Quakers in Europe

Religious movement in Europe

The Quaker movement began in England in the 17th Century. Small Quaker groups were planted in various places across Europe during this early period (For instance, see the Stephen Crisp article). Quakers in Europe outside Britain and Ireland are not very numerous (2023) although new groups have started in the former Soviet Union and successor countries. By far the largest national grouping of Quakers in Europe is in Britain.

Quaker Meetings are held in Brussels and Luxembourg, with occasional meetings in Antwerp and Ghent. The first Meeting for Business was held in Brussels in March 1975.

The Quaker Council for European Affairs (QCEA) is an international not for profit organisation which seeks to promote the values and political concerns of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) at the European level. It undertakes research and advocacy in the fields of peacebuilding and human rights policy, notably in relation to the European Union and the Council of Europe. Founded in 1979 by Quakers who worked in the European institutions, it is based in Brussels, Belgium, and is registered under Belgian law.

Quaker House, located on the Square Ambiorix, Brussels, was acquired shortly after QCEA's foundation. Quaker House Brussels serves as the main Meeting House for Quakers in Belgium and Luxembourg. The building itself, built in the 1890s by the architect Georges Hobé, is a well preserved example of art nouveau architecture and has protected heritage status.

Well known German Quakers include: Elisabeth Abegg, Annot, John William Gerard de Brahm, Hans Einstein, Carl Hermann, John Theodore Merz, Marcello Pirani, and Gerhart von Schulze Gavernitz.

Quakers first arrived in the Netherlands in 1655 when the nephew of William Ames and Margaret Fell, William Caton, took up residence in Amsterdam. The Netherlands were seen by Quakers as a refuge from persecution in England and they perceived themselves to have affinities with the Dutch Collegiants and Mennonites who had sought sanctuary in the country. However, Quakers still encountered persecution similar to that from which they had hoped to escape in England. This did not prevent the start of preaching tours however, and in 1661, Ames and Caton visited the County Palatine of the Rhine and met with Charles I Louis, Elector Palatine at Heidelberg. William Penn, the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania, had a maternal connection to the Netherlands and visited in 1671. He returned in 1677 with George Fox and Robert Barclay and at Walta Castle, their religious community at Wieuwerd in Friesland, he unsuccessfully tried to convert the similarly minded Labadists to Quakerism. The men also journeyed on the Rhine to Frankfurt, accompanied by the Amsterdam Quaker Jan Claus who was their translator. His brother, Jacob Claus, had Quaker books translated and published in Dutch and he later produced a map of Philadelphia.

The attraction of a life free from persecution in the New World led to a gradual Dutch Quaker migration. English Quakers in Rotterdam were permitted to transport people and cargo by ship to English colonies without restriction and throughout the 18th century many Dutch Quakers emigrated to Pennsylvania. There were an estimated 500 Quaker families in Amsterdam in 1710, but by 1797 there were only seven Quakers left in the city. Isabella Maria Gouda (1745–1832), a granddaughter of Jan Claus, took care of the meeting house on Keizersgracht, but was evicted shortly afterwards. The Quaker presence disappeared from Dutch life by the early 1800s until its re emergence the 1920s, with Netherlands Yearly Meeting established in 1931. Well known Dutch Quakers include: Kees Boeke, Jan Claus, Jan de Hartog, and William Sewel.

There is a vibrant history of Quakerism in Norway. Unlike in many other European countries Quaker communities survived migration and persecution for over three hundred years. Norway Yearly Meeting holds meetings in Bergen, Bø in Telemark, Kristiansand, Farsun, Mandal, Oslo, Stavanger, and Trondheim.

Quakers first visited Norway in the 1650s when Quaker faith was still in its infancy. British Quakers record a ship stranded in Bergen in 1666 which was deporting Quakers to British colonies. Laurence Fullove, one of the Quakers aboard the ship reports that tracts were handed out to curious citizens of Bergen. That same year, in 1666, the first Quaker tract in Danish and Norwegian was published: John Higgin's The Lord's Message to All Persons who confess their faith in God.

