Every Hutterite alive descends from a few hundred people.
The line nearly ended twice — reduced to a handful in Transylvania and Wallachia in the 1700s, then rebuilt in Ukraine, then emigrated to Dakota Territory in the 1870s, where fewer than half of about 1,265 arrivals chose communal life. The three Leut are named after the men who led those three groups.
The bottleneck is genetic as well as historical: roughly 1,265 Hutterites emigrated from Ukraine to Dakota Territory between 1874 and 1879, and of those only the groups that settled at three Bruderhofs kept community of goods — the Schmiedeleut under Michael Waldner, a blacksmith, the Dariusleut under Darius Walter, and the Lehrerleut under Jakob Wipf, a teacher. The rest, called Prairieleut, farmed individually and were absorbed into Mennonite congregations. The three Leut have separate leaderships and do not intermarry freely; the Schmiedeleut split again in 1992 over the leadership of Jacob Kleinsasser and remain divided. Because the founding population was so small and marriage stays within the Leut, Hutterite communities have been studied extensively in medical genetics, which has produced both real research value and recurring questions about consent.
The same ground, other faiths
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