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Summary
Summary
Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths; it is the prize of empires, the site of Judgement Day and the battlefield of today's clash of civilizations. From King David to Barack Obama, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict, this is the epic history of three thousand years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism and coexistence.
How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the "center of the world" and now the key to peace in the Middle East? In a gripping narrative, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals this ever-changing city in its many incarnations, bringing every epoch and character blazingly to life. Jerusalem's biography is told through the wars, love affairs and revelations of the men and women--kings, empresses, prophets, poets, saints, conquerors and whores--who created, destroyed, chronicled and believed in Jerusalem. As well as the many ordinary Jerusalemites who have left their mark on the city, its cast varies from Solomon, Saladin and Suleiman the Magnificent to Cleopatra, Caligula and Churchill; from Abraham to Jesus and Muhammad; from the ancient world of Jezebel, Nebuchadnezzar, Herod and Nero to the modern times of the Kaiser, Disraeli, Mark Twain, Lincoln, Rasputin, Lawrence of Arabia and Moshe Dayan.
Drawing on new archives, current scholarship, his own family papers and a lifetime's study, Montefiore illuminates the essence of sanctity and mysticism, identity and empire in a unique chronicle of the city that many believe will be the setting for the Apocalypse. This is how Jerusalem became Jerusalem, and the only city that exists twice--in heaven and on earth.
Author Notes
Simon Jonathan Sebag Montefiore was born on June 27, 1965 in London. He is a British historian, award winning author of history books and novels and television presenter. He was educated at Ludgrove School and Harrow School. He read history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge where he received his Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD). He won an Exhibition to Caius College. He went on to work as a banker, a foreign affairs journalist, and a war correspondent.
Montefiore's first book Catherine the Great & Potemkin. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won History Book of the Year at the 2004 British Book Awards. Young Stalin won the LA Times Book Prize for Best Biography, the Costa Book Award, the Bruno Kreisky Award for Political Literature, and Le Grand Prix de la Biographie Politique. Jerusalem: The Biography was a global bestseller and won The Book of the Year Prize from the Jewish Book Council. His latest history is The Romanovs: 1613-1918. He is also the author of the acclaimed novels Sashenka and One Night in Winter. One Night in Winter won the Political Novel of the Year Prize.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Popular historian Montefiore (Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar) presents a panoramic narrative of Jerusalem, organized chronologically and delivered with magisterial flair. Spanning eras from King David to modern Israel with rich anecdotes and vivid detail, this exceptional volume portrays the personalities and worldviews of the dynasties and families that shaped the city throughout its 3,000-year history. Montefiore explains how religious and political influences created the city's character, while fostering its stature as a center of the Western religious world. He effectively demonstrates how political necessity stimulated and inspired religious devotion and how the portrayal of Jerusalem as a holy city sacred to three religions is relatively recent. Chapters are organized by epochs: Judaism, paganism, Christianity, Islam, Crusade, Mamluk, empire, and Zionism, with the body of the book ending with the Six-Day War. A balanced epilogue considers Jerusalem in the context of recent events. Drawing upon archival materials, archeological findings, recent scholarship, and his own family's papers (he is descended from the 19th-century Jewish leader Moses Montefiore), Montefiore delivers Jerusalem's unfolding story as epic panorama and nuanced documentary history, suitable for general and scholarly audiences. Photos and maps. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* If, as some have maintained, the word Jerusalem mean. city of peace. it is a grand historical irony. For, as this beautifully written, absorbing, but often grim account shows, there are few stones of the city that have not been stained with the blood of its inhabitants during the past 3,000 years. Acclaimed historian and biographer Montefiore views Jerusalem as a living, breathing organism bearing the genetic imprint of many conquerors, including Jews, Greeks, Arabs, crusading Franks, Turks, and the British. Although his Jewish family has strong links to the city, Montefiore scrupulously sustains balance and objectivity in the book's chronological presentation of the development of the city from the prebiblical time of the Jebusites to the present. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, Jerusalem truly is a holy city, yet that status has been tragically used to justify bigotry, fanaticism, and appalling massacres, some of which Montefiore describes in horrifying detail. While sometimes painful to read, this is an essential book for those who wish to understand a city that remains a nexus of world affairs.--Freeman, Ja. Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"IF I forget thee, O Jerusalem," declares the Psalmist, "may my right hand forget its cunning." He neglects to mention that remembering Jerusalem is no picnic either. In "Jerusalem: The Biography," Simon Sebag Montefiore unleashes so many kings, killers, prophets, pretenders, caliphs and crusaders, all surfing an ocean of blood, that the reader may begin to long for redemption, not from the book, which is impossible to put down, but from history itself. Open "Jerusalem" at random, like a Bible, and discover something gruesome: on Page 4, Roman soldiers are crucifying 500 Jews a day in the run-up to the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70; on Page 75, Alexander Jannaeus, a much-loathed Jewish king of the first century B.C., after slaughtering 50,000 of his own people, celebrates his victory "by cavorting with his concubines at a feast while watching 800 rebels being crucified around the hills." Crucifixion was so common in the ancient world, Montefiore notes in one of his many fascinating asides, that Jews and gentiles alike had taken to wearing nails from victims as charms, anticipating what became a Christian tradition. And when the population dwindled - as after the First Crusade, which like a neutron bomb eliminated the infidels but preserved the holy places - you could always dash across the Jordan, like Baldwin the crusader king in 1115, and bring back "poverty-stricken Syrian and Armenian Christians, whom he invited to settle in Jerusalem, ancestors of today's Palestinian Christians." One of the constants in so long a history is the fluidity of the population of the region. Montefiore notes that between 1919 and 1938, before the British turned off the tap of Jewish immigration, the Jewish population of Palestine grew by 343,000; Arab immigration was even greater, swelling the population by 419,000 during the same period. Montefiore, the author of two books on Stalin and another on Prince Potemkin, has a fine eye for the telling detail, and also a powerful feel for a good story - so much so that his vastly enjoyable chronicle at times has a quasi-mythic aspect. He cheerfully borrows snippets of Scripture, legends and dubious eyewitness accounts, weaving them into his larger narrative. So what if Herod's genitals didn't really explode with maggots. All will be set right in a footnote, though you may forget about the scholarship while reading of how the former "showgirl," Empress Theodora of Byzantium, "was said to be a gymnastically gifted orgiast whose specialty was to offer all three orifices to her clients simultaneously." This is not an account of daily life or humble devotions. It's a little like learning about the American West by watching a John Wayne movie: everyone is a gunslinger or a sheriff, with nameless extras diving under the bar when trouble starts. Still, for a book that spans 3,000 years, it does a remarkably inclusive job. Montefiore has chosen to organize "Jerusalem" chronologically, and it stretches from King David's establishment of the city as his capital to the 1967 war, with an epilogue meditating on more recent events. The author explains that "it is only by chronological narrative that one avoids the temptation to see the past through the obsessions of the present." This turns out to be a hard standard to maintain, even for a historian like Montefiore. Describing King Solomon's dedication of the Temple, he notes: "At that moment, the concept of sanctity in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic world found its eternal home," as if the three religions evolved simultaneously. Writing about the Jewish king Josiah, he notes that "his optimistic, revelatory reign was more influential than any other between David and Jesus," suggesting that Jesus was a reigning king. Similarly, he uses "Old Testament" where "Hebrew Bible" is needed. This is not a mere style choice in a book about Jerusalem - the Hebrew Bible ends with II Chronicles and the exhortation to rebuild the Temple; the Old Testament - whose order was determined by Christians - ends with Malachi, whose closing words are seen as a prophetic adumbration of Christ. These awkward locutions do not seem in the slightest religiously motivated; on the contrary, they appear to be part of this book's desire to be all things to all people, as when Montefiore writes of Jerusalem: "The Abrahamic religions were born there." This is certainly a stretch for Islam, born in the Hejaz, even if Mohammed originally determined that Jerusalem would be the qibla, the direction of prayer - until the Jewish tribes of Medina refused to accept his prophetic authority and he switched it to Mecca. As for Christianity, it developed on the far side of the Temple's destruction and the Roman determination to wipe Jews and Judea off the map once and for all, which included renaming the region Palestina, after the extinct enemies of the Jews. The fallen