Book Review - Jerusalem: the Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

 Jerusalem: the Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

London: Phoenix, 2012 (first published 2011)      ISBN 9781780220253

One of the blurbs on my edition of this book calls it "a tour de force", and there is no doubt that Jerusalem lives up to that particular piece of praise as well as all the others that it has gained since publication. It is the story of Jerusalem for sure, but along the way the reader learns much of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, of the Arabs, Romans, Ottomans, Russians and British, of Crusader Kingdoms and Sultanates, and of modern geopolitics.

Like all great works of non-fiction, Montefiore has woven much more into his story than the bare bones. The reader comes away from this work with a much broader knowledge of Western and Middle Eastern history than they would have a right to, given the books ostensible subject matter. The reader does of course gain an intimate knowledge of the development and trials of Jerusalem itself, as well as wonderful little titbits of other information such as the origin of the phrase "Bob's your uncle", the fact that Rudolf Hoess, Franz von Papen and Rudolf Hess were all in Jerusalem at the same time, and that the future King George V got tattooed when there, in the same place as his father.

These little nuggets of information are the cherries on top of the wonderfully rich dessert of history that Sebag Montefiore serves up. Thankfully his style, and the easily digestible short chapters make it both easy to read, and easy to absorb the information.

Sebag Montefiore writes in the last pages of the book that "for 1,000 years, Jerusalem was exclusively Jewish; for about 400 years Christian; for 1,300 years, Islamic, and not one of the three faiths ever gained Jerusalem without the sword, the mangonel or the howitzer."

The history of this city is a history of rapine, destruction, and war. It is also a history of worship, ecstasy and wonder. It is a story of immigration, emigration, and cosmopolitanism. It is the story of a city that on many occasions threatened to die, but is in many ways the most important city on Earth. The origins of Jerusalem are obscure and biblical, although recent archaeology has proven that King David did in fact exist.

Until the arrival of the Romans, and sometimes even after, Jerusalem was a backwater. Holy to the Jews, it was of small interest to others apart from being an attractive place to loot, owing to the gold that was held in the Temple.

Rome and Herod brought some stability to Jerusalem, although religious fever often led to riots, and there was also a continuous underground of Jewish rebellion against Roman rule. This was mainly driven by Jewish fundamentalism; a belief that gentiles could not rule God's chosen people. Jesus was part of this milieu.

The disaster of AD70 when the Romans sacked the city and destroyed the Temple after yet another Jewish rebellion, signalled the end of any Jewish control of the city for nearly 1,900 years. Jews were expelled, and Jerusalem once again became a backwater.

After an interval of Byzantine rule, the Arabs took the city in AD630. Soon after came the building of the Dome of the Rock, which raised Jerusalem to a holy site for its third religion (and which has led to many of the trials and tribulations the city has suffered down the years). Montefiore explains that this move was partially political, as the rule of Jerusalem, Abd Al-Malik did not control Mecca and so needed a counterweight to the shrine there.

While the Muslims tolerated both Christians and Jews, life was not easy for them under Islamic rule. The Crusaders however were worse. The Crusader Kings, who were essentially freebooters looking for land, were often dangerous to each other, but not as much as they were to both Jews and Muslims.

Saladin's relatively enlightened rule was but a short interlude between the Christian crusaders and the Mamluks and Ottomans, who ruled Jerusalem for 400 years. For most of that time the city was again a backwater - Jews were forbidden the Temple Mount, and Christian worship was heavily circumscribed (although the Christians seemed to rank ahead of the Jews in the eyes of the Pashas and Sultan).

As the Ottoman Empire sank into sloth and corruption, Western countries began to influence what happened at the centre of Christendom. Kings, Czars and Emperors vied with each other to endow churches, fund pilgrimages and gain the upper hand in the machinations to do with the operation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The rise of millenarian ideas in the USA and Britain led to a push to allow Jews back to Jerusalem so that biblical prophecies of the Armageddon could be fulfilled. Montefiore clearly explains how these ideas led to massive changes on the ground in Jerusalem (one of Montefiore's ancestors funded Jewish settlement there) and on policy. The Balfour Declaration was a ground-breaking change in geopolitical thinking, even though one of the major reasons it was made was to mobilise Jewish support for Britain's fight in World War One.

Montefiore brings the history up to the present with descriptions of the internecine terrorism performed by both Jews and Arabs during the British Mandate and beyond, and explains how so many chances to find a workable peace have been missed: when one side felt politically strong enough to offer terms, the other side was too weak to accept them.

The uneasy state of peace that currently entails in Jerusalem has come at the cost of almost total segregation of Jews, Muslims and Christians from each other, and the destruction of what was a unique culture. It seems that we humans have not learnt a thing from the history of this holy and benighted place.

There is so much more in this book than I have noted here - it is an accessible wonder, and well worth reading. You will learn a lot.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell