German Colony

The Temple Society was founded in southern Germany in 1861 under the Protestant theologian Christoph Hoffmann, on the belief that settling in the Holy Land would hasten the second coming. In 1868 Hoffmann and Georg David Hardegg arrived from Württemberg with the first party. Hardegg stayed to build the Haifa colony while Hoffmann went on to found the second one at Jaffa. Haifa was then a walled town of roughly 4,000 people, and the Templers bought land outside it, on the flat ground between the mountain and the shore.

They built to a plan, which was the unusual part. The main street ran north to south from the anchorage towards the Carmel, with two narrow parallel streets behind it (today HaGanim and Meir Rotenberg) and cross streets running east to west, among them Jaffa Road and Allenby. Every house had a garden round it. At the southern end, on the lower slope of the mountain, were the colony's vineyards, which is where HaGefen Street, the street of the vine, gets its name.

Farming did not last. The colonists brought European methods, machinery and new crops including the potato, then moved into industry, tourism and transport. They ran the first scheduled carriage services between Haifa, Jaffa, Acre and Nazareth, which is also how regular post first moved between those towns, and they built hotels, workshops and an olive oil soap factory.

By the end of Ottoman rule the colony held about 750 people, with the only doctor in the district and the only building engineer. The housing figures do not agree: the English account gives 150 houses, the Hebrew one about 100 dwellings plus dozens of farm buildings. Jacob Schumacher held an American passport, as sixty of the colonists did, and served as United States consular agent for Haifa and northern Palestine.

Templer houses are easy to identify once the grammar is clear: stone, European motifs mixed with eastern arches, a gable on almost every building, a balcony over the entrance, and an inscription cut above the front door. The inscription is usually a verse from the Old or New Testament chosen by the family, sometimes with the family name and the year of building beside it.

The clearest surviving example is on Beit Dyck at number 8, which reads EBEN EZER 1893: the stone of help, from the first book of Samuel, where Samuel sets up a stone and says that the Lord has helped us this far. The Dyck family sold agricultural equipment, and the large windows across the front were display windows for it.

The declared heritage buildings run in a short row, walkable in twenty minutes.

Number 16 was the Haifa home of Laurence Oliphant, the Scottish traveller, member of parliament, novelist and mystic, who settled in Palestine in 1882 and split his time between this house and another in the Druze village of Daliyat al-Karmel. His live-in secretary was Naftali Herz Imber, author of the poem that became Hatikvah.

The Templers did not build the whole street, and it is not a period piece. The Haifa Trail's inventory runs from the 1870s stone houses through an early twentieth-century Italian hospital to a Brutalist soldiers' centre and a shopping centre of 1999.

• No. 1: Beit Keller, house of the German vice-consul
• Nos. 2 to 4: Beit Struve, an olive oil and soap family
• No. 5: the Kraft Hotel, the first modern hotel in Haifa, later the British military governor's residence
• No. 8: Beit Dyck, agricultural machinery, with EBEN EZER 1893 over the door
• No. 11: Beit Ha'am and the Templer school, now the Haifa City Museum
• No. 12: Beit Schumacher
• No. 15: Beit Dr Schmidt, restored with a glass floor showing part of the cellar
• No. 16: Beit Oliphant
• No. 48: the tourism association's information office

The Templers backed Germany in the First World War and paid for it: in July and August 1918 the British sent 850 of them to an internment camp at Helwan near Cairo and deported 350 to Germany in April 1920. The colony recovered, and then the 1930s took it apart. In 1937, 34 per cent of German colonists in Palestine were Nazi party members, and on 12 May 1937, the day of George VI's coronation, every German colony in the country flew the swastika.

When war broke out in 1939 the British interned colonists holding German citizenship. The four German farming settlements became wired camps with watchtowers, while women and children from the town colonies at Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem were for a time left in their houses under police watch. On 31 July 1941, 661 German colonists were shipped to Australia by way of Egypt and held at Tatura in Victoria until 1946 or 1947, leaving 345 in Palestine. The British also brokered wartime exchanges of Templers for Jews under German control, on the order of 1,000 for 550 by one account.