Temple became for Christians the emblem of Judaism's displacement by a later dispensation. It is the awkward Oedipal relationship Islam and Christianity have to Judaism, the parent that just won't die, that makes Jerusalem a sort of Old Testament set in stone. "Solomon, I have surpassed thee," Justinian declared when he dedicated Hagia Sophia in 537. When Caliph Omar, who wrested Jerusalem from the Christians in 636, visited the Temple Mount, he found what one observer called "a dung heap which the Christians had put there to offend the Jews." Omar built his mosque there precisely because of its Jewish significance, but Omar II, around 720, banned Jewish worship on the Temple Mount - a ban that stood for the duration of Islamic rule and found its absurdist fulfillment during the waning days of the Clinton presidency, when, as Montefiore reminds us, Yasir Arafat "shocked the Americans and the Israelis when he insisted that Jerusalem had never been the site of the Jewish Temple." He also forbade Palestinian historians to mention the fact. MONTEFIORE'S work is a corrective to such willful erasures, just as it ably demonstrates the deep Islamic devotion to the city, as well as the Christian connection, older still. He explains that "the sanctity of the city grew out of the exceptionalism of the Jews as the Chosen People. Jerusalem became the Chosen City, Palestine the Chosen Land, and this exceptionalism was inherited and embraced by the Christians and the Muslims." There is, unfortunately, a contradiction at the heart of this hopeful passage. The word "inherited" elides a world of woe and religious rupture, as does the transfer of "exceptionalism" from the Jews to their city. But it isn't in fact the city that confers holiness on its people. Israel's greatest poet, Yehuda Amichai - who lived for many years in the Jerusalem neighborhood established by Montefiore's illustrious ancestor, Moses Montefiore - wrote a poem about Jerusalem in which the weary poet sits down on the steps near David's Tower, only to have a guide use his head as a landmark to direct tourists to an ancient ruin: "I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them, 'You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family.'" A Roman relief of soldiers with spoils taken from the Temple of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Open Montefiore's book at random, like a Bible, and you will discover something gruesome. Jonathan Rosen is the editorial director of Nextbook and the author, most recently, of "The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature."
Choice Review
Jerusalem is a grammatically dual form only in Hebrew (Yerushalayyim), a shift that apparently dates from the Persian period. Scholars have suggested one heavenly, the other earthly--Sebag Montefiore prefers earthy. Nearly 40 percent of this fact-filled book spans Napoleon to the 1967 unification of the city under Israeli control. Sebag Montefiore sings a paean to a city that has captured his own family history in a sweeping popular survey of the past three millennia. His prologue describing the Roman conquest in 70 CE is a gripping summary of a holy city's demise, a tribute to the author's skill as a biographer. Occasional lacunae, e.g., Ezra and his important contributions, represent lapses that a more judicious reading by his expert advisers would have avoided; additionally, interesting typos and charming howlers mar only slightly this thinly veiled family hagiography, filled with gossipy and illuminating vignettes of Arab and missionary Christian upper society. The author revels in sex and violence reminiscent of Suetonius's expose of the Caesars and Procopius's indelicate secret history, with an occasional scatological excursus. Informative notes are perhaps the most valuable. Despite its minor peccadilloes, this is an important, somewhat irreverent contribution to the huge bibliography on Jerusalem, and a swell read. Useful bibliography. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. S. Bowman University of Cincinnati
Guardian Review
"Jerusalem is the holy city," writes Simon Sebag Montefiore, "yet it has always been a den of superstition, charlatanism and bigotry . . . the cosmopolitan home of many sects, each of which believes the city belongs to them alone." Jew, Christian and Muslim alike feel compelled to rewrite its history to sustain their own myths. "A hundred patients a year," Montefiore notes, "are committed to the city's asylum suffering from the Jerusalem syndrome, a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion." The 3,000-year conflict provides a terrible story, which he tells surpassingly well, and although not his purpose, one that is likely to confirm atheist prejudices. Montefiore takes the history of the old city from its beginnings as a fortified village through every conquest or occupation - Canaanite, Israelite, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian, Seleucid, Roman, Byzantine, Ummayad, Abassid, Fatimid, Seljuk, Crusader, Saracen, Tatar, Mamluk, Ottoman, British, Jordanian and finally Israeli. Rival places of worship were destroyed and new ones constructed with the stones of earlier buildings, thus making Jerusalem the most complicated