"Mennonites like to visit back and forth ... this is a principle of their religion"

How do you define Mennonites? What is their essence. Many historians and theologians have tripped up trying to address this question!

In 1838, Russian Mennonite leader Johann Cornies was asked to comment on a settlement idea by Russian State Counselor Peter Keppen—and he did not shy away from identifying what is at the core of their faith and identity.

Keppen’s recommendation was to settle small clusters of three Mennonite families each—as model farmers, like a chain of pearls at key junctures—deep into central and western Crimea, on roads connecting Perekop, through Simferopol to Yevpatoria.

Why? Mennonites were officially “foreign colonists” in Russia who were deemed especially “useful” and given favourable privileges and gratuities by the crown. These benefits were dependent on being model agriculturalists on the South Russian steppe. The expectation: that "their good habits would eventually rub off on the coarser people around them” (note 1).

In response, Cornies gave Keppen a brief lesson on who and what Mennonites are and how they can be best settled. Curiously the description is found among letters where Cornies describes different breeds of sheep and cows and the environment and treatment each type needs to survive and thrive!

First, good, industrious Mennonites would not settle this way, and the community would not allow less industrious settlers to participate “lest they become a disgrace to the community and draw the ire of the government."
Second, “a life lived in isolation is also not in keeping with Mennonite customs and would be too lonely. Mennonites like to visit back and forth, sharing joys and sorrows. This is a principle of their religion. This is the way in which they help one another with brotherly support, edifying themselves spiritually and comforting and encouraging one another.”
Third, “their children must be provided with enough schooling that would allow them, at the very minimum, to learn to read and write. [At the time of their baptism] they must be able to deliver their confession of faith orally in order to be accepted into the community and must convince the community of the propriety of their behaviour. This is essential and important to Mennonites. The community must know that a [candidate for baptism] has led a life which makes him acceptable and worthy of membership, a fact to be confirmed by witnesses."

Fourth, “the situation would be a very different if a regular settlement, including professionals necessary in an agricultural economy, were established in the region near these roads. This settlement would need to have a house of worship and a school and be provided with a schoolteacher."
Fifth, "[the proposed] road stations, with three families each, might be an extension of the larger settlement. Leadership and protection could originate from the settlement. To endure and become permanent, every settlement needs appropriate leadership, mutual encouragement, support and protection" (note 2).

Notably, helping and encouraging one another in community is absolutely central to a Mennonite understanding of faith, Cornies notes. He also assumes a non-resistant community, as well as state policing protection. And access to basic education for both girls and boys is non-negotiable because reading (Bible, catechism) is critical for believers' baptism.

The linkage of order, work and economic vitality, on the one hand, and morality and faith on the other, had always been key for Cornies.

Keppen was a Baltic German who grew up in Kharkiv and had his first administrative appointment in Crimea, before being called to St Petersburg. Now returning to southern Ukraine as an academic and senior state official for the new Ministry of State Domains, he finds an ally in Cornies (note 3). Mennonites had "everything that a Russian administrator could want in a foreign colonist: 'capital,' laudable personal qualities (industriousness, cleanliness, moderate drinking habits), and expertise as farmers and craftsmen" (note 4).

The generous Mennonite Privilegium and its terms are best understood under Greater Russia’s sense of imperial, messianic mission to serve and rule nobly over many peoples (note 5)--which is displayed in this correspondence. The growing emotional attachment and loyalty of Russian Mennonites to the royal house, and their own religious sense of call or mission as “model” colonists and agriculturalists, took root within this context.

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Map:

Note 1: Willard Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 117.

Note 2: Transformation on the Southern Ukrainian Steppe: Letters and Papers of Johann Cornies, vol. 2: 1836–1842, translated by Ingrid I. Epp; edited by Harvey L. Dyck, Ingrid I. Epp, and John R. Staples (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020) 104-106, no. 127 –https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/100164/1/Southern_Ukrainian_Steppe_UTP_9781487538743.pdf.

Note 3: John Staples, "Introduction," 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), xlviii.

Note 4: Sunderland, Taming the Wild Field, 117. “Nearly all Mennonites are orderly and clean in their domestic life, sober and honest in their moral life and diligent and industrious in their economic life” (Contenius, cited in David G. Rempel, “Mennonite Migration to New Russia [II],” Mennonite Quarterly Review 9, no. 3 [July 1935], 109–128; 115).

Note 5: David G. Rowley, “‘Redeemer Empire’: Russian Millenarianism,” American Historical Review 104, no. 5 (1999), 1582–1602.

---

To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, “‘Mennonites like to visit back and forth ... this is a principle of their religion’,” History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), June 12, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/06/mennonites-like-to-visit-back-and-forth.html.

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History of the Russian Mennonites

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