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Caliphs, Crusaders, and the Bloody History of Jerusalem

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By Jonathan Rosen

• Oct. 28, 2011

“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.’”

The Biography

By Simon Sebag Montefiore

Illustrated. 650 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.

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.”

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Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore – review

J erusalem is a city of historical misdirection. The Tower of David is Herodian in origin and Solomon's Stables never housed the king's "horses brought out of Egypt". The topography and architecture tell a story of fluctuating ascendancies.

The Cenacle, where Jesus supposedly ate the Last Supper, was successively a synagogue, a church and a mosque. The Muslims' Haram al-Sharif superseded the Jewish Temple, although during the medieval Crusader kingdom the Knights Templar built barracks and chapels there. The administration of the Haram is not, surprisingly, the nub of any of the religious or ethnic disputes that still wrack the city. Jews are prohibited from walking on the site in case they unwittingly wander into the Holy of Holies (Ariel Sharon's ill-judged walkabout that sparked the second intifada was in violation of Jewish law, as well as common sense).

Violence among Christian denominations in the city is pettier and far more ancient than the relatively recent national conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. When Pope Paul VI asked the Greek Orthodox for permission to pray at the chapel of Calvary in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the patriarch required him to make a written petition, then summarily refused it. The ceremony of the Holy Fire on Easter Saturday, when a tongue of flame "miraculously" descends and illuminates the church, has repeatedly deteriorated into brawling among monks who have little consideration for health and safety. As Tom Lehrer ought to have sung, the Armenians hate the Greeks, the Syriacs hate the Armenians, the Orthodox hate the Catholics, and everyone hates the Copts.

Jerusalem is omphalic (medieval maps placed it at the centre of the world), a vortex that for nearly 2,000 years has dragged from three of the world's great religions prayers, pilgrims, and the military might of those who would claim it entirely for themselves. Yet from the suppression of the final Jewish revolt by Hadrian in AD 135 until the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Jerusalem was, with the exception of the Kingdom of Jerusalem during the Crusades, a provincial backwater of little strategic value in vast empires ruled from Rome, Cairo, Damascus and Istanbul.

It would from time to time be mauled by a passing army with sights on bigger things, its variegated ethnic and religious complexion providing everyone with an excuse for a massacre. Occasionally Jerusalem inflamed the spirit of its overlord – the Ummayyad caliph Abd Al-Malik commissioned the Dome of the Rock in the seventh century – but for the most part it was neglected and slum-ridden, its major industry the fleecing of pious tourists.

Flaubert, who admittedly travelled through the Middle East more in search of carnal than spiritual ecstasy, called Jerusalem "a charnel house surrounded by walls, the old religions rotting in the sun". It was only during the much maligned British Mandate after the first world war that Jerusalem became an elegantly cosmopolitan city: the King David Hotel, the Hebrew University and the Hadassah Hospital were all built, and the Jewish and Arab middle classes flourished in Rehavia, Talpiot, Sheikh Jarrah and Katamon.

Jerusalem has a rather old-fashioned structure, compared with the circumambulatory shamanism of recent city biographies such as Peter Ackroyd's London and Venice and Eric Hazan's The Invention of Paris . It proceeds chronologically, mostly through the perspectives of the military and political leaders who have conquered and governed Jerusalem. Sebag Montefiore also attends to his own family's development of Jerusalem: his relative, the 19th-century philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, established Mishkenot Sha'ananim, the first Jewish suburb outside the walls of the Old City. The Kentish windmill he constructed there still stands today.

The book comes alive, however, when he discusses more obscure figures: Heraclius, the Byzantine emperor who seized Jerusalem from the Persians; Captain Monty Parker, a Boer War veteran who was convinced that the Book of Ezekiel contained a cipher locating the Ark of the Covenant under the Temple Mount; and the medieval German knight Arnold von Harff, who taught himself a smattering of Arabic and Hebrew which was both useful ("I will give you a gulden") and, you would have thought, redundant ("Good madam, I am ALREADY in your bed").