The Society of Friends in Norway started in 1814, with the highest concentration of Quakers living in and around Stavanger. In 1819, Quakers Knut and Anne Halvorsen had their marriage recognised and were allowed to reside in Norway. Other named Quakers were allowed to live in the Stavanger area by the Norwegian Royal Decrees of 1826 and 1828, on the condition that they reported births, deaths, and marriages to the authorities and did not proselytise. During this time two Quakers, Elias Tastad and Knut Halvorsen, were prosecuted for burying their deceased family members in un consecrated soil. During the 1825 mass migration of Norwegians to America, the numbers of Norwegian Quakers in the country diminished by a third. In 1846, the Society of Friends became the first officially registered and legal religious society outside the state church of Norway. It was not until 1956 that other groups (the Methodists and Lammers society) were registered in a similar way. Throughout the 1840s, Norwegian Quakers were subject to the Act Relating to Dissenters (1845), which was intended to keep dissenting groups in small, isolated pockets of Norwegian society. Despite this, Quakerism continued to spread, and new meeting houses were built in Kvinesdal, Sauda, Roldal, Skjold, and Tromsø during the 1840s. Still a relatively small population, Quakers numbered 473 in the 1865 census. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Quakers were very active in the Norwegian peace movement, which threatened their status as an organisation. After the Napoleonic wars, Norway maintained conscription, and a number of Norwegian Quakers were punished for conscientious objection. One of the first recorded Norwegian Quaker conscientious objectors, Soren Olsen, was lashed for three days in 1848. In a wider act of objection, in 1898 the clerk of Stavanger meeting refused to submit the names of Quaker conscripts to the local authorities. In 1898, the Norwegian Society of Friends became a private religious organisation, which meant that the organisation was no longer subject to the act on dissenters. The society accepted new members and was able to continue to carry out funerals and marriages.

In 1909, a group of Norwegian Friends attended London Yearly Meeting and in 1920, several Norwegian Friends attended the first worldwide conference of Friends. The peace testimonies prompted a new movement of collections and campaigning in Norway, which has continued to the present day. In 1937, Ole Olden established the periodical Kvekeren which was issued across Scandinavian countries. During World War II a number of Norwegian Quakers, including Olden and Lund, were imprisoned by the occupying German forces for resistance work. Lund was active in the Norwegian underground movement protecting Norwegian Jews and refugees and in 1947 she became the first member of the Oslo Worship Group to become a Quaker. Olden was later nominated for the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize. Lindgrov School was established by Norwegian Friends in 1959, contributing ideas to national policies concerning training and work as aspects of care for people with learning disabilities. In 1975, a Monthly Meeting was established in Kristiansand.

Well known Norwegian Quakers include Elise M. Boulding, Asbjørn Kloster, and Sigrid Helliesen Lund.

There are weekly Quaker meetings in Moscow and meetings by arrangement in St Petersburg. The history of Quakerism in Russia is long and diverse, with multiple references and obscure connections to British Quakerism throughout Russian history.

The first Quaker connection to Russia came in 1656 when British Quaker George Fox sent an epistle to the Tsar of Muscovy Aleksei Mikhailovich. In 1697, Peter the Great visited England as part of the Grand Embassy where he was presented with Barclay's Apology and other Quaker works. Peter met with William Penn and attended meetings for worship whilst in England. Despite these initial connections, during the latter seventeenth century in Russia, the name "Quaker" was one of a number of pejorative terms for religious individuals who challenged earthly powers in the name of personal experience of the divine. Records show that Quakers were prosecuted in Russia as early as 1689. In 1779, the Ecclesiastical Dictionary listed "Quakers" as "nothing else but crowds of deranged people and enthusiasts who are possessed". Further formal Quaker contact with Russia came in the 1760s, when Empress Catherine II sought a physician to inoculate herself and her son against smallpox. Catherine sought the Quaker physician Thomas Dimsdale, who was subsequently recalled to Russia to inoculate Catherine's grandsons.

