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 ruler 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

Book Review - The Fall of the Roman Empire by Michael Grant

 The Fall of the Roman Empire by Michael Grant

New York: Collier Books, 1990 (rev. ed. first ed. published 1976)   ISBN 0020285604

This is a serviceable book that describes in broad terms the author's view on how the Western Roman Empire came to collapse in the Fifth Century AD. Unfortunately I have to state at the beginning of this review there are much better books covering the subject. Grant's style is workmanlike at best, his lack of footnotes is annoying given how many quotations are used in the text, and he can tend to some post facto explication of the fall of the West, especially when it comes to the influence of Christianity on the fall of the Empire.

After an introductory chapter, which focusses on the events of the last hundred or so years of the Western Empire, Grant then catalogues the factors that went into causing the fall. The headings for the sections of his book The Failure of the Army, The Gulfs between the Classes, The Credibility Gap, The Partnerships that Failed, The Groups that Opted Out, The Undermining of Effort, cover his main themes. The first two in particular are crucial to the final downfall of the once great institution that was the Roman Empire.

It's clear that as time went on, the Roman Empire became more and more militarized as the "Germans" pressed more heavily on their frontiers. As Grant explains in an appendix, the Western Empire with its much longer "barbarian" border, had to provide a much stronger military force than the Eastern Empire. This led to a requirement for a very large army, and the high taxation required to keep it running. In earlier times, service in the army was a path to Roman citizenship, but after Caracella decreed that all free people in the Empire were automatically citizens in AD 212, that encouragement to service was removed. Each province of the Empire needed to provide a certain number of recruits for the army, but many bought their way out of service: their money was used to pay for German soldiers. The dilution of the Roman portion of the army led to a less professional force, a less reliable force, and a smaller force. Grant point out that evidence suggests that in the last century of the Empire, it seems the biggest offensive forces to deal with breaches in the Empire struggled to reach ten thousand men, a far cry from the huge Roman armies of earlier times.

Grant also explains how the Empire crumbled from within - the crippling taxes levied particularly on agricultural production were inequitably enforced, with wealthy citizens able to evade or reduce their taxes more than middle classes. This type of activity led to what Grant calls the "Credibility Gap", where the disconnect between the vital middle classes and the government meant that when the Empire needed their citizens, those citizens were often not too interested in helping.

Grant also points out that while Rome was happy to have Germans come into the West to fight or farm for the Empire, it did little to embrace those Germans or make them feel welcome. The aggressive suppression of any religions other than Roman Catholicism in the West also did little to encourage people to feel like they were part of something bigger than their own group or sect. The East and the West also gradually drifted apart, failing to support each other, and developing differing interpretations of religion.

Grant makes much of the rise of Monasticism and asceticism, suggesting that the call to turn away from the earthly life to a life of contemplation and peace was a factor in the fall of the Empire. I think his theory is problematic on a couple of fronts. Firstly, much of the evidence he provides is from a period later than the fall of the Western Empire, and he extrapolates that evidence backwards, which is risky. He also fails to convince me that the numbers of people who would actively turn away from the earthly life would be significant enough to affect army recruitment, for example. Where he does make a valid point in my opinion with regards to clerical expansion is that many people who could have become good imperial administrators instead turned to the church. This change seems due to laws that meant that civil servants were often responsible for raising taxes, or covering the costs of the taxes they failed to raise. The Church was a less stressful career.

The lack of footnotes is a real concern to me in this book - whenever I wondered at a quotation or a point, there was nothing for me to go back to and check. This book seems to want to rise above a popular history, but it doesn't quite get there. When I got to the end of the book I felt that I knew a lot about Grant's thinking about the fall of the Empire, but somewhat less as to why he came to the conclusions that he did. I would recommend other books before this if  you are interested in the fall of the Roman Empire.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Backfire: a History of Friendly Fire from Ancient Warfare to the Present Day by Geoffrey Regan

 Backfire: a History of Friendly Fire from Ancient Warfare to the Present Day by Geoffrey Regan

London: Robson Books, 2002 (First published 1995)               ISBN 1861055013

This is a somewhat disappointing book about a fascinating subject. Many years ago (before the internet) I was doing some family research on my Great-Grandfather and his brothers, all of whom served in World War One. My Great-Grandfather was killed in action on 20 September 1917, during the Battle of Menin Road. Trying to find out more, I headed naturally to C.E.W. Bean's Official History where it is mentioned that during the course of forming up for the battle the Australians suffered considerable losses due to the artillery barrage falling short. I hadn't considered the concept of "friendly fire" before that time, but since then have found it peeping through the curtains of many a memoir or history of wartime events.