Jerusalem is a city of the imagination, an inspiration for religious sects from the Pilgrim Fathers to the Rastafarians, as well as hundreds of artists and writers. Sebag Montefiore barely touches on this aspect, although, unsurprisingly for the author of superb works on Catherine the Great and Stalin, he writes excellently on the reactionary clericalism of the 19th-century Russian tsars, who idealised Jerusalem even to the point of fighting the Crimean War over it. Nonetheless, this is compendious and fleet-footed history of a city where the glorification of God has always been built on bloodied soil.

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THE BIOGRAPHY

by Simon Sebag Montefiore ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 31, 2011

An essential text, bathed in blood, lit with faint hope.

The sanguinary story of thousands of years of conflict in the home city of religions.

Perhaps it’s impossible to write disinterested history, but Montefiore ( 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.

Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-307-26651-4

Page Count: 672

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011

HISTORY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

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Page Count: 352

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Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

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Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

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Book Review: Simon Sebag Montefiore’s ‘Jerusalem: The Biography’

This blithely written book presents Jerusalem as the home of all monotheistic faiths, disregarding the unique bond between Jews and their ancient capital.

By Henry Goldblum

At first glance, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s best seller Jerusalem: The Biography is surely impressive. Media critics as well as Henry Kissinger have showered it with praise, and the BBC devoted a timely three-part TV series to the author, providing invaluable publicity. Indeed, the book is not dull by any standards. Drama abounds – be it in chapter headings (take chapter 5, “The Whore of Babylon”) or in the description of events, such as the Moloch ceremonies in the days of King Menasseh, “the sacrifice of children at the roaster…in the Valley of Hinom…as priests beat drums to hide the shrieks of the victims from their parents” (p. 39). The Muslim invasion is depicted in graphic detail, particularly the battle of 636 CE, which took place “amidst the impenetrable gorges of the Yarmuk River” (p. 172) – although the area through which the Yarmuk flows is in fact more of an open plain.

Renouncing Uniqueness

Sebag Montefiore has clearly invested much effort in conveying his vision of Jerusalem – past, present, and future. The result reflects thoughtful study of many sources relating to different features of the city, and the author certainly recognizes its special status. However, in his apparent desire to deal evenhandedly with the various local religions, he fails to make it clear that it is only for Jews and Judaism that Jerusalem is, was, and has always been the sole spiritual center on earth. This omission is unacceptable. The author rightly refers, if only en passant, to Midrash Tanhuma and the writings of Philo of Alexandria as two examples of this basic, constant belief, unlimited by time or circumstance. The intensity of Jerusalem’s sacred status for Judaism is such that later monotheistic faiths have attempted at various times to gain a foothold in the city, despite their having other, holier places (Mecca and Medina, Rome and Bethlehem). Perhaps recognizing the significance of capturing the “chosen status” of Judaism, they have utilized diverse strategies to prop up their variant “histories,” including reinterpreting Muhammad’s miraculous night visit to the “Farthest Mosque” on the outskirts of Mecca to include a stopover in Jerusalem.

It has always been fundamental for the Jew to appreciate this imbalance, and it cannot be overlooked in any attempt to describe Jerusalem. Sebag Montefiore has downgraded this uniquely Jewish aspect of the city; as far as he is concerned, Judaism’s monopoly on Jerusalem is limited to part 1 of his book, extending until the year 70 CE. Parts 2-8 belong primarily to other faiths and peoples, and the final section of the book, dating from 1898, is titled “Zionism,” as if the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty is a separate chapter in the history of the city rather than the restorationof a violently interrupted continuum. Significantly, he neglects to emphasize thata Jewish majority has dominated the citywhenever circumstances have permitted,including from the early 19th century onwardwithout interruption; nor does he remind thereader that only when Jews have ruled thecity have all other faiths enjoyed full rights ofworship there.

Historically Dubious These omissions are partially explained by the almost complete absence of references to classic Jewish works compiled in the Land of Israel – despite their obvious relevance in terms of place, time, and subject. Thus, the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds are together accorded a mere four quotations; the output of Jewish historians from Graetz to current Israeli scholars not of the revisionist mode is similarly glaringly absent. In contrast, detailed descriptions of events and individuals taken from non-Jewish sources abound – even when their relevance is historically uncertain or unsound – notably the passages on Jesus in chapter 11. The sole reference to Jesus in Josephus (Antiquities, book 17, 63-64), whom Sebag Montefiore cites among other non- Jewish sources as confirmation of his existence as a historic character, is widely regarded as being of dubious authorship (see Emil Schürer’s History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus, vol. 1, p. 428ff.).

