Anabaptist Roots: The Emmental

                                               
Note: This is first in a series about my trip to Europe last summer, part of which I spent exploring religious and family roots.
 
I went on a pilgrimage last summer, in search of my family and religious roots. Actually, they weren’t lost; I’ve always taken interest in and known where I came from. But when the opportunity arose to spend some time in Europe, I wanted to visit the places where my ancestors and their faith were born, and to which they fled to escape persecution for their faith.

My journey began in Zurich, Switzerland, where the Anabaptist movement was founded in the early 1500s. “Anabaptist” means “rebaptize,” and the people who formed the movement believed that only those who were old enough to make a mature confession of faith in Jesus Christ should be baptized into the church. Their name came from the fact that people joined the movement by being baptized as adults, even though they had been baptized as infants.

The official state church in Switzerland at that time was the Swiss Reformed Protestant Church, which perceived the Anabaptist movement as a severe threat to the orthodox faith. It did not take long for the civic and religious leadership to set out to “stamp out the Anabaptist weed,” as it was ordered in official documents of the time. The Canton of Berne, which includes the beautiful and fertile Emmental Valley, was the most energetic and harsh in its persecutions. Anabaptists were beaten and imprisoned, and when that didn’t stop the movement, they were beheaded and drowned. 

A man named Marx Boshart hosted a clandestine meeting of the fledgling Anabaptist movement in his home in Zurich in the early 1500s. He was among the first to be rebaptized and was later imprisoned for his role in the movement. 

My mother’s maternal grandmother was a Boshart. Family historians have not yet been able to establish a link between her and Marx Boshart, but given that her family was from the same region of Switzerland, we strongly suspect there is one and I am proud to claim him. 

Eventually many Anabaptists, including both paternal and maternal strains of my mother’s family and the maternal strain of my father’s family, fled from persecution into the Alsace region of France and the Waldeck region of Germany. Members of my mother’s family in particular were prominent in the formation of the Mennonite Church out of the Anabaptist movement, and members of my father’s family were part of the group that broke away from the Mennonites in the late 1600s to form the Amish Church.

My first visit in Switzerland was to the oldest continuously operating Mennonite Church in the world. It is located in Langnau in the Emmental Valley and was founded in 1530. There I encountered a young man practicing the piano who gave directions to a place called the “Taüfer Versteck,” or “Baptist Hideout” near the tiny village of Trub, Switzerland. I will continue with that story next week.