Adapting to Toleration: Swiss Anabaptist Refugees in the Electoral Palatinate, 1650-1711

Abstract

In 1664, Elector Karl I Ludwig, Count Palatine of the Rhine decreed a General Concession granting the Anabaptists living in his lands the free exercise of religion in exchange for the yearly payment of fees and a few limits to their newfound freedom. This act was not the beginning of toleration for Anabaptists in the Palatinate, however. Anabaptist immigrants, refugees, and exiles had been making their way into the Palatinate and settling at the behest of nobles, estate managers, and local officials since 1650. In so doing, they forged relationships of de facto toleration that led to the promulgation of the general policy in 1664. Those same relationships continued to determine their security even as the Anabaptist communities themselves took up the fight for their rights as legal residents, subjects, and citizens of the elector’s lands well into the eighteenth century.Early modern scholarship has demonstrated that displaced communities often struggled to adapt because of the intolerant attitudes and policies of their host communities. This dissertation argues that for a community shaped by over a century of persecution, toleration could pose a similar challenge. Furthermore, this project identifies those adaptations and shows how making them in turn altered the public-facing identity of the group. In what they called themselves, where they lived, and how they gave new expression to their traditional theology, these Anabaptists became Palatine Mennonites not by turning their backs on what they had once known but by reinterpreting the core of their identity as Swiss Brethren to adapt to life in a new land.