The reliability of the author’s statement at the opening of the Islam section is similarly questionable: Muhammad is said to have come “to venerate Jerusalem as one of the noblest of sanctuaries” (p. 169). With all due respect, the Koran never mentions Jerusalem, and by beginning his discussion of Islam with the reinterpretation of the passage regarding “the furthest place of worship,” Sebag Montefiore creates a false impression, especially since in Sura 2, the Prophet commands that prayer be directed exclusively to Mecca. The other quotes on page 168 are all from later Muslim sources. The term “Iliya,” a corruption of the pagan name Aelia Capitolina coined by Hadrian, continued to be used by the Muslim conquerors of Jerusalem for a generation or more following Muhammad’s death, with examples from as late as the end of the 10th century. This is the name of the city appearing on the milestones of Caliph al-Malik, who built the Dome of the Rock in the 690s. The name Al-Quds, “The Sanctuary,“ came into common use only in the 11th century, in the context of the struggle between Crusaders and Saracens for dominion over the Holy Land (see Moshe Gil, The Political History of Jerusalem in the Early Muslim Period, p. 10). The anecdote concerning Caliph Omar’s tour of the Temple Mount (p. 175 in Sebag Montefiore’s book) only reiterates the secondary status of Jerusalem in Islam – the caliph rebukes Kaab, a converted Jew, who suggests praying in the direction of the Temple on the mount rather than toward Mecca. As Bernard Lewis has stated in The Middle East, “Much of the traditional narrative of the early history of Islam must remain problematic, whilst the critical history is at best tentative” (p. 51). Why, then, has Sebag Montefiore adopted Islamic accounts regarding this period so readily? Is he perhaps playing to Muslim sensibilities? All this leads us to an epilogue that looks forward, as might be expected from the previous sections, to a permanent division of the city into two capitals for two states, in accordance with current liberal and revisionist dogma. The hope of witnessing such a chapter in the history of Jerusalem rankles coming from a scion of the illustrious Montefiore family, whose philanthropy was once invested in the furtherance of a quite different destiny for the city.

Admittedly, Jerusalem: The Biography provides an enjoyable ride. A more appropriate destination and a less controversial and dangerous route might be preferable, but that, presumably, would require a change of driver.

Dr. Heny Goldblum is a lawyer and a scholar of history

Visit Behind the News in Israel .

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Book Review | Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

And it makes for reading that cannot be put down.

Here’s the short version of why you should read Simon Sebag Montefiore’s history of Jerusalem: In just under seven hundred pages, Jerusalem: The Biography is a satisfying, narrative-based history one of the most contested pieces of real estate in world history, if not the most contested. In those relatively few pages, Montefiore manages to give at least the appearance of objective attention to each of the major religions that dominate the city’s history, as well as to the many, many conquerors that pass through its gates over its thousands of years of history. With all the sordid intrigue of an Italian opera, Jerusalem: The Biography is painfully tragic, proceeding chronologically with the march of history as it demands to be read from the introduction to the last page. Not a tale of the daily, mundane, or pedestrian, it is a story of kings, rulers, and the powerful. The average Jerusalemite appears only as a pawn of history, to be butchered, starved, driven-out, or resettled.

As a Christian, it’s hard to deny the allure of the holy city that was the setting for Jesus Christ’s life. Indeed, even Christianity’s god bemoaned the city, already ancient when he appeared, for its tragic past while alluding to the blood that would spill in its streets in coming years. And yet, as the reader turns through pages filled by debauchery, sieges, massacre, and horror, it is difficult to turn away from Montefiore’s writing. Full of detail, Jerusalem is full of more detail than could possibly be necessary to know the history of the three-thousand-year old city,

To point to how varied and thorough the detail Montefiore brings to bear as he tells his story, New York Times reviewer Jonathan Rosen started randomly opening pages throughout the book:

“[O]n 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.””

