Are the Amish Jewish? No: Amish and Jewish Faith Compared

Who Are The Amish?See all 35 articles in this series

No, the Amish are not Jewish. They are Christians, heirs of the Anabaptists of the Swiss Reformation, named for Jakob Ammann, who led them into their own church in 1693. Judaism is the covenant faith of the Jewish people, lived by the Torah, and it does not accept Jesus as the Messiah or the Son of God.

From a passing car the two can look alike, so the question is a fair one. In both communities many men wear full beards and hats. Married Amish men grow a beard but no mustache and wear an Amish-style hat, and Hasidic men often leave their beards untrimmed and wear large black hats. Amish families speak Pennsylvania German at home, and Yiddish, the everyday tongue of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, grew out of medieval German too, so to an outsider the two can sound alike.

Look past the hats and beards, and the real question is what each believes. Jesus himself shows us where they meet. When a scribe asked him which commandment comes first, he answered with the words that still stand at the heart of Jewish morning and evening prayer: “The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord” (Mark 12:29). The Amish pray to that one God, and so do their Jewish neighbours. Where they part is over the one who spoke those words to the scribe.

Topic	Amish	Jewish
What it is	A Christian church	The faith of the Jewish people
Jesus	Son of God and Saviour	Not the Messiah, a prophet or the Son of God
Roots	Anabaptists, Switzerland, 1525; Amish from 1693	Israel’s covenant in the Hebrew Bible
Scripture	Old and New Testaments, Luther’s German Bible	The Hebrew Bible, read with the Mishnah and Talmud
Joining	Adult baptism, usually at 18 to 22	Birth to a Jewish mother, or conversion
Holy day	Sunday, worship every other week	Shabbat, Friday sundown to Saturday nightfall
Worship	In members’ homes; no church buildings	Synagogue and home
Language	Pennsylvania German and English	Hebrew in prayer; Yiddish in Ashkenazi tradition
How many	About 421,000 (2026)	About 15.7 million (2024)

This is the difference that matters most, and each side should be heard in its own words. Scholars of the Amish at Elizabethtown College’s Young Center put it plainly: the Amish are “a Christian church that accepts the basic tenets of Christian faith.” They are less given to theology than to living it. They “seek to follow the teachings of Jesus in daily life by loving their enemies and forgiving insults,” and they read the Sermon on the Mount above all, where Jesus says, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you” (Matthew 5:44).

The world saw what that means in October 2006, when a gunman shot ten girls in a one-room Amish school at Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, and killed five. “Before the sun had set on that awful October day members of the Amish community brought words of forgiveness to the family of the one who had slain their children.” That is the Sermon on the Mount, kept.

Judaism answers the question of Jesus differently. My Jewish Learning gives the short answer: “Judaism does not consider Jesus to be a prophet, the messiah, or the son of God.” Jewish tradition looks for a messiah who will restore the kingdom of David, rebuild the Temple and gather the exiles home. The medieval sage Maimonides wrote that if a claimant fails in this, “or if he is killed, it’s known that he is not the one that was promised by the Torah.” Jewish views of Jesus the man are many. “Some Jews regard him as a wise rabbi, others view him as a heretic,” the New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine says.

Christians, the Amish among them, believe that Jesus is the Messiah of Israel, who suffered, died and rose again. “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?” the risen Jesus asks on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:26). We say that with joy, and we say it as people who owe Israel the Scriptures, the promises and the Messiah himself. The fuller comparison is in Judaism vs Christianity: Shared Scripture, Different Answers About Jesus.

Children are raised Amish, but no one is born a member of the Amish church. The Anabaptists earned their name, “rebaptizers,” by baptizing adults who had been baptized as infants, and the Amish still baptize only those old enough to choose. Most take their vows between 18 and 22, after weeks of instruction, and promise to follow Jesus and keep the Ordnung, the rules of their church district, for life. Before that comes Rumspringa, “running around,” the years from about sixteen when the young decide. About 85 percent of Amish youth join. Outsiders may join too, though the Amish do not seek converts, and only several dozen have done it.

A Jewish child belongs from birth. “According to traditional Jewish law (halacha), Jewishness is passed down through the mother,” and most Orthodox and Conservative Jews hold to it; the Reform movement also accepts a child of a Jewish father who is raised Jewish. Judaism also receives converts: traditional Judaism holds that a Jew is “anyone born to a Jewish mother or converted to Judaism in a halakhic manner,” that is, according to Jewish law, and the branches differ on how a conversion is done. Jewish boys are circumcised on the eighth day, the covenant sign God gave Abraham: “he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, every man child in your generations” (Genesis 17:12).