archaeological site in the world. Populations were slaughtered or sold into slavery, then later replaced by new waves of immigration. Montefiore's book, packed with fascinating and often grisly detail, is a gripping account of war, betrayal, looting, rape, massacre, sadistic torture, fanaticism, feuds, persecution, corruption, hypocrisy and spirituality. Before going back to the earliest times and King David, Montefiore begins with the sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in AD70 by Titus. Jerusalem was packed with refugees and pilgrims for Passover. After his victory, 500 Jews a day were crucified until the Romans ran out of wood. Some survivors were sold into slavery; many others were held back to die in the circus, fighting each other or wild animals. Titus's destruction of Jerusalem did not start the diaspora - there were large Jewish communities already in Babylon, Parthia, Egypt and Cyprus - but it certainly focused yearning on the lost city and the destroyed Temple. And not all Jews were banished. Sixty years after Titus, Emperor Hadrian faced another, far better-led Jewish revolt. In fact the Jewish population was to rise and fall over the following centuries, depending on the whims of the conquerors and on outside events, such as the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at the end of the 15th century. With the decision of Emperor Constantine in the fourth century to impose Christianity on both the eastern and western empires, Judaism faced a new challenge. Empress Helena remodelled the ruins of Jerusalem with churches, including that of the Holy Sepulchre. The city became a centre of Christian pilgrimage. No one could have predicted that Constantine's nephew, Julian the Apostate, would reverse the process. To the astonished joy of the Jews, he set out to rebuild the Temple. But on his death the new emperor, Theodosius, raised Christianity again and banned the Jews from Jerusalem. In the seventh century, Islam, the third monotheistic religion, was also drawn to Jerusalem. Muhammad, who revered the Bible and saw Moses and Jesus as prophets, believed, like Jews and Christians, that Jerusalem would be the site of the Last Judgment, or "the Hour". The Christians surrendered Jerusalem without a fight, and the Jews especially welcomed the tolerance of their new masters. All admired the celestial beauty of the Dome of the Rock soon dominating the city skyline. Yet for the Jews, its position on the Temple Mount meant that they could not rebuild the Temple of Solomon. The easygoing Umayyad dynasty was replaced in a massacre by the austere Abassids, who lost interest in Jerusalem just at the time when Christian Europe, led by Charlemagne, looked towards the holy city. It was not, however, until the end of the 11th century, following the persecutions of Caliph Hakim and the massacre of pilgrims, that Christian kings began to think of reconquering Jerusalem. Their timing was fortunate, for the caliphate had been battered by the Seljuk Turkmen and fragmented. In 1099, the first Crusader army took Jerusalem with appalling slaughter. Their knights "rode in blood up to their bridles", recounted an enthusiastic chronicler. The city stank for six months afterwards. The Kingdom of Jerusalem, with fluctuating fortunes, lasted until Guy de Lusignan, the husband of Queen Sibylla, marched out in 1187 towards Galilee led by the True Cross to fight the great Saladin. Thirst and Armenian archers did for his mighty cavalry. Jerusalem soon fell, and those of its population who could not afford a ransom were sold into slavery or the harem. Other crusades followed. In 1228, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen reached the Holy Land and exploited the divisions among Saladin's descendants. After secret negotiations with the Sultan Kamil, he occupied Jerusalem, but gave the Muslims complete rights over the Temple Mount. His tolerance, enforced by the leader of the Teutonic Knights, Hermann von Salza, was a rare event in Jerusalem's history. (Bizarrely, Heinrich Himmler later named Waffen-SS formations after both Hohenstaufen and Salza.) But in 1244, Christian Jerusalem fell for the last time until General Allenby's army defeated the Ottoman Turks in 1917. By the time of the first world war, both Jewish and Arab nationalism had begun to develop. The Jews suffered from rising antisemitism in Russia and western Europe, while the Arabs grew restive under the yoke of the Ottoman empire. The necessities of war in the Middle East encouraged the British to make promises to the Arabs that they had little intention of keeping, while philo-semitism in Lloyd George's cabinet led to the Balfour Declaration, raising Zionist aspirations. Even before their betrayal by the British at the Versailles conference, the Arabs had become alarmed at the scale of Jewish immigration. Tel Aviv had been founded on the coast in 1909, and two years later came the first kibbutz. Zionists persuaded themselves that Palestinian Arab and Jew could live happily alongside each other. But the secular and socialist idealists of the first waves of immigrants were very different from the hardliners who came later. Lloyd George decided to carve up the Middle East, taking Palestine