When Tsar Alexander I visited England in 1814 as one of the victors over Napoleonic France; the Quakers sought out the ruler as they had Peter I. Alexander's evangelical faith was not dissimilar to that of then contemporary Friends: he "received them warmly, prayed with them, 'fully assented' to their peace testimony, and attended meetings for worship". He also invited Friends to visit his Empire, and subsequently welcomed Quaker visitors, notably William Allen, who worked in Russia to promote education and prison reform, and travelled among the many dissenting religious groups of Southern Russia. In 1817, the Russian government wished to drain marshlands near St Petersburg, and Alexander sent a request for a suitable specialist to the Society of Friends in Britain. Quakers Daniel Wheeler and his family responded to this call; they spent some thirty years reclaiming land near St Petersburg and introducing modern farming techniques. Daniel's wife Jane Wheeler died in Russia in 1832, and her daughter in 1837. In recognition of the Wheelers' services the Imperial government granted them in perpetuity the land in which the dead had been buried: the Quaker burial ground still exists at Shushary, close to the city. In 1854, British Friends sent a mission to Emperor Nicholas I seeking, unsuccessfully, to avert the Crimean War. Later they worked with the great novelist and pacifist Leo Tolstoy and his followers. Tolstoy's daughter in law became a member of the Society. An important facet of Quaker involvement with Russia which began at this time was war and famine relief, first carried out in the Russian Grand Duchy of Finland in the 1850s. This became a major area of work, and British and American Friends gave considerable help during the Volga famine of the 1890s.

During and after World War I, the revolutions and the Russian Civil War, Quakers worked with refugees and other victims of harvest failures, wars, and relocations to create feeding centres, hospitals, orphanages, schools, and cottage industries. Perhaps the best known example of Quaker relief work in Russia was Friends' participation in the international response to the famine of 1921. In that year alone, British and American Friends fed 212,000 people. The small Quaker office set up in Moscow in connection with these activities managed to maintain cooperation with the new Soviet authorities in the field of health through the 1920s, and survived until 1931. It became the last representative of any Western religious organisation in Moscow as Stalin tightened his grip on the Soviet Union. Under Stalin, Friends were able to make formal visits to the Soviet Union in 1930, 1948 and 1949; otherwise contacts were limited to a few unusual and energetic individuals. After World War II, from 1950 onwards, the British Friends' East West Committee and the American Friends' Service Committee tried to expand links, with some success, especially under Khrushchev. With the advent of Perestroika contact became easier.

As in all Scandinavian countries, there were Quaker settlements in Sweden from the 1660s well into the 1800s. Small groups of Friends are known to have existed in Sweden in the 19th century under the care of Norway Yearly Meeting. However, they were prohibited by the Swedish government during the nineteenth century, as no alternatives where allowed to the state church (the Church of Sweden). Sweden Yearly Meeting arose spontaneously from a small worship group which met during World War I. In 1937, a number of Swedish Quakers (including :sv:Emilia Norlind) formed Sweden Yearly Meeting, which was recognised by the government as an independent religious society outside the State Church. Since 1956, Swedish Friends have had their own Meetinghouse in Stockholm called Kväkargården. About seventy kilometres Nirth of Stockholm, the rural Svartbäcken is used for general meetings for business, retreats and children's summer camps. Samfundsrådet, a general meeting for business, meets twice a year to carry on business between yearly meetings. Well known Swedish Quakers include Emilia Fogelklou, Jeanna Oterdahl, Elin Wägner, Per Sundberg (sv), and Gunnar Sundberg (sv).

Swiss Quakers hold a Monthly Meeting in Geneva, and there are records of Quaker meetings in Zurich, Basel, Bern, Biel/Bienne, Neuchâtel, Lausanne, Montreux and Romanshorn. Quaker meetings in Switzerland began with individuals who discovered a close affinity to the spiritual quest and ideals of Quakers. They met through their involvement in peace and reconciliation, conscientious objection and service, and, not least, in the Civil Service Movement founded by Pierre Cérésole in the early 1920s. A number of them had been to the Quaker centre at Woodbrooke, in Birmingham, and were subsequently accepted as individual members of London Yearly Meeting. Swiss Quakers held their first annual meeting in Bern in 1934, and continued meeting annually under the umbrella of London Yearly Meeting on whose authority they depended for the admission of new members. In 1938 they acquired the right to admit their own members, and in November 1939 they were recognised as a Regional Meeting. An independent Switzerland Yearly Meeting came into being in 1947. Well known Swiss Quakers include: Pierre Ceresole, Adolphe Ferriere, Edmond Privat, Elisabeth Rotten, and Theophilus Waldmeier.