The Story of the German-Uzbek Mennonites in Three Books
(As gleaned from a fourth book, Sofia Samatar's The White Mosque)
Yes, Mennonites, or as they’re sometimes called here in Pennsylvania, Diet Amish. And yes, that Uzbekistan, the doubly-landlocked country in Central Asia, though when the community was formed in 1881, it was the imperial Russian province of Turkestan. The locals called their community Ak Metchet, the White Mosque, for the whitewashed church at the center of their village, at the edge of the Kyzl Kum Desert. They were waiting for the Rapture.
How a group of German-speaking Mennonites came to be guests of the Khanate of Khiva is at the center of Sofia Samatar’s The White Mosque. An American-born Mennonite, Samatar went to visit the remains of Ak Metchet and understand this deeply weird story of bearded Anabaptists in Central Asia. That story, as it turns out, is also the story of three particular books, and the profound impact they had on this small band of frowning Germans in Central Asia. So let’s take a look at each of them.
The Martyrs Mirror
Mennonites are Anabaptists. Anabaptists believe that infant baptism is a mistake. Only adults in full possession of their reasoning and educated in the values of Christianity can really pledge themselves to a life of Christian service. After all, Jesus was baptized when he was thirty, and and all of the apostles joined him as adults.
The idea of anabaptism (ana- meaning again) sounds innocuous to us, living in a jaded modernity five centuries after the Protestant Reformation. But much follows from adult baptism. For one thing, it means that people have to be educated in Christianity before they join, which makes literacy vitally important—you have to be able to read the Bible to be an Anabaptist. Because they’d read the Bible, Anabaptists had a clear definition of Christianity: be like Christ and the Apostles. That meant no violence, no oaths sworn to worldly powers like kings and governments, and no hoarding of property. And it also meant, of course, that the vast majority of practicing Christians in the world weren’t really Christians, because they hadn’t chosen baptism.
For all this, the Anabaptists were slaughtered, humiliated, and driven into exile—not only by the Catholic Church, but by the newly-emerging Protestant states, too. Looking back in 1660 on the last century of Anabaptist persecution, Thielemen van Braght wrote: “Never were there in so small a space so many dark prisons, deadly tribunals, scaffolds, fiery stakes, and other instruments of death erected and made use of as were at this time in Germany and the Netherlands.” This comes from van Braght’s introduction to his book Martyrs Mirror, or to use its full title: The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians who baptized only upon confession of faith, and who suffered and died for the testimony of Jesus, their Saviour, from the time of Christ to the year A.D. 1660. After the Bible itself, it is the most important book for Anabaptists, like the Amish and the Mennonites.
Looking through this book of modern martyrology, you will find stories of victims like Dirk Willems, who would have escaped a fiery death at the stake if he hadn’t stopped to save his pursuer from drowning; or Gerrit Hazenpoet, also burned at the stake, who kicked off his slippers as he roasted, saying “It were a pity to burn them for they can be of service to some poor person.” The book goes on like this for 1,500 pages, interrupted only by woodcuts of astonishing craftsmanship.
It is still used today as a textbook for Mennonites. The lesson that they took from it is clear: persecution, suffering, and exile are the lot of all good Anabaptists, and they must be faced with charity, patience, and stoic humor. Even though the worst of the persecution had ended by 1660, Mennonites were already used to living apart from the world, and being ready to travel far.
For instance, to Russia.
Homesickness
The growth of the modern state in the 18th century made life hard for Mennonites. They had many needs: contracts and loyalty oaths to ensure legal compliance; tax revenue to support bloody, slave-owning imperialist misadventures and secular legal systems; and most of all, young men to fill their barracks, load their cannons, and fire their muskets. This was all unacceptable to Mennonites. The 1700s were a time of mass emigration. Many went to North America, but a few found an unlikely refuge in Russia.
Catherine the Great, German-born Empress of All Russias, wanted to fill the frontiers of her expanding empire with her industrious, pious countrymen. Of all the Germans, the Mennonites were especially keen to take up Catherine’s offer, as the Russians were willing to waive compulsory military service and the most onerous taxes for settlers. By the end of the century, tens of thousands of Mennonites were living on the Volga River basin, at the edge of the great Eurasian Steppe.
They brought their copies of Martyrs Mirror with them, but that wasn’t their only reading. After the Bible and the Mirror, Samatar writes, the most popular book by far among the Russian Mennonites was a curious 1794 novel by the German Mennonite doctor Heinrich Jung-Stilling.
Das Heimweh (Homesickness) tells the story of Eugenius, a pious young man who has never felt truly at home in his community or with its narrow, self-satisfied, provincial Christianity. He embarks on an allegorical journey of the soul (Stilling was a big fan of The Pilgrim’s Progress) going east to a mystical valley, loosely described as somewhere near Samarkand, where true Christians—mostly Mennonites—are gathering for the Second Coming.
Most German readers hardly noticed the book, and today it’s absolutely forgotten. But among the Mennonites of Russia, Das Heimweh was enormously popular. It’s not hard to see why they might identify with the story of a young Mennonite’s heroic journey to the distant, desolate lands of the East to form a community of true believers ready to serve as the Bride of Christ (one of the Mennonites’ favorite metaphors). For most readers, it was probably a flattering story, and a nice bit of bedtime reading between longer bouts with the Bible and Martyrs Mirror.
But for a few readers, Das Heimweh was not only a novel, but a prophecy. Stilling himself was discomfited to find people coming to his door in Marburg, asking him about the divine revelations contained in his novel. Samatar quotes from Stilling’s memoirs, as the author tells pilgrims who came to kiss his hands that the whole thing was mere “fable and fiction,” that he had chosen Samarkand on a whim. (Uzbekistan had never played an important role in Christianity, and besides a few Nestorian churches, the region had been stoutly Islamic for a thousand years.)
The accidental prophet did everything he could to discourage his followers, but even after his death in 1817, the cult of Das Heimweh continued to grow, especially among Russian Mennonites.
The Unsealed Prophecy
Few people have ever read a novel as seriously as Claas Epp, Jr. read Das Heimweh. An influential member of the Russian Mennonites, Epp was obsessed with the idea that Stilling’s book was literally true. He combed through the book for instructions, cross-referencing its vague descriptions with the Bible. Russia, he concluded, was not close enough to the site of the Second Coming. True believers would have to go farther, and Epp would lead the way. “God’s word,” he wrote in a letter, “points to the inner regions of Asia.” Samatar quotes further:
An even more precise description revealed to us, if we want to accept it, is where the spirit of God led the man of God, Stilling. Even though Stilling sought the place of refuge in Palestine and therefore let Eugenius take this wrong way, Stilling had to follow the spirit which let him see the assembled peoples of the spirit in the regions of Samarkand and Bukhara…After the assembling of the peoples had happened there, Eugenius first went to the place of refuge which lay in the nearby regions. This was how it was revealed to Stilling.
Epp continued his studies, compiling his extensive notes together into a book, self-published in 1877. The Unsealed Prophecy of the Prophet Daniel and the Meaning of the Revelation of Jesus Christ laid out his arguments, citing chapter and verse of the Bible alongside Stilling, that the return of Christ was imminent. Epp was confident that Christ would appear to greet the faithful outside the town of Shakhrisabz, in Uzbekistan, on March 8th, 1889.
As he rode from settlement to settlement to share his book, Epp found an unusually receptive audience among his fellow Mennonites. They were in crisis: in 1870, the Russian exemption on military service had ended. Soon, Mennonite men would be asked to don the uniform of the Tsar and swear an oath to serve and kill in the name of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality. Suddenly, Shakhrisabz didn’t sound like such a bad idea.
And so, in 1880, Claas Epp and a hundred Mennonite families set out into the steppes of Russian Turkestan, intending to settle in the southern reach of Uzbekistan in order to greet Christ.
The trip was a disaster. Dozens perished in the heat of the Kyzyl Kum desert, nothing grew in the hardy soil of Shakhrisabz, and local bandits quickly figured out that these strange new Christians were so meek, you could walk into their houses and simply take whatever you wanted without resistance. The original settlement lasted less than a year. Most of the hundred families left, either returning to Russia or moving on to North America. A few formed a settlement of their own in modern Kyrgyzstan.
Thirty-nine accepted an offer from the nearby Khan of Khiva, who would let them live on one of his tracts and find employment on his estate. This settlement was where the Mennonites built their White Mosque, and where the Soviets came fifty years later to deport them. And it was where, in 1889, they gathered to meet Jesus.
As you may know, Jesus Christ didn’t return on March 8th of that year. Seeing his distraught parishioners, Epp announced, as these guys always do, that he’d made a mistake: his clock, which he’d used to figure out the year of the Second Coming, had been set crooked. Instead of pointing to 8 and 9, when they should have been pointing to 9 and 1. Jesus would come in 1891. This also failed to transpire. Epp, as these guys always do, doubled down. He told his remaining followers that he himself was the Son of Christ, the fourth part of the “Quadruple Godhead”: the Father, the Holy Ghost, and the Sons. In 1900, the community revoked his right to preach. He died in 1913, forsaken by most of the community.
The Ak Metchet no longer had an apocalyptic mission. Now, they were just a bunch of German-speaking Anabaptists in the middle of Uzbekistan. They made do, raising their crops and children year after year, largely self-sufficient. Surprisingly, they maintained good relations with the locals. Nearly a century after their deportation by the Soviets in 1935, the Uzbeks Samatar meets say that the Mennonites are fondly remembered for their hard work, skilled craftsmanship, and respect for Islam. The Uzbek government, not usually the nicest group of folks, has gladly hosted Mennonite heritage tours of the Ak Metchet site, and local authors have published books celebrating the community.
Among Mennonites, the Ak Metchet community isn’t quite as celebrated. You don’t need a degree in theology to see that Claas Epp committed blatant, outrageous heresy, and many liberal Mennonites, like Samatar, have mixed feelings about Mennonite colonization.
But for me, as a non-expert and reader, I can’t help seeing Ak Metchet as a story about literature. To be sure, it took an awful lot of politics, persecution, and theology to bring the Mennonites out to Uzbekistan. But three very different books turned out to have a very decisive role in the creation of this unique community. Sometimes, you really are what you read.
From the Archives:
A few months ago I wrote about another obscure, geographically improbable religious commune: the Orthodox Jews of the Peruvian Amazon. Read about it here:
And that’s all for this post. Happy reading!