Despite his penchant for detail, Montefiore never seems to lose control of his narrative. Where tedium might threaten, a danger when facing a constant march of dates, names, and places, Montefiore seems to imbue his story with a kind of epicness… It is a city that is larger than history, exerting a magnetism on the peoples and nations that seem unable to avoid its attraction. Like a black hole, it seems to distort the laws of history and the decisions of otherwise rational actors who come too close to its gravitational pull.

And yet, the city is by no means as romantic as each successive re-writer of history would imagine it. From the barbarity of the crusaders at the turn of the first millennium to the dung-heap on the Temple Mount Caliph Omar found when he took the city in the 600s, to the modern-day controversies (including Yassir Arafat’s head-scratching claim that Jerusalem had never been the site of the Jewish Temple). Still, Montefiore takes pains to be fair to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic relationships to the city, all while correcting oft-repeated myths and politically charged rewrites of history.

In some senses, it can be hard to read Jerusalem: The Biography and see a god in all of this violence. And yet, it is not any god that has brought the seemingly unending death and war to the Holy Land, but the errant followers of the faiths that call Jerusalem home.

Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths; it is the prize of empires, the site of Judgment Day and the battlefield of today’s clash of civilizations. From King David to the 21st century, 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. In this masterful narrative, Simon Sebag Montefiore brings the holy city to life, through the people who created and destroyed it—from Herod, Cleopatra and Nero to Churchill, Rasputin and Truman—and draws on the latest scholarship, his own family history, and a lifetime of study to show that the story of Jerusalem is truly the story of the world.

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Dan Burton lives in Millcreek, Utah, where he practices law by day and everything else by night. He reads about history, politics, science, medicine, and current events, as well as more serious genres such as science fiction and fantasy.

[…] that it’s bloody, and it almost always has been (go check out Simon Sebag Montefiore‘s Jerusalem: A Biography for a fascinating, if relatively brief, history of that piece of the Middle East). After […]

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Book review: “Jerusalem: The Biography,” by Simon Sebag Montefiore

By dallasnews Administrator

6:45 PM on Dec 2, 2011 CST

Some places live and breathe on at least two different planes: the physical and the notional.

“New York” is more than pavement and politics, for instance. It’s also — particularly for those who will never step foot on that pavement — an idea, a vision. “This isn’t New York” can be compliment or curse, but the reference is only rarely to the city’s infrastructure or tax code.

Jerusalem is such a place — yet its reality is much more than merely bifurcated.

Almost since the city’s foundation, Jerusalem has existed as holy relic, political fulcrum, way station to conquest and glittering prize for every major civilization with a toehold west of Baghdad.

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What “Jerusalem” meant to a 19th-century Syrian, for instance, is very different from what it meant to an 18th-century Englishman, or a Jew fighting Roman or Jordanian occupation. Not to mention the city’s 21st-century partisans: politicians in Washington, Palestinians in Amman, Jews in Chicago, Russian Orthodox Christians in Moscow, the European Union parliaments, the Israeli and Palestinian governments. All have something to say about the city, all have influence on its daily affairs, and, frequently, each knows precious little of the full sweep of Jerusalem’s actual lived history — or one another.

In the monumental Jerusalem: The Biography , author Simon Sebag Montefiore digs through millennia of evidence and anecdote to find the beating heart of a city long pressed into service as a battering ram against competing narratives. There are myriad Jerusalems, it seems, but the stones and hills are the same, all resonating with the prayers and dreams of millions of very different people.

“So a history of Jerusalem has to be a history of both truth and legend,” Montefiore writes. “But there are facts and this book aims to tell them, however unpalatable to one side or the other … The city’s past is often imaginary.”

While the sheer work involved in putting together a work of this scope is dizzyingly impressive — from King David through the Roman Empire, Arab conquest, Crusades, Napoleon, British Mandate, up to the 1967 Six Day War — Montefiore's even greater accomplishment is Jerusalem's sheer readability.

On every page, the reader is gripped with unfolding drama, joy and sorrow, as empires rise and fall, each certain it has achieved some kind of permanence, each leaving rivers of blood in its wake — and (in one of the book’s more unsettling constants) bodies and-or decapitated heads on or around Jerusalem’s city walls, literally up to and including the mid-20th-century British.