The Amish read the whole Christian Bible, Old Testament and New, in Luther’s German translation for worship. Beside it stand three old books from their own story: the Martyrs Mirror, 1,100 pages on the Anabaptists who died for their faith in the sixteenth century; the Ausbund, their hymnbook, many of its hymns written by Anabaptists in prison; and the Dordrecht Confession of 1632, whose eighteen articles every candidate for baptism reviews. Daily life is shaped by the Ordnung each congregation agrees, which is why one Amish district can differ from the next.

Jewish life rests on the Torah, read with the Mishnah, the first work of rabbinic law, set down around the year 200, and the Talmud, which comments on it. From these comes halakha, Jewish law, including kashrut, the food laws, which Jewish families keep “in varying degrees.” How strictly varies widely. In Pew Research Center’s 2020 survey, 15 percent of American Jews called observing Jewish law essential to being Jewish; among the Orthodox it was 83 percent.

No. Jewish people keep the seventh day, as the commandment says: “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8). Shabbat is a 25-hour rest “from just before sundown each Friday through the completion of nightfall on Saturday,” welcomed with candles at home and marked in the synagogue with the reading of the Torah.

The Amish, like most Christians, worship on Sunday, the day of the resurrection. They have no church buildings. Every other Sunday a church district meets in one of its members’ homes, or in a barn or shop, so each household hosts about once a year. There is no organ, no altar and no pulpit; the people sing slow hymns in German from the Ausbund, and the ministers preach in Pennsylvania German without notes. Twice a year, at communion, members wash one another’s feet, as Jesus washed his disciples’.

Mostly by coincidence of history. Amish dress and beards go back to Jakob Ammann, who “forbade the trimming of beards and the wearing of fashionable dress” to keep his flock humble and set apart. Many Amish practices rest on “separation from the world,” which is also why most groups drive horse and buggy, take no electricity from the public grid and keep out televisions and computers. The Amish do use some new tools, such as chain saws, and each district decides what fits its life.

The beards and hats of Hasidic men have another story. Their beards keep the Torah’s command, “neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard” (Leviticus 19:27), and some Hasidic men, following Kabbalistic tradition, will not even trim them. Some believe the fur hat called the shtreimel was simply the fashion of early modern Poland, kept when others changed, and each Hasidic group has its own; the Chabad Hasidim wear fedoras. The language likeness is real but distant. Pennsylvania Dutch is closest to the German of the Palatinate, carried to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, while Yiddish, by the most accepted account, formed among Jews in the Rhine Valley around the tenth century and took in Hebrew, Aramaic and Slavic words.

The look also describes only a small part of Jewish life. In Pew’s 2020 survey, 37 percent of American Jews identified as Reform, 17 percent as Conservative, 9 percent as Orthodox, 4 percent with other branches and 32 percent with no particular branch.

Yes. The Amish and Mennonites are “religious cousins” from the same Anabaptist family. They divided in 1693, when Ammann wanted communion twice a year, foot washing and the shunning of members who had been put out of the church. The full story is in Amish vs Mennonite: Same Anabaptist Roots, Different Ways of Living. Neither group has a Jewish origin.

The Young Center counts about 421,340 Amish in 2026, adults and children: 414,545 in the United States, 6,655 in Canada and 140 in Latin America. The number has doubled in twenty years, carried by large families and the young who stay. The demographer Sergio DellaPergola estimated the world’s Jewish population at 15,736,800 on 1 January 2024, with 7,153,000 in Israel and 6,300,000 in the United States.

More than the eye at the roadside sees. Both keep faith at home. The Amish hold their very worship in their own houses and barns; Jewish families greet Shabbat at their own table with candles, wine and song. Both remember their martyrs. The Amish read the Martyrs Mirror. Jewish people have suffered persecution for centuries, too often at Christian hands, and in Pew’s 2020 survey 76 percent of American Jews called remembering the Holocaust essential to being Jewish. And both hand their faith to their children, as Moses told Israel to do.

Paul, a Jew who loved his people, spoke of them as those “to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises” (Romans 9:4). We stand with our Amish brothers and sisters in Christ, and we honour the people of Israel from whom he came. Moses’ old command speaks to both kinds of home: “thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way” (Deuteronomy 6:7).

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• Amish Religious Practices: How Do The Amish Worship?
• Are the Amish and Mennonites Related? Yes, They Parted Ways in 1693
• Why do Amish have beards?
• What is the Sabbath day?
• Do the Amish Get Circumcised? Some Do, but Not as a Religious Rite

More from this seriesWho Are The Amish?See all 35 articles