HUTERITES. - This is one of the 17 Mennonite sects. Its founder was Jacob Huter, a sixteenth-century Anabaptist, burned at Innsbruck in 1536.
His followers, although persecuted because of their Anabaptist origin and their communist doctrine, were nevertheless protected by landowners who esteemed them for their work in the fields and for their honesty; they were thus able to spread, so that, at the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, there were 24 groups in Bohemia and Moravia, and they were known as the “Huterite brethren.” They lived with certain restrictions until the end of the eighteenth century, when Emperor Giuseppe II granted freedom to the Mennonites; later expelled from the Austrian Empire, they withdrew to Russia. When their freedom was subsequently curtailed by the ubase of 1873 and 1875, they emigrated to the United States, where they currently form a community of approximately one thousand persons and have begun a flourishing mission in Paraguay.