As Montefiore writes, however, Jerusalem has also always been “a hybrid metropolis of hybrid buildings and hybrid people who defy the narrow categorizations that belong in the separate religious legends and nationalist narratives of later times.” One group builds, the next destroys, those who come after use bits and bobs of what remains to build something new — again and again and again.

The book isn’t flawless. For instance, the author makes clear that the Montefiore family played an enormous role in shaping modern Jewish Jerusalem, but in a distracting lacuna, never mentions his own place in the family. Furthermore, there are occasional inaccuracies — from the ritual observance of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, to the 2000 Israeli-Palestinian Camp David peace talks — that stick out in a work so otherwise finely tuned.

But inaccuracies fade into the background in the face of Montefiore's otherwise masterful wrangling of centuries of fact into blood-and-bone human epic. A hugely ambitious effort, clearly produced with real love for the city and its people, Montefiore's Jerusalem should be read by everyone and anyone who would dare to venture an opinion on the city, or its future.

Emily L. Hauser has written about the contemporary Middle East and Muslim world since the early 1990s. She blogs at www.emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com.

The Biography

Simon Sebag Montefiore

(Knopf, $35)

dallasnews Administrator

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Book review: ‘Jerusalem’ by Simon Sebag Montefiore

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Simon Sebag Montefiore’s epic survey of Jerusalem’s sanguinary history does not inspire confidence in the civilizing qualities of religion. The pile of corpses accumulated over millenniums from the persecutions both perpetrated and endured by all three of the faiths — Christianity, Islam and Judaism — that have contended for Jerusalem would surely be high enough to reach the celestial home of any one of them. Not that politicians come off any better than believers here. Anyone frustrated by the intractable stalemate in the contemporary Middle East peace process may take grim comfort from the knowledge that Jerusalem has been a flash point for global warfare since the time of the Egyptian pharaohs: “the desire and prize of empires,” as Montefiore puts it, “yet of no strategic value.”

Montefiore embraces Jerusalem’s paradoxes in his chronological account, which seeks to avoid hindsight and disclaims a political agenda. He succeeds admirably in remaining evenhanded, a particularly notable achievement since his great-great-uncle Moses Montefiore, an English financier, was foremost among the wealthy European Jews seeking to ameliorate the dreadful conditions under which their coreligionists lived in Ottoman-ruled 19th century Jerusalem. Like his great-great-uncle, who befriended Jerusalem’s powerful Muslim Families while building facilities for the city’s Jews, Montefiore appreciates the messy, on-the-ground reality of life in Jerusalem throughout the centuries.

Montefiore’s depiction of all three faiths is restricted to the actions of their founders and adherents as revealed by the plethora of primary and scholarly sources he ably employs. “My task is to pursue the facts, not to adjudicate between the mysteries of different religions,” he writes. The author of prize-winning biographies of Stalin and Potemkin, he uses the same focus on individual lives to tell Jerusalem’s story, though in this case the cast of characters is much larger and stretches across more than 3,000 years.

The main narrative begins around 1000 BC with the capture of Jerusalem by David, king of the Israelites. Jewish Jerusalem survived, tossed among various empires, until 70 AD, when the Romans crushed a rebellion, demolished the Second Temple and obliterated the city, leaving only the holding walls of the Temple Mount, a few towers, and a pile of wreckage scavenged and reused by Jerusalem’s conquerors ever since.

Montefiore’s detailed account of the city’s subsequent architecture — a pagan temple erected on the rock where Jesus was crucified, replaced by Christian churches after Constantine’s fourth century conversion; the seventh century Muslim shrine and mosque built on the Temple Mount — cogently makes the point that “most of Jerusalem’s shrines … have been borrowed or stolen, belonging formerly to another religion.” Jerusalem’s political and social history is equally complex. Its Arab conquerors tolerated Christian and Jewish worship within limits of fluctuating severity; pilgrims from all three faiths were flocking to the city by the 11th century. Crusaders executed the most barbaric slaughter since the Romans when they took Jerusalem in 1099, yet the ruling class of Christian Jerusalem adopted many Eastern customs. Saladin recaptured the city for Islam in 1187, but warfare among Christian armies, various Muslim powers and the barbarian Tartars reduced Jerusalem by the early 15th century to a grimy backwater whose 6,000 residents alternately fleeced and lynched the pilgrims.