The end was violent. On 12 March 1946 a Haganah team assassinated Gotthilf Wagner, the leader of the community, whom Jewish sources regarded as a committed Nazi and whom the Templers regarded as a victim; the Criminal Investigation Department read the killing in terms of land politics, because Wagner had told his people not to sell to Jews. Researchers still differ over the motive. More Templers were killed in 1948, the Haganah raided the internment camps in April, and the evacuated Germans reached Cyprus on 22 April. The rest left Israel for good between December 1948 and the autumn of 1950, and in 1962 Israel paid 54 million Deutschmarks for the nationalised property. The Templer cemetery survives on Jaffa Road, behind the British military cemetery, with an obelisk to the German dead of the First World War.

For four decades after the Germans left, the colony was a neglected fringe of the city centre, its houses used as workshops and stores, and attempts by the mayor Abba Hushi to rehabilitate it came to nothing. The turn came in the 1990s, when the neighbourhood was restored in step with the building of the Bahai gardens above it, and the design plan approved in 1996 set out to convert Ben Gurion Boulevard into a tourist and leisure axis.

The street itself was substantially rebuilt at the turn of the century, and this is the part visitors take for original when it is not. The traffic lanes were narrowed so that the pavements could be widened, a public transport lane was laid between them, and several street-facing gardens were expropriated to make the promenade.

The houses themselves are a mixture, and the Hebrew account is careful to say they were restored only in part. The plan to put the city museum into Beit Ha'am and the Templer school was drawn up in the same programme, initiated by the then director general of Haifa Museums, Nissim Tal, and designed by the architect Dagan Mushly; the two halls opened in 2000 and 2004. Their dates are disputed. The museum gives Beit Ha'am as 1869, the first Templer community building in the country, rebuilt in 1890 with a large hall and the bell tower that makes a Protestant meeting hall look like a church, and the school as 1902; Wikipedia's article on the neighbourhood describes an Evangelical community centre on the same ground, inaugurated on 2 July 1893, with a separate school of 1907.

So the honest reading is this. The street line, the width, the block pattern and the surviving house fronts are Templer work. The pavements, planting, lighting, bus lane and much of the stonework repair are from the last thirty years, the gardens that once surrounded each house are largely gone, and the shade trees are not the ones the colonists planted.

What makes this neighbourhood photograph the way it does is an accident of sequence. The Templers laid their main street pointing up the mountain and put their vineyards at the top of it. That vineyard ground is where the Bahai World Centre now sits, and when the 19 garden terraces around the Shrine of the Bab opened in June 2001, to Fariborz Sahba's design, climbing close to a kilometre over some 200,000 square metres, they came down the hill along the line the Templers had already drawn.

The join is a roundabout at the corner of Ben Gurion Boulevard and HaGefen Street, named UNESCO Square for Tolerance and Peace: the gardens' main entrance plaza is on its southern side, the colony promenade starts on its northern side. The naming ceremony was held on 30 May 2011 in the presence of the UNESCO director general Irina Bokova, and the square was inaugurated on 9 December 2012, marking the World Heritage inscription of 8 July 2008.

The consequence for a visitor is worth planning around. Walking south, the terraces and the gold dome sit dead centre at the end of the street, framed by the houses; walking north the same view is behind you and the street ends in the Dagon grain silo. Tourists stand on the central island to take the photograph, which is a bad place to stand: it is thin, with moving traffic and a bus lane on both sides.

The restored houses filled with businesses almost immediately: cafes, bars, restaurants and small hotels, the great majority Arab-owned. Hebrew Wikipedia's account calls Ben Gurion Boulevard the centre of leisure, social life and internal migration for young Arab Israelis more than anywhere else in Haifa, or in the country. It is the one part of the city busier after dark than during the day.

Institutional tenants arrived alongside the bars. The Haifa City Museum took the two Templer halls at number 11. In 2004 the WIZO design academy moved from Hadar into a building the municipality vacated here, the first Hebrew-language academic institution in the lower city, and the students who followed pushed the port campus built nearby that decade. The tourism association keeps its information office at number 48 and runs a guided walk on Saturday mornings.

The colony is also one of the two neighbourhoods that host the Holiday of Holidays each December, the festival the municipality runs with the Beit Hagefen Jewish-Arab centre and the Wadi Nisnas residents' committee. Wadi Nisnas, immediately east across HaGefen Street, is where the market is; the colony is where the sitting down is done.

One recent scar is worth knowing about. On 17 November 2024 the Schumacher building, which houses the University of Haifa's Schumacher Institute and its collections, was hit by a missile fired from Lebanon.