The author, Professor Emeritus of History at California State University, Fresno, is returning in this book to a subject he wrote on previously in a briefer format, the four hundred year history of Mennonites in Poland and Prussia (A Homeland for Strangers: An Introduction to Mennonites in Poland and Prussia [Fresno, Calif.: Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies, 1989]). As the title of this more substantial monograph indicates, his concentration is on the early modern period, which ended with the second and third partitions of Poland in 1793 and 1795.

Mennonites emigrated from Netherlands to the Vistula delta, probably in the 1540s, to escape the fierce persecution of the Spanish rulers of Netherlands. They were welcomed, particularly in “royal Prussia,” the part of Prussia that was ruled by the kings of Poland in the aftermath of their fifteenth-century struggle with the Teutonic Knights. “Ducal Prussia,” the part of Prussia that the Hohenzollern grand master of the Teutonic Knights secularized in 1525 on the advice of Martin Luther, was less receptive to “Anabaptist” settlement. These Dutch immigrants were welcomed by lay and clerical landlords in royal Prussia because of their skills in draining and diking land that often lay under sea level (like the lands in their Netherlands homeland). Religious toleration was established even a bit earlier in the kingdom of Poland (Confederation of Warsaw, 1573) than in the Dutch Republic. However, the Mennonites were in Poland a tolerated religion in an area that was divided between an official Catholicism and a strong Lutheran minority that held a privileged position in German cities such as Danzig and Elbing. They frequently had to pay dues to support established Churches. They were sometimes barred from settling within walled cities; urban guilds resented the competition of craft skills they brought from Netherlands and sometimes enforced monopoly privileges against the newcomers. At first the Mennonites could worship only in houses; but gradually they were permitted to build their own churches—in Montau (1586), in Elbing (1590), and in the Danzig suburbs (Frisian Church in 1638, Flemish Church ten years later, mirroring the Mennonite schisms in Netherlands). In the second half of the sixteenth century, Mennonite farmers gradually established themselves upriver from the Vistula delta in the Kulm and Thorn areas. The Mennonites were a clear asset to the economy of the Vistula valley and were entirely willing to live peacefully with their Catholic and Lutheran neighbors. Their religious beliefs were examined by Catholic authorities and, depending on the Counter Reformation zeal of the Catholic examiner, considered dangerous or tolerable. They were judged less unorthodox than the Unitarians (who were expelled from Poland), their religious services were permitted, and special privileges excused them from military service and the swearing of oaths.

Although Klassen's focus is on Mennonite life under the Polish crown, he concerns himself as well with the gradual deterioration of the Mennonite position in post-partition Poland. This deterioration was connected with the gradual transformation of Polish Mennonite self-identity from Dutch to German. The first Mennonite Bibles and hymnals used in Poland were in the Dutch language, which continued to be preferred to German until the late eighteenth century. In the first century of Mennonite settlement in Poland, the Mennonites frequently depended on the good offices of the government of Netherlands to maintain their tolerated position. The partitions and destruction of the Polish kingdom in the late eighteenth century put the Mennonite settlements under the rule of the kings of Prussia, who were less accepting of their traditional exemption from military service, or at least from taxation earmarked to support the Prussian army. One response of conservative Mennonites to the loss of their traditional protection from the Polish crown, was to accept the offer of Catherine the Great of Russia to resettle in the Ukrainian lands recently cleared by her victory over the Crimean Tartars. In the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Mennonites of the formerly Polish parts of Prussia came increasingly to identify themselves as Germans. With the liberal revolution of 1848, some German Mennonites argued that they should renounce their traditional exemption from military service in exchange for the equal rights of citizenship. In the years following 1867, the Mennonite privilege of exemption from military service was abolished by the Prussian state in the course of its creation of the German Empire under the Hohenzollern. Some conservative Mennonites emigrated from Polish territories to Russia or America, but the majority either abandoned traditional Mennonite pacifism or accepted the German government's alternative of noncombatant service. By the time of the recreation of the Polish state, and the separation of Danzig as a free city under the League of Nations, most Mennonites in the region had identified with German nationalism. The sad business of these former Mennonite pacifists becoming supporters of the Third Reich, until their expulsion from West Prussia in 1944, is not dealt with in any substance in Klassen's book. The author focuses on the early modern Mennonite experience in Poland, but he nevertheless feels compelled to allude to the currents of modernity which swept the formerly Dutch Mennonites out of Polish lands after a stay of four hundred years. However, there is little of substance in the book about the years following the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. This leads to one point of critique of this worthwhile book: it is difficult to understand the logic of the chapter divisions. The reader gets a sense of the whole topic by a good deal of repetition of the same points from chapter to chapter, but there is no thematic development throughout the book. The later chapters tend, to be sure, to describe later, post-partition centuries of the Polish Mennonite experience, but the sad climax of these four hundred years seems deliberately avoided.