Templers (religious believers)


The Temple Society is a German Protestant sect with roots in the Pietist movement of the Lutheran Church. Members refer to themselves as Templers.
The Templers were expelled from the Lutheran Church in 1858 because of their millenarian beliefs. Their aim was to realize the apocalyptic visions of the prophets of Israel in the Holy Land.

Etymology

The word Templer is derived from the concept of the Christian Community as described in the New Testament, see 1 Corinthians and 1 Peter, where every person and the community are seen as temples in which God's spirit dwells. There is no connection to the Medieval Knights Templar.

History

and Georg David Hardegg founded the Temple Society at Kirschenhardthof near Ludwigsburg in 1861. This religious society has its roots in the Pietist movement within the Lutheran Evangelical State Church in Württemberg. Called "Deutscher Tempel" by its founders, their aim was to promote spiritual cooperation to advance the rebuilding of the Temple in the Holy Land, Palestine, in the belief that this foundation will promote the second coming of Christ.
While the Lutheran state church in Württemberg condemned and fought the Templers as apostates, the Prussian Protestant position was somewhat milder. Their settlement in the Holy Land found a warm support through Wilhelm Hoffmann, who was no apostate from the official church, like his younger brother Christoph.
Wilhelm Hoffmann served as one of the royal Prussian court preachers at the Supreme Parish and Collegiate Church in Berlin and was a co-founder and first president of the Jerusalem Association, a charitable organisation founded on 2 December 1852 to support Samuel Gobat's effort as bishop of the Anglo-Prussian Bishopric of Jerusalem.
Christoph Hoffmann fell out with his fellow leader Hardegg, so that in June 1874 the Temple denomination underwent a schism with Hardegg and about a third of the Templers seceding from the Temple Society. The schismatics around Hardegg searched to join another Christian denomination. To this end they addressed the Lutheran Church of Sweden and the Anglican Church Missionary Society, but both refused to take care of the schismatics.
In 1878 Hardegg and most of the schismatics founded the Temple Association, but after Hardegg's death in the following year the cohesion of its adherents faded. Then envoys of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces successfully proselytised among the schismatics, gaining most of them. Thus some colonies became places of partisans of two different Christian denominations and their respective congregations.
While in Germany the Templers were regarded sectarians, the Evangelical proselytes gained major financial and intellectual support from German Lutheran and united church bodies. This created an atmosphere of mistrust and envy among the colonists of different denominational affiliation.

Early settlement in Palestine

Hoffmann and Hardegg purchased land at the foot of Mount Carmel and established a colony there in 1868. At the time, Haifa had a population of 4,000. The Templers are credited today with promoting the development of the city. The colonists built an attractive main street that was much admired by the locals. It was 30 meters wide and planted with trees on both sides. The houses, designed by architect Jacob Schumacher, were built of stone, with red-shingled roofs, instead of the flat or domed roofs common in the region. Hard work, the harsh climate and epidemics claimed the lives of many before the colony became self-sustaining. Hardegg stayed in Haifa, while Hoffmann moved on to establish other colonies.
In the same year, Bahá'u'lláh, the prophet-founder of the Baha’i Faith, arrived in the Haifa-Akka region as a prisoner of the Ottoman Empire. Years later, after his release from strict confinement, he visited the Templer Colony on Mount Carmel several times and wrote a letter to Hardegg. He asked his son, ‘Abdu’l-Baha, to build, on the alignment of the Templer Colony road but halfway up the mountain, the shrine to the forerunner of the religion. The conjunction of the Templer buildings and the Shrine have become the most significant landmark in the modern city of Haifa.
, Tel Aviv
Hoffman established colonies in Jaffa a year later, and two years later, in 1871, a third colony in Sarona, as the Templers' first agricultural colony, on the road from Jaffa to Nablus. In 1873 a fourth colony was established in the Valley of Refaim Jerusalem.
The colony's oranges were the first to carry a "Jaffa orange" brand, one of the better known agricultural brands in Europe, used to market Israeli oranges to this day.
The Templers established a regular coach service between Haifa and the other cities, promoting the country's tourist industry, and made an important contribution to road construction.