Montefiore whisks through this grubby period to arrive at the consolidation of the Ottoman Empire, which established a status quo that endured in Jerusalem from 1517 until the late 19th century. Ottoman sultan Suleiman restricted worship by Jews, streaming into Jerusalem after their expulsion from Spain, to a narrow street alongside what became known as the Wailing Wall. For strategic reasons, he recognized Western Catholics as custodians of the city’s Christian shrines, infuriating the local Greek Orthodox. Rivalry between the two sects remained so bitter over the ensuing three centuries that in 1846 a battle on Good Friday between adherents left 40 people dead around the altar of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The glaring contrast between religious ideals and human actions could hardly be more pointed.

They may have hated each other, but it was the anti-Semitism of both wings of Christianity that permanently altered Jerusalem’s demographics. Pogroms had already sent thousands of Russian Jews fleeing to the city by the time European persecutions provoked Theodor Herzl to publish his influential Zionist tract, “The Jewish State,” in 1896. World politics led the British government to support this idea in the Balfour Declaration, cynically designed to enlist Jewish support for America’s entry into World War I. Prince Faisal, aiming to rule a Kingdom of Syria extracted from the dying Ottoman Empire, was willing to accept a Jewish majority in Palestine within this kingdom. Jewish immigration exploded: By 1936, there were 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem; Christians and Arabs totaled 60,000.

The city’s Muslim religious leader paid a friendly visit to Hitler and encouraged anti-Semitic riots. The radical Jewish Irgun responded by tossing grenades into Arab cafés. Montefiore impartially describes atrocities on both sides in the years leading to the establishment in 1948 of “a much larger and stronger Israel than would otherwise have emerged” if Arab leaders had not repeatedly rejected the two-state partition repeatedly accepted by Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion. The author is equally matter-of-fact about the rise of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose secular socialism was not so different from Ben-Gurion’s, ironically, except that his pan-Arabism mandated the elimination of Israel. The main narrative concludes with the Six-Day War in 1967, when Jerusalem, divided between Jordan and Israel in 1949, came under exclusive Israeli rule.

“The conquest transformed, elevated and complicated Jerusalem in a flash of revelation that was simultaneously messianic and apocalyptic, strategic and nationalistic,” Montefiore writes in his brief epilogue, which sketches an increasing fundamentalism on all sides that does not bode well for lasting peace in the region or the city. Yet throughout Jerusalem’s history, acts of appalling barbarism prompted by religious intolerance have alternated with deals struck by pragmatic leaders who recognized they could never keep the Holy City solely for themselves. It’s fitting that Montefiore closes his densely textured book, suspicious of all sweeping assertions, with a quiet morning walk to watch Jews, Christians and Muslims praying at their respective sacred sites on “the divine esplanade where Heaven and Earth meet.” Whatever Jerusalem’s political future may be, it stands as a monument to humanity’s enduring religious faith, in its best and worst aspects.

“Jerusalem: The Biography” By Simon Sebag Montefiore Alfred A. Knopf, 652 pages, $35

Smith is a contributing editor for the American Scholar and reviews books for The Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post.

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Eustea Reads

A life in books and tea, book review: jerusalem, the biography by simon sebag montefiore.

This is actually my cousin’s book but I borrowed it during his housewarming party last month. Yes, I am the person who takes things away during a housewarming (but with every intention of bringing it back!).

Jerusalem is a sweeping biography of the city, starting from the reign of King David and ending in the present day. As you can imagine, covering about three millennia (give or take a few centuries) of history in about 550 pages is no mean feat, but Montefiore has managed to do an admirably impartial job. You could probably expand this book into a couple hundred volumes but as an introduction to Jerusalem, this does the job very well.

The book is divided into nine sections:

• Christianity

Each section represents the dominant power in Jerusalem at that time. While I am familiar with the information in the Judaism section, since the Bible as historical document was used as a reference, I learnt a lot about what happened to the city during the times of the Roman empire (before the rise of Christianity) and what happened after. I won’t do a detailed summary, but basically the history of Jerusalem can be summarised as: many wars happened. It’s not just during the crusades (which the book shows are not as one-sided as we may think) but in the years before and after. It’s sad that these fights are still continuing – I couldn’t help but think that if the two-state solution was accepted by the Arabs during the formation of Israel, the situation might not be so bad right now. Instead, it seems like both sides are now opposed to compromise, which means that the conflict is doomed to continue (at least, that’s how it looks like to someone all the way in Asia, I’m sorry if I am reading things wrongly).

