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Yehoshua Ben-Arieh on 19th and early 20th century Jerusalem
Yehoshua Ben-Arieh on 19th and early 20th century Jerusalem
Yehoshua Ben-Arieh's two books on Jerusalem in the 19th century, one about the Old City and the second one on the emergence of the New City, are invaluable for understanding how the city changed over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries (up until the First World War). Ben-Arieh is more interested in the Jewish areas of the Old City and the new Jewish neighborhoods of the New City, but he covers the Christian communities in both parts of the city pretty well, especially the foreign communities (for example, the Franciscans or the Russians), and he does give some notice to the Arab Muslim communities (better in the book on the Old City than the one on the city outside the walls). In the second book, he writes painstakingly about each new development outside the city walls.
James Finn
James Finn
The first new building outside the walls that was built by Jews and for Jews was sponsored by the British consul, James Finn, in the mid-19th century. He first had a summer house built for himself and his family in Talbieh. Ben-Arieh describes it this way:
The small, square, one-story house, built of stone by Jewish laborers, comprised two rooms - a dining room and a living-room - with a balcony facing east. The kitchen and offices were in another part of the house. The plot around the house was used for growing vegetables, trees and flowers (Ben-Arieh, volume 2, pp. 62-63).
Finn built a second house outside the walls in 1855 as part of a settlement known as Kerem Avraham (Abraham's Vineyard). This house still stands in Jerusalem, on 24 Ovadyah Street, now part of the Geula neighborhood. This was the first house built by Jews for Jews, according to Consul Finn's wife. Ben-Arieh reports:
While the foundations were being dug, a Roman columbarium was discovered. This also still exists today. Some ancient rock-hewn wine-presses were also found nearby. A few large water cisterns close to the house supplied water to poor Jews in the district (Ben-Arieh, vol. 2, p. 63).
The cisterns each carried special inscriptions; for example, one said, "Gather the people together, and I will give them water."
The Finns also set up a plantation for Jews to work in (Kerem Avraham), during the Crimean War, when the charity contributions to the Jews of the Jerusalem from their co-religionists in Europe were cut off by the war. At Kerem Avraham they grew olives, vines, and vegetables.
For a magazine story about Kerem Avraham with some photographs of the current condition of the house, see History of Jerusalem: Kerem Avraham, by Ari Lewis, in the Jewish Magazine (January, 2008).
The German Templars in Palestine
The German Templars in Palestine
Along with Jews who came to settle in Palestine during the 19th century, there were many different kinds of foreign Christians who were interested in building up the Holy Land - in many cases, as part of the imperial designs of particular foreign states (see, for example, the building of Russian institutions in Jerusalem in the 19th century). Others came for purely religious reasons. Among these were the German Templars, who split off from the Lutherans, came to Palestine, and established settlements in Haifa, Jerusalem, and Sarona. The Jewish Magazine has an interesting article by Jerry Klinger on the Sarona settlement, which is now located in the center of Tel Aviv.
The article describes the Templars in this way:
August, 1854 in Ludwigsburg, Germany, Christoph Hoffman, Christoph Paulus, Georg David Hardegg and Louis Hohn, along with 200 supporters, form the "Society for the Gathering of the People of God in Jerusalem." They were members of a fundamentalist splinter of the Lutheran Church, which expelled the rapidly growing movement in 1859. Failing in their appeal not to be expelled from the Church to King William I of Wurttemberg two years later, they established an independent Christian religious organization called the Deutscher Tempel (German Temple). Hoffman was elected Bishop. The members called themselves Templers. The Templers believed that they must relocate to Palestine as Germany could not be reformed. In Palestine they would dedicate their lives to live according to the apostolic vision from Corinthians 3:16 "Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit lives in you?" Remaking their lives as God's temple in Palestine, they believed, would hasten the Second Coming of Christ and the Messianic era.
David Kroyanker on the German Templars in Jerusalem
David Kroyanker on the German Templars in Jerusalem
The European powers, in particular German, Russia, France, and Britain, filled an important role in the development of Jerusalem outside of the walls and in creating the physical image of the city from the middle of the 19th century to the First World War. In the urban fabric of Jerusalem in this era there stand out church buildings, hostels for pilgrims, hospitals, and educational and welfare structures, which were copied from the landscape of their homeland in Europe; from the golden onion domes of the Russian church by the name of Mary Magdalene on the Mt. of Olives, through the German Augusta Victoria hostel on Mt. Scopus which was designed in the style of medieval fortresses in the area of the Rhine; to the tower in the Florentine style of the Italian hospital on Shivtei Israel Street. The German Colony in south Jerusalem, which was known as the “Refaim Colony” at the time of its construction, is the only neighborhood established in the city by members of a foreign power – pioneers from southern Germany – who settled here from religious motivations.
… The Templar community was established by and throve with the initiative of the German theologian Christoph Hoffman (1815-1885), who was not satisfied with the stagnation of the Lutheran Protestant church. Hoffman preached – by means of the newspaper “Süddeutsche Warte,” which was published in Stuttgart – for the preparation of Christian communal life of the “people of God” in Jerusalem, according to the principles of the Tanakh and the New Testament. In the beginning a community of about 5,000 believers assembled around Hoffman and his partner in new religious ideas, the revolutionary Georg David Hardegg. The church saw heresy in these ideas, and as a result of a dogmatic split with the church, in 1859, the new community was excommunicated and organized as a separate group.
The organization was first called “Friends of Jerusalem,” and after that the name was changed to the “Tempelgesellschaft” [Temple Society], without any connection to the crusading order of the Knights Templar. The “Temple” of the Templars was not a building of wood and stone, but a “divine structure” of a community of people, “living” building stones. The Templars composed articles of association for their community, themselves wrote special prayers, abolished the priesthood as the spiritual shepherd, and gave authority to the council of the community and the council of elders (Aeltestenrat). The new association encouraged the participation of its members in organizing the life of the community, emphasized the education of the young generation, and showed great sympathy for the yearnings of Jews for settlement in the land, especially from a messianic concept – the belief that the Messiah would return to earth when all of the Jews were concentrated in the land of Israel.
Location of the German Colony
Location of the German Colony
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