So, when I found this book, I took it up with some interest. Regan has skimmed the surface of the concept of friendly fire, and expanded the concept beyond what I think most people would think it to mean. He skips between generalizations and "how it must have been" to specific details of other incidents. One gets the feeling that he was trying to write this book with limited time to research and think about the project.   

It seems to me from the Introduction that Regan was moved to write this book after the friendly fire incident that killed six British soldiers during the first Gulf War, but he begins the book proper with a description of Ancient Greek warfare, and a discussion of how there must have been much "friendly fire" in the phalanx, purely through the way the formation was structured. He continues the theme into Medieval warfare, noting along the way that the lack of uniforms caused much confusion as well. The problem with this section of the book is that Regan provides little actual evidence for the theories that he puts forward.

Moving to the early modern period, Regan begins to draw more on written accounts of friendly fire incidents during the Napoleonic Wars, and start to elaborate on the main cause of friendly fire - confusion. The development of tightly drilled infantry (squares etc.) was an effort to try and reduce confusion, but of course war is confusion, so much of the drill went out the window after a couple of volleys, or if officers were early casualties of the action. Confusion was often the cause of incidents in the armies opposing the French - allies often engaged other allies owing to lack of knowledge of their whereabouts, or even what their uniforms looked like.

These observations set the scene for the major part of Regan's book, concerning World War One and Two, and later conflicts. It's these sections of the book that I found most disappointing. In all probability, and as Regan suggests, mis-directed artillery fire was the cause of most friendly-fire casualties during World War One. Regan in my opinion skates over the reasons why such fire might be mis-directed, and focuses instead on the outcomes of the few incidents which he writes about.

There are two reasons for this, in my opinion. Firstly, Regan has chosen to write a journalistic style of book rather than a more academically focused one. And the second, which comes from the first, Regan has used mostly secondary sources for his information (and to be fair he admits this).

In World War Two it was aircraft that were at the centre of the main friendly fire incidents that he discusses. Aircraft dealt out a lot of friendly fire (Operation Cobra), and also received a lot (Invasion of Sicily). Regan, in describing both World Wars, uses mostly material about the Entente and Allied forces - I assume because he was tied to English language material. The result is that we know a lot about the inadequacies of the USAF in particular, but not so much about the Axis forces (although he does mention Operation Bodenplatte).

I remember reading or hearing the following phrase, about bombing in World War Two "When the Luftwaffe flies over the battlefield, the Allies take cover, when the RAF flies over, the Germans take cover, when the USAF flies over everybody takes cover!" Regan doesn't use that quote, but he does imply in his book that is was the US that seemed to be the worst offender...even bombing Switzerland several times.

Again, sometimes, confusion and lack of information led to tragedy. Often vehicles on the ground were showing appropriate identification symbols, but the fliers were not told about them. Often, aircraft were flying fixed routes at fixed heights at fixed times, but the Flak gunners were not notified. As Regan points out, often these problems could have been and should have been fixed.

My main problem with this work is the patchy nature of it - the lack of detail on the why, the intense focus on a few events, the lack of an overview. However, there are another few annoyances.....the chapter on execution of troops for various offences gets quite a few pages in this book, but I really don't think this issue comes under most commonly thought of definitions of friendly fire: there are other books that cover this much better. There is an interesting chapter on "fragging", but again, not enough detail, evidence or statistical information to be more than frustrating for the reader.

The final bone I have to pick is with language, specifically Regan's use of the term "amicide" as a synonym for friendly fire. While friendly fire is in itself an ungainly term for what is being described, amicide, to me, is completely misleading. Genocide, suicide all imply the deliberate taking of life, whereas ("fragging" aside), friendly fire incidents are not deliberate - they are tragic errors. This book is the first time I have come across the term - I hope it is the last, although with the way the English language is increasingly mauled as the years go on, I fear it won't be.

