Mennonites in the Netherlands

The Mennonites (or Mennisten or Doopsgezinden) are named for Menno Simons (1496–1561), a Dutch Roman Catholic priest from the province of Friesland who converted to Anabaptism around 1536.

[2] The doopsgezinden ("baptist-minded") or the Algemene Doopsgezinde Sociëteit (General Baptism-minded Society) are a religious community in the Netherlands that can be considered the Dutch branch of the Mennonites.

In the days of the Dutch Republic, this position brought the community into conflict with local and Stadholderly authorities, because the church members refused to participate in the city's militia.

Anabaptism appeared in the Netherlands by 1530, when Melchior Hoffman (1495–1543) visited Emden in East Frisia.

The early years saw a number of, at times, rather fanatical, even violent, developments under Anabaptist-associated groups, like the Batenburgers.

After the demise of the Anabaptist rule in Münster (1534–1536, under Jan van Leiden), Menno Simons became the pivotal person who inspired the movement known as the (Ana)baptists.

In the second half of the 16th century many Frisian and Flemish Mennonites from the Netherlands moved to the Vistula Delta, where they established settlements that flourished until the 1770s.

Many of these Vistula delta Mennonites later moved to the Russian Empire and from there to North and Latin America.

Today there several hundred thousands of these so-called Russian Mennonites, who are of Dutch descent and speak Plautdietsch.

In the heyday of the Dutch Republic, the Golden Age of the seventeenth century, many of the Menists came into considerable wealth.

At the end of the century, there was considerable upheaval and the "patriots" inspired by events in the American colonies strove for sweeping reform in the rather archaic institutions of the Republic.

In the Batavian Revolution of 1795, a disproportionately large number of 'doopsgezinden', as they started to call themselves, could be found amongst the "patriots" and they played an active role in the emancipation of groups that, like themselves, had been excluded from full citizenship.

In the century that followed, many of the more orthodox members of the 'doopsgezinden' decided to leave and join the more conservative Dutch Reformed Church.