A Mennonite Pandemic Spirituality, 1830-1831

Asiatic Cholera broke out across Russia in 1829 and ‘30, and further into Europe in 1831. It began with an infected battalion in Orenburg (note 1), and by early Fall 1830 the disease had reached Moscow and the capital. Russia imposed drastic quarantine measures. Much like today, infected regions were cut off and domestic trade was restricted.

The disease reached the Molotschna River district in Fall 1830, and by mid-December hundreds of Nogai deaths were recorded in the villages adjacent to the Mennonite colony, leading state authorities to impose a strict quarantine.

When the Mennonite Johann Cornies—a state-appointed agricultural supervisor and civic leader—first became aware of the nearby cholera-related deaths, he recommended to the Mennonite District Office on December 6, 1830 to stop traffic and prevent random contacts with Nogai. For Cornies it was important that the Mennonite community do all it can keep from carrying the disease into the community, though “only God knows our destiny” (note 2).

On December 30, 1830, Cornies reported the situation to his Mennonite friend Johann Wiebe in Tiege, West Prussia. He noted the actions they had taken, but also offered a theological framework for understanding their crisis.

“God alone knows what will befall us in this sad time. Our villages exist like an island in an ocean of cholera, and there is evil all around. ... We have taken the following precautionary measures.

In every village, two men visit each house daily to check on the family’s health. To separate the sick from the healthy, one house has been emptied for use as a hospital. A large bathtub, etc. stands beside each Village Office.

We do not know what the future holds. Only the Eternal can see it. We must build on His grace and plead with Him to turn this scourge away from our empire and our villages.

With complete faith in the wisdom of our government, we await the Almighty’s ordinances without fear.

May every Christian, every thinking person harbour the personal conviction that whatever comes from God will serve our well-being. May this supreme wisdom divinely illumine man’s immortal spirit, created in His image, and cast light into the darkness of our earthly path.

We do not strive against God’s will by using our minds in taking precautions against disease and in battling disruptive natural forces. We are using our talents from on high, submitting them to His wise counsels and thereby praising His holy name. As you know, some people here consider precautionary measures to be sinful. Others continue to indulge in frivolity, even in this depressed, discouraging time.” (Note 3)

Cornies praised the state’s self-distancing measures:

“All roads are blocked and no one is allowed through without undergoing quarantine. It is impossible to thank God enough for His fatherly guardianship of our administration, which protects us through its wise measures” (note 4).

“If we follow these regulations scrupulously, the only thing left for us to do is to pray honestly and to submit to God’s Will” (note 5).

Within a few months, the pandemic broke out in the city of Danzig as well, despite a 20-day quarantine on individuals and goods coming from Russia. On June 16, 1831, Prussia began to treat vessels proceeding from Danzig “as if coming from Russia” (note 6).

The Mennonite and German colonies of the region were spared a cholera outbreak. September 18, 1831: “Until now our community has been spared, although we have felt ourselves under siege since May … I consider no doctor to be God and no medicine as Saviour, but I firmly believe that if God does not give His blessing to our daily bread or our medications, they will neither nourish us nor heal us” (note 7).

During the German occupation of Ukraine in 1942 was the following 1831 vaccination record was found: “Table on Vaccination of Children in the Districts of Chortitza and Molotschna” (note 8). Unfortunately, the document itself appears to be lost.

Vaccinations for Mennonites were not new; good cow pox immunization records for children in Chortitza in 1809 and 1814 are available (note 9).

Johann Cornies’ reading of scripture makes him confident that the Tsar’s response—including vaccination encouragement—is divinely led.

"[T]he Lord has power over all human hearts and directs them as He wishes, guiding them like water in a brook [cf. Proverbs 21:1]. In this way He also directed the loving father of our country to go to Moscow to take measures that would ease the suffering. Many others followed his lead with significant acts of benevolence and support for the poor. We give God a thousand thanks." (Note 10)

Reason, prayer and hope in the emperor are three strands of one cord for Cornies. The pandemic took some 250,000 lives in Russia, with a fifty-percent mortality rate among those infected (note 11).

The global dimensions of the pandemic, the large numbers of deaths, the state enforced quarantines, the crippling economic consequences, the existential fear of death—all of these aspects bear a striking resemblance to our own times. Perhaps there is something to learn from the spirituality of the time as well.