for Britain while giving Syria to France. The British, especially the urbane governor Sir Ronald Storrs, believed that they could persuade Zionists and Arabs to live together. But in 1920 riots broke out in Jerusalem when 60,000 Arabs protested against the Balfour Declaration. Shooting broke out when a secretly raised Jewish defence force tried to protect the Jewish quarter. A cycle of mutual fear and violence was bound to develop. Arabs stoned Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall. And by 1936, three years after Hitler's rise to power, there were 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem, with only 60,000 Christians and Muslim Arabs. In 1936, British police cornered and shot down a cell of armed fundamentalist Arabs in the Judaean hills. The Arab revolt began. The grand mufti of Jerusalem backed it, splitting the Arab community, and fled abroad where he later sought support from Hitler. Jewish paramilitary groups fought back. Neville Chamberlain reversed the Balfour Declaration as the British struggled to control Palestine. With opportunities for a settlement missed, largely through an Arab rejection of a separate Jewish state, the situation became impossible. Zionist paramilitaries fought a vicious guerrilla campaign against British troops, and at the end of the war an unstoppable flood of Jewish refugees arrived from European camps. Clement Attlee found that turning to the United States provided little comfort. American Baptists and Evangelicals were strongly pro-Zionist, to say nothing of the increasingly vocal Jewish community. President Truman insisted that another 100,000 Jews should immediately be granted entry. Britain gave up the mandate in despair, and the first Arab-Israeli war immediately ensued. Montefiore's narrative is remarkably objective when considering his own family's close links with Jewish Jerusalem. One might quibble with certain details, but overall it is a reliable and compelling account, with many interesting points. Britain's biblical enthusiasm in the 19th century was soon far surpassed in the US. Since then, messianic Christianity has intensified. American fundamentalist Christians, excited since 1967 that Jerusalem was again Jewish, believe that the "second coming" is now imminent. Some have even been trying to breed an unblemished red heifer for sacrifice according to the prophecy. Now that the peace process appears to have finally collapsed, Montefiore's book indicates that the Jerusalem syndrome of the comparatively few may well affect us all. Antony Beevor's books include D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (Penguin). To order Jerusalem for pounds 20 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Antony Beevor Caption: Captions: Jerusalem . . . 3,000 years of conflict "Jerusalem is the holy city," writes Simon Sebag Montefiore, "yet it has always been a den of superstition, charlatanism and bigotry . . . the cosmopolitan home of many sects, each of which believes the city belongs to them alone." Jew, Christian and Muslim alike feel compelled to rewrite its history to sustain their own myths. "A hundred patients a year," Montefiore notes, "are committed to the city's asylum suffering from the Jerusalem syndrome, a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion." The 3,000-year conflict provides a terrible story, which he tells surpassingly well, and although not his purpose, one that is likely to confirm atheist prejudices. The Kingdom of Jerusalem, with fluctuating fortunes, lasted until Guy de Lusignan, the husband of Queen Sibylla, marched out in 1187 towards Galilee led by the True Cross to fight the great Saladin. Thirst and Armenian archers did for his mighty cavalry. Jerusalem soon fell, and those of its population who could not afford a ransom were sold into slavery or the harem. Other crusades followed. In 1228, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen reached the Holy Land and exploited the divisions among Saladin's descendants. After secret negotiations with the Sultan Kamil, he occupied Jerusalem, but gave the Muslims complete rights over the Temple Mount. His tolerance, enforced by the leader of the Teutonic Knights, Hermann von Salza, was a rare event in Jerusalem's history. (Bizarrely, Heinrich Himmler later named Waffen-SS formations after both Hohenstaufen and Salza.) But in 1244, Christian Jerusalem fell for the last time until General Allenby's army defeated the Ottoman Turks in 1917. [Lloyd George] decided to carve up the Middle East, taking Palestine for Britain while giving Syria to France. The British, especially the urbane governor Sir Ronald Storrs, believed that they could persuade Zionists and Arabs to live together. But in 1920 riots broke out in Jerusalem when 60,000 Arabs protested against the Balfour Declaration. Shooting broke out when a secretly raised Jewish defence force tried to protect the Jewish quarter. A cycle of mutual fear and violence was bound to develop. Arabs stoned Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall. And by 1936, three years after Hitler's rise to power, there were 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem, with only 60,000 Christians and Muslim Arabs. - Antony Beevor.