So, for me, not a lot to recommend here.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Rome and Jerusalem by Martin Goodman

 Rome and Jerusalem: the Clash of Ancient Civilizations by Martin Goodman

London: Penguin, 2007                                                     ISBN 9780140291278

What a book! This magisterial work is so much more than the title and prologue might suggest. Using the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70 by the Roman Empire as a focal point, Martin Goodman has written a book that takes the reader through both Roman and Jewish society before and after the cataclysm of the destruction of the Temple during the Roman sack of Jerusalem.

With wide-ranging and deeply researched chapters on how both Rome and Jerusalem saw themselves (and others), how they governed, how family life was lived and more, this book is a compendium of what life was like in Rome and its Empire in the First Century AD. The amount of detail is staggering:  this book is like a rich dessert after a big meal - delicious, but to be partaken of in small servings (it took me nearly two months to get through, which is about 4-5 times longer than I would usually take to read a book of this size).

Goodman makes a case that the destruction of Jerusalem was not initially due to any great Roman hatred of Jews, or the Jewish faith, but more an unfortunate by-product of Roman political maneuvering, especially Vespasian's rise to power after the death of Nero and the year of the four emperors. 

In the first section of the book, where Goodman gives the reader the detail of both Roman and Jewish lives and activities, he makes it clear that both the Romans and the Jewish sides did not have a natural enmity. From the Roman side, the Jews and the Jewish faith were seen as exotic and quaint, perhaps more so than other conquered peoples, but not in a threatening way. In fact some Romans took up some of the Jewish ideas, including resting on the Sabbath. While there were wobbles in the relationship when Caligula ordered that a statue of himself be installed in the Jewish Temple, fortunately Caligula died before his order was implemented. While the Romans thought it odd that the Jewish people only had one God, they generally let them alone. From the Jewish side, they were happy to pray to their God for the health and good fortune of the Emperor, but not to worship him.

So how did the peace collapse? Like most revolutions, the core problem was taxation. This led to a raid on the Temple, which caused a more widespread uprising. Nero sent Vespasian to quell the province, initially avoiding Jerusalem. Vespasian was called back to Rome, which was in disarray after Nero's death, and he left his son Titus in Judea to continue the campaign. The  Jewish side was in disarray after factional fighting, and Titus launched an assault on Jerusalem to provide a triumph for his father, as that was felt to be politically necessary after his accession to power. Titus assaulted the city, causing many casualties, but initially avoided destroying the Temple. There is a school of thought - one that Goodman is inclined to believe - that it was never the Roman's intention to destroy the Temple, and that its destruction was an accident. The fact that Roman troops rarely desecrated shrines of other peoples they fought lends weight to this theory.

However once the Temple was destroyed it was politic for Titus and Vespasian to tell the story that the destruction was always intended. Of course that also meant that the Jewish people in the Empire were under persecution, not necessarily for things they'd done (other groups rebelled from time-to-time under the Empire but weren't persecuted in the same way), but to assist in the projection of Imperial power. The end of the war in AD70 was not the end of Jewish suffering - they were forced to pay a yearly tax, and of course they were not allowed to rebuild. In fact Jerusalem was made free of Jews, another punishment. While the Jews for many years held out hope of rebuilding the Temple, to this day it remains a ruin.

Goodman shows us that it was the political shenanigans in Rome, from Vespasian all the way through to Constantine, that kept the Jews as a repressed and un-loved people. These political issues led to the Christians moving from seeing themselves as a sect of the Jewish faith, to something in opposition to Judaism. With the power of Rome directed against the Jews, early Christians did not want to be associated with them. Thus the birth of Antisemitism can be seen to have occurred through the need for Vespasian to have a triumph to cement his new-found imperial stature, and the Jews being the unfortunate victims at the time.

This book is an absolute treasure-trove of information and thinking on Rome, Jerusalem, the Jewish faith and early Christianity. It has been for me both eye-opening and mind-widening.