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Pic 1: Johann Cornies

Pic 2: Nogai village, in Daniel Schlatter, Bruchstücke aus einigen Reisen nach dem südlichen Rußland in den Jahren 1822 bis 1828 (St. Gallen, 1830), 74, https://www.e-rara.ch/zuz/content/zoom/7886108.

Map: Courtesy of Brent Wiebe; see his important website (especially for map collections) and the illustrations to my related article, https://trailsofthepast.com/2020/08/07/mennonitesepidemics/.

Note 1: John P. Davis, Russia in the Time of Cholera, Disease under Romanovs and Soviets (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2018), 40.

Note 2: Cornies to Molotschna Mennonite District Office, December 6, 1830, in: Transformation on the Southern Ukrainian Steppe: Letters and Papers of Johann Cornies, vol. 1: 1812–1835, translated by Ingrid I. Epp; edited by Harvey L. Dyck, Ingrid I. Epp, and John R. Staples (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 198, no. 198.

Note 3: Cornies to Johann Wiebe, Tiege, West Prussia, December 30, 1830, in Transformation I, 205, no. 202.

Note 4: Cornies to Blueher, December 10, 1830, in Transformation I, 200, no. 200.

Note 5: Cornies to Andrei M. Fadeev, Dec. 22, 1830, Transformation I, 202, no. 201.

Note 6: History of the epidemic spasmodic cholera of Russia (London: Murray, 1831), 245f. https://archive.org/details/b22478371/page/246/mode/2up.

Note 7: Cornies to Jacob van der Smissen, September 18, 1831, in Transformation I, 244, 239.

Note 8: Records of the National Socialist German Labor Party (NSDAP), National Archives Microcopy, no. T-81, roll 606, image 5396345. Deutsches Ausland-Institut, file 1397. American Historical Association. American Committee for the Study of War Documents. Washington, DC, 1956. Scanned on FamilySearch.org records, image 639 of 1,309, https://www.familysearch.org/records/images/image-details?page=1&place=5337&endDate=1942&startDate=1942&rmsId=TH-909-64122-19191-56&imageIndex=638&singleView=true&fbclid=IwAR2a1h4O-gjFi-CdKONW8Co5P31hOdWdIOloc7VSR0TUxbh4y-FoVwVD6f0.

Note 9: See previous post on vaccinations 1809 and 1814 (forthcoming); see also for the plague in Danzig, 1709, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/01/plague-and-pestilence-in-danzig-1709.html; and also Spanish Flu, 1918 and its impact on Mennonites, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/03/spanish-flu-pandemic-in-ukraine-and.html.

Note 10: Cornies to Blueher, 10 December 1830, in Transformation I, 205, no. 200. Cornies also uses this Proverb in correspondence to Wilhelm Frank, March 10, 1826 (no. 51, p. 59) as does Elder Bernhard Fast to Cornies, February 16, 1827 (no. 97, p. 115).

Note 11: Davis, Russia in the Time of Cholera, 42.

---

To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "A Mennonite Pandemic Spirituality, 1830-1831," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), May 29, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/05/a-mennonite-pandemic-spirituality-1830.html.

Comments

Village Reports Commando Dr. Stumpp, 1942: List and Links

Each of the "Commando Dr. Stumpp" village reports written during German occupation of Ukraine 1942 contains a mountain of demographic data, names, dates, occupations, numbers of untimely deaths (revolution, famines, abductions), narratives of life in the 1930s, of repression and liberation, maps, and much more. The reports are critical for telling the story of Mennonites in the Soviet Union before 1942, albeit written with the dynamics of Nazi German rule at play. Reports for some 56 (predominantly) Mennonite villages from the historic Mennonite settlement areas of Chortitza, Sagradovka, Baratow, Schlachtin, Milorodovka, and Borosenko have survived. Unfortunately no village reports from the Molotschna area (known under occupation as “Halbstadt”) have been found. Dr. Karl Stumpp, a prolific chronicler of “Germans abroad,” became well-known to German Mennonites (Prof. Benjamin Unruh/ Dr. Walter Quiring) before the war as the director of the Research Center for Russian Germans...