Kirkus Review
Young Stalin, 2007, etc.) endeavors to do so--and largely succeeds. The author sees Jerusalem not just as the setting for some of history's most savage violence--some of the butchery makes Titus Andronicus look like a Sesame Street segment--but a microcosm of our world. Our inability to achieve sustained peace there is emblematic of our failures around the globe. Montefiore begins in 70 CE with the assault of the Roman leader Titus (not Andronicus) on Jerusalem, an attack featuring thousands of crucifixions of Jews--not to mention eviscerations to extract from the bowels of the victims the valuables they'd swallowed. The author then retreats to the age of the biblical David, and away we go, sprinting through millennia, pausing only for necessary explanations of politics, religion, warfare and various intrigues. The story is horribly complex, and Montefiore struggles mightily to make everything clear as well as compelling, but the vast forest of names, places, events sometimes thoroughly conceals some small treasure at its heart. Still, the history is here: Nebuchadnezzar, the Herods, Alexander the Great, Jesus, Pilate, Caligula, Paul, Titus, Justinian, the Arabs and the Muslims, the Crusades, Richard the Lionheart, Saladin, Suleiman, Ottomans, Napoleon, Disraeli, Lawrence of Arabia, Zionism. There are even some guest appearances by Thackeray, Twain and Melville. Suddenly, we are in the 20th century, and only the names and the killing technology have changed. The author ends with the 1967 Six-Day War and with some speculations about the future. An essential text, bathed in blood, lit with faint hope.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Few historians have demonstrated the vision, mastery, and boldness necessary to publish on a subject so vast and in such detail as Montefiore (Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar). Since Jerusalem's origins as a settlement more than 5000 years ago, its history, in the author's citation of 19th-century British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, is "the history of the world." Montefiore explains the city's significance to the three Abrahamic faiths, the idiosyncrasies of its builders and conquerors, and the persistent perception there of a "divine presence." Montefiore starts with King David (he takes the Old Testament as the historical source), gets to the "quixotic and risky but pious" Crusades about halfway through the book, and goes on to note such "pilgrims" as Rasputin and Mark Twain. He confronts challenging questions, including the destruction of the Temple at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C.E. and by Titus in 70 C.E. and the remarkable "Dome of the Rock," and he moves onward to the creation of modern Israel. VERDICT A marvelous panorama for all readers with an interest in religious studies or world history. [See Prepub Alert, 4/4/11.]-Zachary T. Irwin, Pennsylvania State Univ.-Erie (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Excerpted from the Preface The history of Jerusalem is the history of the world, but it is also the chronicle of an often penurious provincial town amid the Judaean hills. Jerusalem was once regarded as the centre of the world and today that is more true than ever: the city is the focus of the struggle between the Abrahamic religions, the shrine for increasingly popular Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism, the strategic battlefield of clashing civilizations, the front line between atheism and faith, the cynosure of secular fascination, the object of giddy conspiracism and internet mythmaking, and the illuminated stage for the cameras of the world in the age of twenty-four-hour news. religious, political and media interest feed on each other to make Jerusalem more intensely scrutinized today than ever before. Jerusalem is the Holy City, yet it has always been a den of superstition, charlatanism and bigotry; the desire and prize of empires, yet of no strategic value; the cosmopolitan home of many sects, each of which believes the city belongs to them alone; a city of many names--yet each tradition is so sectarian it excludes any other. This is a place of such delicacy that it is described in Jewish sacred literature in the feminine-- always a sensual, living woman, always a beauty, but sometimes a shameless harlot, sometimes a wounded princess whose lovers have forsaken her. Jerusalem is the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions and she is the only city to exist twice--in heaven and on earth: the peerless grace of the terrestrial is as nothing to the glories of the celestial. The very fact that Jerusalem is both terrestrial and celestial means that the city can exist anywhere: new Jerusalems have been founded all over the world and everyone has their own vision of Jerusalem. Prophets and patriarchs, Abraham, David, Jesus and Muhammad are said to have trodden these stones. The Abrahamic religions were born there and the world will also end there on the Day of Judgement. Jerusalem, sacred to the Peoples of the Book, is the city of the Book: the Bible is, in many ways, Jerusalem's own chronicle and its readers, from the Jews and early Christians via the Muslim conquerors and the