Floppyjoe
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Joined: 17 Dec 2007
Posts: 171
Location: Winkler, MB., Canada
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 Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 9:48 pm Post subject: Are You One Of God's Chosen People |
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Are You One Of God's Chosen People?
After the Southern Manitoba Prophecy Conference on April 11th and 12th in Winkler I was having coffee with some of the organizers of the event at Tim Hortons. John Plantz a Messianic Jew was present and as the discussion turned to a tie with the Israeli flag on it, John said that there was a Jewish connection to many Mennonite names including Sawatzky. I found this intriguing and decided to do some research about it on the internet. I am half Sawatzky so I decided to start there.
At first I could find nothing about a connection. I then found a web site called Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online.
On this website it lists one of the variants of Sawatzky as Sabatzke1. I then searched for variants of Sabatzke on Google. When searching for Sabatzky I stumbled upon a Jewish website that contained an incomplete list of German Jews murdered between 1933 and 1945. This list has over 148,000 names on it. I found a Sabatzki, several Sabatzkys and a Sawatzki on this list. I also found a Sabat, a Sabbath and a Sabatowski on this list2.
I think that these names may all be derivatives of Sabat which of course means Sabbath. When you try to pronounce the name Sabatzky in Low German it sounds very similar to Sawatzky so I can see how the spelling could easily have changed from a B to a W. Another name of interest to me that was on the list is Wiebe which is of course my last name. Below is a list of some Mennonite names that I found on this list.
Berg, Bergen, Bergman, Block, Brandt, Braun, Classen, Dyck, Elias, Esau, Falk, Freund, Friesen, Funk, Ginter, Hamm, Harder, Harms, Heide, Hepner, Hildebrand, Isaaks, Jansen, Kuhl, Neufeld, Peters, Rempel, Riemer, Sawatzki, Schack, Schellenberg, Schmidt, Simons, Unger, Wall, Wiebe, Wieler, Wientz, Wolf, Zacharias.
If this list is indeed accurate then one can not deny that it is highly probable that many Mennonites are from Jewish backgrounds in the past. That is my take.
Irvin Wiebe
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1 http://www.gameo.org/encyclopedia/contents/S2938ME.html
2 http://www.kristalnacht.org/list/ |
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