Temple Society (Templers)

Christoph Hoffmann's movement emerged from Württemberg pietism's most literal wing: if scripture promised the gathering of God's people, then the faithful should gather — not in revival meetings but geographically, in the Holy Land, as a living temple of God's people preparing the way for the kingdom. The Lutheran establishment expelled the movement, whose 'Friends of Jerusalem' organised as the German Temple; from 1868 Hoffmann and Georg David Hardegg led the first settlers to Haifa.

The colonies — Haifa, Jaffa, Sarona near Tel Aviv, Jerusalem's Emek Refaim, and later inland settlements — became models of nineteenth-century agricultural colonisation: steam mills, orchards, the region's first regular carriage roads and hotels, admired and imitated by early Zionist settlement. Community life in the founding generations carried the gathered-community pattern this catalogue tracks — membership by conviction, community discipline, marriage within the fellowship, education in community schools, and the founder's religious authority — at moderate intensity that relaxed as the colonies prospered and institutionalised.

The twentieth century broke the Palestine community from outside. The world wars made the Templers enemy aliens in a British-ruled land: internment and partial deportation in the first war; and in the second — by which time a substantial minority of the by-then-German-national community had joined the Nazi party, a chapter the society's own historiography addresses — internment of the community and deportation of hundreds via Egypt to camps in Australia in 1941. Sarona's lands passed to the new Israeli state after 1948; the last Templers left in the early state years, and Australia's internment camps became, by the strange logic of the century, the seedbed of the society's continuing centre in Victoria.

The modern Temple Society Australia and its German counterpart are small, open communities — congregational life, aged care, heritage work — whose members join and leave as in any denomination. The entry scores that reality: a comparator documenting how a movement born in excommunication and gathered settlement can institutionalise into ordinary community, with its founding-era mechanics visible only in the historical record. The catalogue pairing is instructive: the Templers and the Labadists began from adjacent separatist impulses; one dissolved inside its own purity requirement, the other outlived even deportation by becoming ordinary.