HUTERITES. — This is one of the 17 sects mentioned. Its founder was Jacob Huter, a 16th-century Anabaptist, burned at Innsbruck in 1536.
Though persecuted for their Anabaptist origins and communist doctrine, their followers were protected by landowners who valued their work in the fields and their honesty. Thus they were able to spread, so that by the start of the Thirty Years' War there were 24 groups in Bohemia and Moravia, known as the “Hutterite brothers.” They survived with some restrictions until the end of the 18th century, when Emperor Joseph II granted them freedom. Later expelled from the Austrian Empire, they withdrew to Russia. When their freedom was restricted by the ukases of 1873 and 1875, they emigrated to the United States, where they now form a community of about a thousand people and have begun a flourishing mission in Paraguay.