1929 Flight of Mennonites to Moscow and Reception in Germany

At the core of the attached video are some thirty photos of Mennonite refugees arriving from Moscow in 1929 which are new archival finds. While some 13,000 had gathered in outskirts of Moscow, with many more attempting the same journey, the Soviet Union only released 3,885 Mennonite "German farmers," together with 1,260 Lutherans, 468 Catholics, 51 Baptists, and 7 Adventists. Some of new photographs are from the first group of 323 refugees who left Moscow on October 29, arriving in Kiel on November 3, 1929. A second group of photos are from the so-called “Swinemünde group,” which left Moscow only a day later. This group however could not be accommodated in the first transport and departed from a different station on October 31. They were however held up in Leningrad for one month as intense diplomatic negotiations between the Soviet Union, Germany and also Canada took place. This second group arrived at the Prussian sea port of Swinemünde on December 2. In the next ten ...

The Tinkelstein Family of Chortitza-Rosenthal (Ukraine)

Chortitza was the first Mennonite settlement in "New Russia" (later Ukraine), est. 1789. The last Mennonites left in 1943 ( note 1 ). During the Stalin years in Ukraine (after 1928), marriage with Jewish neighbours—especially among better educated Mennonites in cities—had become somewhat more common. When the Germans arrived mid-August 1941, however, it meant certain death for the Jewish partner and usually for the children of those marriages. A family friend, Peter Harder, died in 2022 at age 96. Peter was born in Osterwick to a teacher and grew up in Chortitza. As a 16-year-old in 1942, Peter was compelled by occupying German forces to participate in the war effort. Ukrainians and Russians (prisoners of war?) were used by the Germans to rebuild the massive dam at Einlage near Zaporizhzhia, and Peter was engaged as a translator. In the next year he changed focus and started teachers college, which included significant Nazi indoctrination. In 2017 I interviewed Peter Ha...

Eduard Wüst: A “Second Menno”?

Arguably the most significant outside religious influence on Mennonite s in the 19th century was the revivalist preaching of Eduard Wüst, a university-trained Württemberg Pietist minister installed by the separatist Evangelical Brethren Church in New Russia in 1843 ( note 1 ). With the end-time prophesies of a previous generation of Pietists (and many Mennonites) coming to naught, Wüst introduced Germans in this area of New Russia to the “New Pietism” and its more individualistic, emotional conversion experience and sermons on the free grace of God centred on the cross of Christ ( note 2 ). Wüst’s 1851 Christmas sermon series give a good picture of what was changing ( note 3 ). His core agenda was to dispel gloom (which maybe could describe more traditional Mennonites) and induce Christian joy. This is the root impulse of the Mennonite Brethren beginnings years later in 1860. “Satan is not entitled to present his own as the most joyful.” His people “sing, jump, leap ( hüpfen ) ...

Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (Holodomor), 1932-1933

In 2008 the Canadian Parliament passed an act declaring the fourth Saturday in November as “Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (‘Holodomor’) Memorial Day” ( note 1 ). Southern Ukraine was arguably the worst affected region of the famine of 1932–33, where 30,000 to 40,000 Mennonites lived ( note 2 ). The number of famine-related deaths in Ukraine during this period are conservatively estimated at 3.5 million ( note 3 ). In the early 1930s Stalin feared growing “Ukrainian nationalism” and the possibility of “losing Ukraine” ( note 4 ). He was also suspicious of ethnic Poles and Germans—like Mennonites—in Ukraine, convinced of the “existence of an organized counter-revolutionary insurgent underground” in support of Ukrainian national independence ( note 5 ). Ukraine was targeted with a “lengthy schooling” designed to ruthlessly break the threat of Ukrainian nationalism and resistance, and this included Ukraine’s Mennonites (viewed simply as “Germans”). Various causes combined to bring on w...

Why study and write about Russian Mennonite history?

