Jakob Ammann and the Birth of the Amish
Near Berlin, Ohio
The Amish church as a distinct tradition did not exist at the beginning of the Anabaptist movement. It was born in the sixteen nineties from a dispute about how strictly community standards should be enforced. Jakob Ammann was a Swiss-born Anabaptist leader who believed the communities of his time had grown too lax.
He insisted above all on the practice of Meidung, the German word for shunning, which called for the complete social exclusion of members who had been expelled from the community. His position was that expelled members should be avoided by all other members, including their own spouses and families, until they repented and were restored. Many Anabaptist leaders considered this too harsh and divisive, and refused to follow him.
The dispute divided the Swiss and Alsatian Anabaptist communities. Those who followed Ammann's stricter position became known as Amish, taking the name from his own. Those who did not eventually became known as Swiss Mennonites.
Ammann himself disappears from the historical record after the early seventeen hundreds, and historians know little about his later life or death. What he left behind was a tradition of deliberate separation from the surrounding society, of community discipline enforced through the reality of exclusion, and of simplicity as both a spiritual value and a practical means of keeping a community intact and distinct. Those convictions remain visible in Holmes County today.
