A member of an Anabaptist movement in Holland noted for its simplicity of life.
Member of a Protestant Christian sect, originating as part of the Anabaptist movement in Zürich, Switzerland, 1523. Members refuse to hold civil office or do military service, and reject infant baptism. They were named Mennonites after Menno Simons (1496–1559), leader of a group in Holland.
Persecution drove other groups to Russia and North America.
Some Swiss and German Mennonites settled in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1683. From there they eventually spread to the Midwest and Canada. Additional groups went to the Great Plains and to the prairie provinces of Canada after Russia began military conscription in the 1880s. Of the 600,000 Mennonites in the world, some 250,000 are in the us.