The prose is lyrical and sweeping. This generally works to rush you along the centuries and give you a birds-eye view of all that is happening, but this sometimes comes at the expense of needed detail. For example, during the period of Herod and Mariamme, the book tells us that Herod had plans to put Mariamme to death if he should die. The book also tells us that when Mariamme revealed to Herod that she knew of his plans, he had her guardian, his uncle, put to death. What the book did not tell us was why – I had to read Wikipedia to find out that this was because that Herod thought that the only way Mariamme would have found out his plans was if she was intimate/had betrayed him with his uncle.

Incidentally, I’d love to learn more about Mariamme and the other queens of Jerusalem. Any recommendations?

And while I think that the book is generally objective towards Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, I do disagree with a few of the book’s interpretations. For example, the book says that Jesus “did not call himself the Messiah” – something that I disagree with based on versus such as Matthew 16:16-17 and John 4:25-26. Such disagreements are few, especially compared to all the information in the book, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Overall, I found this book to be hugely educational. There’s three thousand year’s worth of history in this book and it’s definitely something that needs to be slowly read and digested. It’s not a light read, but it’s definitely accessible to a general reader (like me).

Featured Image: Photo from Canva

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4 thoughts on “ Book Review: Jerusalem, The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore ”

Sounds like a book everyone should read.

I was an adult before I learned about Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, and all the atrocities that happened then. So when I would read Jesus’ prophecies about it, like in Luke 21:20 – 36, I would get really confused, to say the least.

Yeah, a lot of Bible prophecies require historical context which needs you to read outside the Bible. This would be pretty interesting as a supplement to a Bible class, I think!

I’ve wondered that too about the two-state solution during Israel’s formation having saved so much heartache today had it happened. This sounds like an informative and worthwhile read, Eustacia. I am glad you enjoyed it.

There was a lot of info in this! Thanks for the comment!

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Jerusalem : Book summary and reviews of Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore

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The Biography

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

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Published Oct 2011 688 pages Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion Publication Information

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About this book

Book 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.

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Reader reviews.

"Starred Review. Montefiore delivers Jerusalem's unfolding story as epic panorama and nuanced documentary history, suitable for general and scholarly audiences." - Publishers Weekly "Starred Review. An essential text, bathed in blood, lit with faint hope." - Kirkus "A heavenly city Jerusalem may be; but it is also a relentlessly terrestrial one. The achievement of this marvelous book is to fuse them into one biography." - The Telegraph (UK) "A fittingly vast and dazzling portrait of Jerusalem, utterly compelling from start to finish." - The Sunday Times (U.K.)

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Simon Sebag Montefiore Author Biography

Photo © Hugo Burnand

Simon Sebag Montefiore was born in 1965 and read history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University, where he received his Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD). Catherine the Great and Potemkin was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson, Duff Cooper, and Marsh Biography Prizes. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won the History Book of the Year Prize at the British Book Awards. Young Stalin won the Costa Biography Award (UK), the LA Times Book Prize for Biography (US), Le Grand Prix de la Biographie Politique (France) and the Kreisky Prize for Political Literature (Austria). Jerusalem: The Biography won the Jewish Book of the Year Prize, from the Jewish Book Council (USA). Dr Montefiore's books are published in forty languages. He is also the author of the novel, Sashenka . His new ...

... Full Biography Link to Simon Sebag Montefiore's Website

Name Pronunciation Simon Sebag Montefiore: SEE-bag mahn-tuh-FYOR-ay

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Jerusalem: the biography audible audiobook – unabridged.

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.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

• Listening Length 25 hours and 21 minutes
• Author Simon Sebag Montefiore
• Narrator John Lee
• Audible release date October 25, 2011
• Language English
• Publisher Random House Audio
• ASIN B005Z9GPTG
• Version Unabridged
• Program Type Audiobook
• See all details

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