The Hebrew origin of our Mennonite people is something that you might want to consider seriously. Whether or not you agree will have profound consequences.

I graduated from Eden Christian College, a Mennonite High School in Ontario, where a course was given on Mennonite history. The text we used has long ago disappeared from my library, but I distinctly remember reading that Mennonites are descendants of the Teutonic tribes in what is now Switzerland, Holland and Germany. A dictionary definition for Teuton is, “A member of a people speaking a language of the German branch of the Indo-European language family.” We should also recall that “Indo” refers to Ancient Persia, the subcontinent of India, and some other portions of the Near East. So just knowing that our past is Teutonic is a valuable clue to our ancient origin.

Late in the sixteenth century, Mennonites of mainly Dutch stock (both Dutch factions, Flemish and Frisian, with a liberal sprinkling of Moravians, Germans and Swiss) were invited to leave Prussia for Southern Russia by Catherine the Great. Catherine needed farmers for her newly acquired land and the Mennonite people needed to leave Prussia to avoid military service. By 1840 about seven hundred and fifty families had located in the Molotschna settlement north of the Black Sea. Little did our people know that their forefathers (before they were called Mennonites) had been in this area before... north of the Black Sea and east of the Caspian. They were actually returning in the direction from which they had come.

The Goths, the Germans and the Saxons are sometimes collectively called the Teutonic people. Their original Teutonic or Indo-European tongue gradually developed into the languages we now call English, German, Dutch, Swedish and Danish. Yet Teutonic or Gothic speech was still recognizable in its original form in the Crimea in the sixteenth century. In the sixteenth century? In the Crimea? The Crimea is that area bounded by the Black Sea on the south and west, and by the Sea of Azov on the east... precisely the area settled by the Dutch Mennonites in that very same century! The implication is that the Mennonite-Teutonic people had been in this area before, in a past long forgotten. It is unlikely they knew that more than a millennia had gone by since their predecessors had been in the Crimea. (1)

As a second witness, in 1404 A.D. Archbishop Johannes de Gabonifontibus reported that two small nations were living along and around the Black Sea, the Thats and a few Goths. The Thats were also a branch of the original Teutons, but most of them had migrated to Northern Germany and Denmark. Some had remained in the area where:

“A section of the Thats by the Black Sea shores of Southern Russia practiced Judaism and... were identified with the Lost Tribes of Israel.” (2)

Here is further evidence that the Teutons came from the territory around the Black Sea - specifically Southern Russia - and then migrated into those areas of Europe later associated with the Mennonite people. However, there were still Teutons living by the Black Sea in the fifteenth century, and a century later when the Dutch Mennonites came there, or in a sense returned.

If we jump much father back into history, another story line was emerging in the first millennium B.C. when the Northern Kingdom of Israel was invaded and taken captive by the Assyrians. The captivity began in approximately 740 B.C. when the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh were carried away. In 721 B.C. the city of Samaria fell and the last of Israel’s ten tribes were deported. The majority of the tribes of Israel were settled in a vast territory east of the Euphrates and west of the Indus. Much of this area would eventually become Ancient Persia, including some of India and other countries in the Near East. It was this territory that became the birthplace of the Indo-European language, the language that would eventually become our modern English, German, Dutch, Swedish and Danish. It would also be the language of the Teutons in the 15th Century.

In Hosea 1:6-10 Yahuah (YHWH) promised that the population of the ten tribes would be multiplied beyond calculation after they were expelled from the Promised Land. In the rise and fall of the nations, Assyria fell to the Medo-Persians, and they in turn fell to the Parthians. In the great Parthian Empire which lasted for five centuries, the ten tribes flourished and were multiplied over and over. The Jewish historian, Josephus, recorded how the tribes of Israel had a huge Asian population by the first century A.D. James wrote to the twelve tribes scattered abroad (James 1:1). Peter wrote from Babylon where he had gone to fulfill the great commission (1 Peter 5:13). According to tradition, Thaddeus, Matthias, Andrew, Bartholomew and Simon the Zealot all evangelized or passed through the Parthian province of Armenia. Both secular history and the Scriptures testify to a large and well established Israelite population within the Parthian Empire.

As the great nations and empires before it, Parthia fell to Persia it 226 A.D. The Persians, however, were not a Semitic people and were also Zoroastrians. Religiously intolerant, the Persians soon began to persecute Christians and to a lesser extent the Jews (this was the time of Esther and Mordechai), and triggered one of the largest population shifts in history. A tidal wave of Semitic people, both Israelite and non-Israelite migrated in the direction of the Christian country of Armenia, the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea. This region was a natural refuge because it had been inhabited by a previous wave of Israelites in about 500 B.C. As Steven M. Collins writes:

“When Parthia fell and its people fled into Armenia, the descendants of the ten tribes of Israel in Asia became compressed into a region the shape of a crescent: from Armenia, between the Caspian and Black Seas, around the Black Sea on the north and toward modern Romania and Eastern Hungry. For the first time since the fall of the old kingdom of Israel, the ten tribes of Israel who had scattered into Asia were now mostly together again.”(3)

In a migration that continued for centuries, millions of “Parthian” refugees populated much of Europe. Historians have often acknowledged that most of the nations in Northern, Western and Central Europe are descended from the massive waves of Caucasians who poured into Europe from Asia. Hence the Indo-European language of the Goths, the Germans and the Saxons, known collectively as the Teutonic people. It is from these ancient tribes that the Mennonite people came... the Flemish, the Frisians, the Moravians, the Germans and the Swiss. As a Teutonic people, the ancestors of the Mennonites came with the Parthians from the region around the Tigres-Euphrates.

In a strange twist of history, perhaps unique to the Mennonite people, they returned for a time to the region of the Caucasus, specifically Southern Russia, north of the Black Sea. This is the unusual path that the Mennonite people took as they migrated from Switzerland, Holland and Germany, to Prussia and then to Russia. When these people left the region of the Caucasus, they were known as Teutons. But when they returned, more than a thousand years later, they were called Mennonites.

Strangely, the Mennonite people have twice in their history been associated with that region of the world known as the collecting point for the ancient tribes of Israel. For it was in this very region of the Caucasus that all the tribes of Israel had gathered together as a people before populating most of Europe. There is a persistent rumor that Mennonites are really “Jews” or Israelites. Perhaps some did recall their ancient heritage when the returned to the area north of the Black Sea in the 16th Century.

Hoshea the prophet wrote, “My Elohim rejects them, because they have not obeyed Him, so that they became wanderers among the gentiles” (Hosea 9:17).

So the Mennonites are a people who wandered from Holland to Prussia to the area north of the Black Sea, then to Canada, the United States, South America and elsewhere. Before that, as Israelites, they were expelled from the land of Israel, relocated east of the Euphrates, and then sent westward to the Black Sea region. They have wandered so much that it has become one of their distinguishing characteristics... and a fulfillment of prophecy.The conclusion can only be that the Mennonite people are Israelites, specifically of the ten northern tribes of Israel, and that were scattered throughout the earth because of their disobedience.

Understanding our Hebrew origin has profound consequences.

(Abraham Rempel, 2007)

(1) Collins, Steven M., ISRAEL’S TRIBES TODAY, page 37-38.
(2) Davidiy, Yair, THE TRIBES, page 184.
(3) Collins, Steven M., ISRAEL’S TRIBES TODAY, page 24.