An American villa, a Russian baron with Swiss and Ethiopian wives, and a tropical garden with trees from all over the world. Beit Immanuel, in Jaffa’s German Colony, typifies the multiethnic land of Israel before World War I

Where To?

Beit Immanuel, Jaffa
Historic hotel

 

Where else but in our crazy little country could you find a Russian baron determined to live in Jaffa’s German Templar colony, who dealt in smuggled antiquities, invented sacred sites, cultivated a tropical jungle in his backyard (complete with apes and parrots), married the daughter of an Ethiopian noble, converted his home into a hotel, and finally emigrated to England only to starve to death in Russia? And where exactly would you find all this? In Jaffa’s Beit Immanuel.

The fairy tale actually begins with a tragedy. In 1866, a group of fervently idealistic American craftsmen and farmers arrived in the small port of Jaffa with their families to set up a Christian colony in the Holy Land. The same dubious sense of direction that had led their ancestors to settle on an unknown continent a few centuries earlier now persuaded the Americans to build their homes on an unmarked, freshly dug cemetery filled with cholera victims. The contaminated ground soon claimed nine more lives, six of them children’s. In the wake of this disaster, the colony fell apart, and the remaining pioneers scattered all over the country, abandoning their comfortable stone houses with “made in America” wooden trimmings. 

The vacuum was promptly filled by no less fervently idealistic German Templar farmers and craftsmen, who disembarked at Haifa Bay with their families to create their own Christian colony. Once settled in Haifa, they cautiously acquired two of the deserted houses in Jaffa, finding them germ-free. The Germans then purchased a two-story ex-American villa in 1871 to serve as their community’s school and cultural center, adding two wings and a large backyard overlooking the Mediterranean. 

One damp morning in 1878, a fine horse-drawn carriage screeched to a halt outside the building, and from the vehicle stepped Russian baron Plato Gregoryevich Ustinov.

 

Act 1

Baron Ustinov first visited the Holy Land in 1861, emerging from the belly of a ship in Jaffa when he was just twenty-one. Wounded during his army service in Russia, he’d also contracted a severe lung infection, and his doctors prescribed the healing sunshine of the Middle East. Ustinov’s search for lodgings suitable for a baronet initially turned up only a couple of pilgrims’ hostels with straw beds and crucifixes staring down from bare walls. Luckily he found a slightly higher standard of hospitality at the Basle Pilgrim Mission, run by Peter and Dorothea Metzler, a visionary Swiss Protestant couple. 

The Metzlers and their guest hit it off, and after a year of convalescence, he presented his astonished hosts with a substantial parting gift. This bonus enabled them to open a modest infirmary and a Christian missionary school. 

Ustinov eventually persuaded the Metzlers to move with their five children to Russia, where they ran his estate. Sadly, Dorothea perished during the birth of her sixth child. On her deathbed, she made the baron swear to marry her eldest daughter, Marie, as soon as the girl turned sixteen. 

Overcome by both the tragedy and the Metzlers’ missionary example, Ustinov converted to Lutheran Protestantism in 1875. Under Russian feudal law, he then had to sell his property and leave the motherland. Yet he took his considerable fortune with him, along with Peter Metzler and his orphans. 

A generous donation ensured the group’s warm welcome in the German kingdom of Württemberg, whose sympathetic Queen Olga (herself a Russian aristocrat), arranged for Plato to be both naturalized and baronized. Shortly afterward, sixteen-year-old Marie married the baron despite his being almost twenty years her senior. Two years later, they returned to where their story had begun – Jaffa.