Templer colonies

After the 1898 visit of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, one of the Kaiser's traveling companions, Colonel Joseph Freiherr von Ellrichshausen, initiated the formation of a society for the advancement of the German settlements in Palestine, in Stuttgart. It enabled the settlers to acquire land for new settlements by offering them low interest loans.
A second wave of pioneer settlers founded Wilhelma in 1902 near Lod, Walhalla near the original Jaffa colony, followed by Bethlehem of Galilee and Waldheim in 1907. At its height, the Templer community in Palestine numbered 2,000.
In July and August 1918 the British sent 850 Templers to an internment camp at Helwan near Cairo in Egypt. In April 1920, 350 of these internees were deported to Germany. All the property of the Templers of enemy nationality was taken into public custodianship. With the establishment of a regular British administration in 1918 Edward Keith-Roach became the Public Custodian of Enemy Property in Palestine, who rented out the property and collected the rents.
In April 1920 the Allies convened at the Conference of San Remo and agreed on the British rule in Palestine, followed by the official establishment of the civil administration on 1 July 1920. From that date on Keith-Roach transferred the collected rents for property in custodianship to the actual proprietors. On June 29, 1920, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, informed the British Upper House that Great Britain agreed in principle to their return to Palestine.
The League of Nations legitimised the British administration and custodianship by granting a mandate to Britain in 1922, which Turkey, the Ottoman successor, finally ratified by the Treaty of Lausanne, signed on 24 July 1923 and becoming effective on 5 August 1925. Thus the public custodianship ended in the same year and the prior holders achieved the fully protected legal position as proprietors.
The Mandate government and the Public Custodian of Enemy Property paid them 50% restitution for war losses of livestock and other property. The Bank of the Temple Society, formed in 1925 with its head office in Jaffa and branches in Haifa and Jerusalem, became one of the leading credit institutions in Palestine.

Conflict with the Third Reich

After the Nazi takeover in Germany the new Reich's government streamlined foreign policy according to Nazi ideals, using financial pressure especially. The Nazi emphasis was on creating the image that Germany and Germanness were equal to Nazism. Thus, all non-Nazi aspects of German culture and identity were discriminated against as un-German. All international schools of German language subsidised or fully financed by government funds were obliged to redraw their educational programmes and to solely employ teachers aligned to the Nazi party. The teachers in Bethlehem were financed by the Reich government, so Nazi teachers also took over there.
In 1933 Templer functionaries and other Gentile Germans living in Palestine appealed to Paul von Hindenburg and the Foreign Office not to use swastika symbols for German institutions, without success. Some German Gentiles from Palestine pleaded with the Reich government to drop its plan to boycott shops of Jewish Germans on April 1, 1933. Some Templers enlisted in the German Army. By 1938, 17% of the Templers in Palestine were members of the Nazi party. According to historian Yossi Ben-Artzi, "The members of the younger generation to some extent broke away from naive religious belief, and were more receptive to the Nazi German nationalism. The older ones tried to fight it."
At the start of World War II colonists with German citizenship were rounded up by the British and sent, together with Italian and Hungarian enemy aliens, to internment camps in Waldheim and Bethlehem of Galilee. On July 31, 1941, 661 Templers and other Germans in Palestine were deported to Australia via Egypt, leaving 345 in Palestine.
In 1939, at the start of World War II, the British authorities declared the Templers enemy nationals, placed them under arrest and deported many of them to Australia. During the war the British government brokered the exchange of about 1,000 Templers for 550 Jews under German control. "The swap, Bauer stresses, stemmed primarily from British and German interests: Just as the British wanted to get the Germans out, Germany was happy for the chance to rid itself of a few hundred more Jews. There were three exchanges that took place, one in 1941, one in 1942 and the last in 1944. In total only 480 persons, Templers and other Germans living in Palestine were exchanged.
After its foundation, the State of Israel—with the fresh memory of the Holocaust—was adamant in not permitting any ethnic Germans, of a community which had expressed pro-Nazi sympathies, to remain in or return to its territory. On 12 March 1946 a team from the Zionist Haganah assassinated the leader of the community, Gotthilf Wagner. Later four more members of the sect were murdered in order to drive the group from Palestine. The former Templer colonies were re-settled by Jews.
In 1962 the State of Israel paid DM54 million in compensation to property owners whose assets were nationalized. Sarona was incorporated in Tel Aviv, part of it becoming the compound of the Israeli Ministry of Defense and the IDF High Command Headquarters, while the other part housed various civil offices of the Israeli government, using the original German houses. In the early 21st century the civil offices were evacuated and the area extensively renovated, becoming a new focus of Tel Aviv night life.

Timeline of the Temple Society

In chronological order of their establishment: