Hutterites: An Anabaptist Branch

Hutterites: An Anabaptist Branch

This article relates to Ruth

Kate Riley's novel Ruth takes place on a Hutterite commune in Michigan. Hutterites are a branch of the Anabaptist movement, a radical movement of the Protestant Reformation (other branches include the Amish and Mennonites). The primary tenets of the Anabaptists are adult baptism and the separation of church and state.

Hutterites were originally from Austria and South Germany; their community was founded in 1528 and named for its charismatic leader, Jakob Hutter, who was tortured and burned as a heretic in 1536. The group was persecuted and driven to other parts of Europe, as well as North America in the 1870s. Today, the population of Hutterites is about 50,000 and the sect mostly exists in small colonies (Bruderhöfe) of about 60 to 150 people each in the western parts of the United States and Canada, which are self-governed by a Council of Elders.

Hutterites emphasize communal living, shared ownership of property, and pacifism, with a lifestyle rooted in early Christian teachings; as Ruth puts it: "the Sermon on the Mount was their only charter, all goods were held in common, and a young person such as herself had no task other than discerning whether to accept Christ into her heart and seek baptism." Indeed, the main way that Hutterites differ from Mennonites and the Amish is that they believe in sharing their possessions, as demonstrated by Christ and described in the Book of Acts in the Bible; members don't have personal assets or bank accounts, but rather, all assets are held communally and distributed according to need. In their words, they believe "community of goods and working for each other to be the highest command of love." (In Ruth, when members go on an excursion, like to the zoo, or to a work conference, they're given an envelope with necessary cash.)

When Ruth is a child in the 1960s, her mother speaks to her in Hutterisch at home: "The soft Colony pidgin was full of words for dumplings, mucus, and foolishness. She knew that Hutterisch was not written, and assumed this to be a failure of the alphabet; decades later, on the internet, her queries would return phonemes so exotic that they appeared as empty rectangles on the screen."

Hutterisch is a German dialect originating from the province of Carinthia in Austria and is spoken in Hutterite communities in the US and Canada, with small changes to the dialect and argot depending on the colony. Hutterisch includes many English loan words, including for things like farm equipment and cooking ingredients, but the core vocabulary is almost exclusively German. As Ruth describes, Hutterisch is for the most part an oral language with no standard spelling system, making it challenging to write and read.

Greenwood Hutterite Colony near Delmont, South Dakota
Photo by Rainer Mueller, CC BY 3.0

Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities

This article relates to Ruth. It first ran in the August 27, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.