ethnic group does not take as long as one might expect. In his book Before the Dawn, Nicholas Wade notes, “The genome evolves so fast that whenever any community starts to breed in isolation, whether for reasons of religion, geography or language, within a few centuries its genetics assume a distinctive signature.” He also explains that “one version of a gene, especially in small populations, can displace all the other existing versions of the same gene in just a few generations,” a phenomenon generally called genetic drift. Drift, according to Wade, “can lead to a single version of a gene becoming universal, or fixed, and all other versions being lost.” Moreover, “If a population gets squeezed down to small numbers by some calamity, and then expands, its gene pool will be an amplified version of that of the few individuals who survived the disaster.”2 Wade’s model follows the “founder effect” theory, which emphasizes that small ethnic groups like the Hutterites are heavily influenced by the special genetic makeup of what might be a very small number of founding mothers and fathers. The fourteen most common Hutterite surnames are listed in table 7.1. During the twentieth century, two Mennonite names, Baer and Teichroeb , also gained recognition as Hutterite names. Seven of the fourteen names (Gross, Maendel, Stahl, Tschetter, Walter, Wipf and Wollman) are considered Old Hutterite.3 All but one of these family names (Gross) preceded the influx of ex-Lutheran Carinthians in the mid-eighteenth century . The Old Hutterite names are of Austrian, south German, and Czech origin, and most of them have been found in the Hutterite Church since the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Another five Hutterite names (Glanzer, Hofer, Kleinsasser, Waldner, and Wurz) are Carinthian Austrian in background. These represent descendents of Lutheran families who fled to Slovakia and joined the Hut- 140฀ g฀the hutterites in north america G฀ terites in the 1750s. The remaining two surnames, Decker and Entz, are ethnically Mennonite and come from families who joined the Hutterites in Russia in the 1780s and 1860s, respectively. Although it is of relatively recent Hutterite lineage, Entz is one of the most common Lehrerleut names. In Frederick Manfred’s 1948 novel The Chokecherry Tree, two men traveling through southeastern South Dakota drive into a town they call “Free Men” (actually the Prairieleut town of Freeman). “Yeh, bo, this is quite a town. Quite a town,” notes one of the characters. “‘Everybody in it is related. Full a Hofers and Kleinsassers and Tschetters.’ Fats cleared his nose with a guggling sniff, ‘Yeh, an’ when...