Crusaders to today's American evangelists, have repeatedly altered her history to fulfil biblical prophecy. When the Bible was translated into Greek then Latin and English, it became the universal book and it made Jerusalem the universal city. Every great king became a David, every special people were the new Israelites and every noble civilization a new Jerusalem, the city that belongs to no one and exists for everyone in their imagination. And this is the city's tragedy as well as her magic: every dreamer of Jerusalem, every visitor in all ages from Jesus' Apostles to Saladin's soldiers, from Victorian pilgrims to today's tourists and journalists, arrives with a vision of the authentic Jerusalem and then is bitterly disappointed by what they find, an ever-changing city that has thrived and shrunk, been rebuilt and destroyed many times. But since this is Jerusalem, property of all, only their image is the right one; the tainted, synthetic reality must be changed; everyone has the right to impose their "Jerusalem" on Jerusalem--and, with sword and fire, they often have. Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century historian who is both participant and source for some of the events related in this book, noted that history is so "eagerly sought after. The men in the street aspire to know it. Kings and leaders vie for it." This is especially true for Jerusalem. It is impossible to write a history of this city without acknowledging that Jerusalem is also a theme, a fulcrum, a spine even, of world history. At a time when the power of Internet mythology means that the hi-tech mouse and the curved sword can both be weapons in the same fundamentalist arsenal, the quest for historical facts is even more important now than it was for Ibn Khaldun. A history of Jerusalem must be a study of the nature of holiness. The phrase "Holy City" is constantly used to describe the reverence for her shrines, but what it really means is that Jerusalem has become the essential place on earth for communication between God and man. We must also answer the question: Of all the places in the world, why Jerusalem? The site was remote from the trade routes of the Mediterranean coast; it was short of water, baked in the summer sun, chilled by winter winds, its jagged rocks blistered and inhospitable. But the selection of Jerusalem as the Temple city was partly decisive and personal, partly organic and evolutionary: the sanctity became ever more intense because she had been holy for so long. Holiness requires not just spirituality and faith but also legitimacy and tradition. A radical prophet presenting a new vision must explain the centuries that have gone before and justify his own revelation in the accepted language and geography of holiness--the prophecies of earlier revelations and the sites already long revered. Nothing makes a place holier than the competition of another religion. Many atheistic visitors are repelled by this holiness, seeing it as infectious superstition in a city suffering a pandemic of righteous bigotry. But that is to deny the profound human need for religion without which it is impossible to understand Jerusalem. Religions must explain the fragile joys and perpetual anxieties that mystify and frighten humanity: we need to sense a greater force than ourselves. We respect death and long to find meaning in it. As the meeting-place of God and man, Jerusalem is where these questions are settled at the Apocalypse--the End of Days, when there will be war, a battle between Christ and anti-Christ, when the Kaaba will come from Mecca to Jerusalem, when there will be judgment, resurrection of the dead and the reign of the Messiah and the Kingdom of Heaven, the New Jerusalem. All three Abrahamic religions believe in the Apocalypse, but the details vary by faith and sect. Secularists may regard all this as antique gobbledegook, but, on the contrary, such ideas are all too current. In this age of Jewish, Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, the Apocalypse is a dynamic force in the world's febrile politics. Death is our constant companion: pilgrims have long come to Jerusalem to die and be buried around the Temple Mount to be ready to rise again in the Apocalypse, and they continue to come. The city is surrounded by and founded upon cemeteries; the wizened body-parts of ancient saints are revered--the desiccated blackened right hand of Mary Magdalene is still displayed in the Greek Orthodox Superior's Room in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Many shrines, even many private houses, are built around tombs. The darkness of this city of the dead stems not just from a sort of necrophilia, but also from necromancy: the dead here are almost alive, even as they await resurrection. The unending struggle for Jerusalem--massacres, mayhem, wars, terrorism, sieges and catastrophes--have made this place into a battlefield, in Aldous Huxley's words the "slaughterhouse of the religions," in Flaubert's a "charnel-house." Melville called the city a "skull" besieged by "armies of the dead"; while Edward Said remembered that his father had hated Jerusalem because it "reminded him of death." Excerpted from Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