David G. Rempel’s credentials as an historian of the Russian Mennonite story are impeccable—he was a mentor to James Urry in the 1980s, for example, which says it all. In 1974 Rempel wrote an article on Mennonite historical work for an issue of the Mennonite Quarterly Review commemorating the arrival of Russian Mennonites to North America 100 years earlier ( note 1). In one section of the essay Rempel reflected on Mennonites’ general “lack of interest in their history,” and why they were so “exceedingly slow” in reflecting on their historic development in Russia with so little scholarly rigour. Rempel noted that he was not alone in this observation; some prominent Mennonites of his generation who had noted the same pointed an “extreme spirit of individualism” among Mennonites in Russia; the absence of Mennonite “authoritative voices,” both in and outside the church; the “relative indifference” of Mennonites to the past; “intellectual laziness” among many who do not wish to be distu...

Becoming German: Ludendorff Festivals in Molotschna, 1918

During the friendly German military occupation of Ukraine at the end of WWI, patriotic “Ludendorff Festivals” were encouraged by German forces to raise funds to support injured German soldiers. A first such festival in the Molotschna was held on June 25, 1918 in Ohrloff, and was attended by “a great many German officers, soldiers and colonists with music, [patriotic] speeches and social interaction” From the perspective of the German army press, the event was “extremely enjoyable;” it was accompanied with music by a 30-piece regiment orchestra, and beer, sausage, sandwiches, ice-cream, raspberries and cherries were sold. It closed with a “small dance,” raising 7,387 rubles or 9,850 German marks in donations ( note 1 ). Later that summer, a Ludendorff Festival in Halbstadt began with Sunday worship, followed by an early concert, games and performances by the Selbstschutz , as well as “entertainment and merriment of every kind,” with short plays and dancing into the morning ( note ...

What is the Church to Say? Letter 4 (of 4) to American Mennonite Friends

Irony is used in this post to provoke and invite critical thought; the historical research on the Mennonite experience is accurate and carefully considered. ~ANF Preparing for your next AGM: Mennonite Congregations and Deportations Many U.S. Mennonite pastors voted for Donald Trump, whose signature promise was an immediate start to “the largest deportation operation in American history.” Confirmed this week, President Trump will declare a national emergency and deploy military assets to carry this out. The timing is ideal; in January many Mennonite congregations have their Annual General Meeting (AGM) with opportunity to review and update the bylaws of their constitution. Need help? We have related examples from our tradition, which I offer as a template, together with a few red flags. First, your congregational by-laws. It is unlikely you have undocumented immigrants in your congregation, but you should flag this. Model: Gustav Reimer, a deacon and notary public from the ...

Four-Part Singing in Mennonite Schools and Church in Russia

The significance of singing instruction may seem trite, but it became a key vehicle in the Mennonite school curriculum for fostering a basic appreciation of the arts and for faith formation. In Johann Cornies’ circulated guidelines for teachers, singing was recommended as a means “to stimulate and enliven pious feelings” in the children—a guideline he copied directly from a German Catholic pedagogue and circulated freely under his own name ( note 1 ). On January 26, 1846 Cornies distributed a curriculum regulation to all schools that mandated “singing by numbers ( Zahlen ) from the church hymnal” ( note 2 ). Attention to singing instruction in the schools precipitated significant and controversial changes in Mennonite liturgy. An 1854 visiting observer to the Bergthal Colony—a Chortitza daughter colony outside of Cornies’ purview—wrote: “Endlessly long hymns from the Gesangbuch (hymnal) were begun by the Vorsänger (song leader) of the congregation, and sung with so many flo...

What is the Church to Say? Letter 3 (of 4) to American Mennonite Friends

Irony is used in this post to provoke and invite critical thought; the historical research on the Mennonite experience is accurate and carefully considered. ~ANF Mennonite endorsement Trump the man No one denies the moral flaws of Donald Trump, least of all Trump himself. In these next months Mennonite pastors who supported Trump will have many opportunities to restate to their congregation and their children why someone like Trump won their support. It may be obvious, but the words can be difficult to find. To help, I offer examples from Mennonite history with statements from one our strongest leaders of the past century, Prof. Benjamin H. Unruh (see the nice Mennonite Encyclopedia article on him, GAMEO ). I have substituted only a few words, indicated by square brackets to help with the adaptation. The [MAGA] movement is like the early Anabaptist movement! In the change of government in 1933, Unruh saw in the [MAGA] movement “things breaking forth which our forefathe...

History of the Russian Mennonites

Search This Blog