Haban, Habani, Habaner...

A computer search of the word Haban sometimes has Google wondering if perhaps you were really looking for a hot chili pepper and were too lazy to spell out habanero. Haban, in its Hutterite/Slovakian context is not in common usage. The most frequent Hutterite-related listings for the word are associated with Haban pottery, a floral decorated ware that the Hutterites were known for in Slovakia and that the converted-to-Catholicism Haban continued to produce long after the rest of the Hutterites had left for points east (and then west). Anyway, I thought it would be a good idea to take some time to delve a little deeper into the meaning of the word that appears in the title of this blog...

The word Haban is somewhat shrouded in mystery. The truth is that no one really knows specifically what the word means, Haban having multiple meanings and connotations. In her memoir of Grandma and Grandpa, my mom says “Habani” and “Habans”, equivalent forms of the word, mean - “God's true children” - coming from the Hebrew “Habanim”. (The actual English translation of the Hebrew word “Habanim” is closer to “adoption”.) Anabaptist historical writers often add “Habaner” as an equivalent to “Haban” and “Habani”, saying the Haban part is a shortened form of "Haushaben", another name for the Bruderhof, the communal houses the Hutterites lived in.

“Haban” was first used by the peasants of Slovakia as a derogatory nickname for the Hutterites that had settled in their towns. The Hutterites were different from the people whom they settled among, different in dress, lifestyle and religion. The Hutterites were generally seen as strange intruders to the life of the town, and even as they came to be begrudgingly appreciated and tolerated for their expert craftsmanship and nursing skills, they were held at arms length by the local peasants. “Haban” became the label they were known by, perhaps sarcastically intoned with something like “Yeah, they think they are God's true children...” After the 1780s, after the Jesuit-forced conversion of some Hutterites to Catholicism, “Haban” became the name for those former Hutterites who remained in the towns in Slovakia and went through the motions of being Catholic. The remaining Hutterites left Slovakia and went to Wallachia, a section of Romania, then Russia and finally to the United States where they settled through the Great Plains and up into Canada where there are approximately 45,000 Hutterites living today. But the former Hutterites that remained in Slovakia, that group of German-Slovak-Hutterite-Catholic hybrids, were still set apart from their village neighbors by dress and lifestyle though, no longer, at least on a superficial level, by religion. The name that they were called and eventually came to call themselves would continue to be “Haban”...

Mama and Papa were not just ordinary Slovaks, but were better known as Habani – from Remembering Mama and Papa, a memoir by Lillian Cederle Zima