Highly recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Jugurthine War / The Conspiracy of Cataline by Sallust

 The Jugurthine War / The Conspiracy of Cataline by Sallust, translated with an introduction by S.A. Handford

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963 (read copy a 1983 printing)     ISBN 0140441328

I really enjoyed this book - I had of course read some of Cicero's speeches against Cataline, when struggling with my Latin studies many years ago, but I have until now never read Sallust, and, in this translation by S.A. Handford he gives the reader a very vibrant and opinionated account of both the war against Jugurtha (112-106 BC), and the Cataline conspiracy.

Gaius Sallustius Crispus was a supporter of the plebian parties against the nobility and the Senate in Rome, and this bias comes across in both works (it seems that despite his championing of the lower classes, Sallust was not above enriching himself when he had the chance - as governor of Numidia his oppression and greed gave him not only enough money to build the Gardens of Sallust, but, very nearly a condemnation from the Senate, only avoided through the patronage of Caesar). At the end of his career in public life, Sallust retired to become an author. The two works under review are the only ones we have of his in their entirety, as well as fragments of his history of Rome.

As Governor of Numidia, Sallust would have been in a good position to discover details of the war between Rome and Jugurtha, and he provides the reader with a rollicking story of battles, intrigue, and betrayal. While Jugurtha is clearly the enemy in this book, Sallust has little good to say about the Roman elite and senatorial class. In fact the first section of this work is an extended harangue against the Roman governing class, their cupidity and corruption, and how the hard-won peace that they had gained after the defeat of Carthage  was wasted.

Sallust writes the Jugurthine War as a kind of morality tale: when Jugurtha, the illegitimate son of King Micipsa, arranged to have his two co-heirs of the kingdom killed, he aroused the enmity of Rome (who was an ally of Micipsa while he was alive). Jugurtha had been led to believe that the Senate was infinitely corruptible, so he endeavoured to bribe his way to exoneration. Here Sallust again, through the Thucidian trope of placing this thoughts in the mouths of historical actors (in this case Metellus), describes the descent of Rome from probity to corruption - in the speech Metellus shames the Senate, and stirs the plebs, so that an army is sent from Rome to Numidia to defeat Jugurtha.

Jugurtha however, is a wily opponent. By the use of his considerable wealth, and clever guerrilla-style tactics, he leads Metellus a merry dance across the deserts of North Africa. Meanwhile, in the Roman camp, Marius - Metellus' second-in-command - desired the top job, and stirred up Rome against Metellus' failure to win the war.

The war, however, was being won. Marius gains control of the armies just as the tide was turning against Jugurtha, who, in his paranoia, had started turning against his friends and allies until finally he was betrayed.

Sallust is fast-paced yet pithy in his writing, and had interesting things to say about leadership and warfare - he put the following into the mouth of Metellus "You [Jugurtha] have now a splendid opportunity... of concluding a friendly alliance, which will be preferable to war. In spite of your confidence in your strength you should not throw away a certainty for an uncertainty. It is always easy to begin fighting, but the man who starts may find it exceedingly hard to stop; for while anyone - even a coward - can open hostilities, only the victor can decide when they shall cease." Quite.

The Cataline Conspiracy tells the story of the second Catilinarian Conspiracy, and is a story of a lust for power gone bad. Cataline had once been a servant of the Roman republic, fighting alongside Pompey and Cicero in the Social War, although his personal character was under a cloud, thought to have murdered his first wife, and to have committed adultery with a Vestal Virgin (he was acquitted in court of the adultery charge, although there is a belief he bribed the court to achieve that outcome).

When he was passed over for election to Consul, he determined to gather together like-minded souls and overthrow the Republic. Sallust's version of the story shows Cataline bringing the lowest types under his umbrella, with promises of debts forgiven, booty, plunder, positions and power. Unfortunately for Cataline and his fellow conspirators, he is found out, and while Cataline escapes Rome to meet up with his troops, his fellow conspirators led by Lentulus are captured and imprisoned. The centrepiece of Sallust's work are the speeches in the Senate of Caesar and Cato, where Caesar puts the case for the banishment of the prisoners, and Cato for their execution. It is interesting to read that Sallust had good things to say about both of these men, who were to become deadly enemies not too many years after the events here described.

Before I picked up this text, I knew nothing of the Jugurthine War, and only the outline of the Catalinarian Conspiracy. Not only do I now know more, I have been highly entertained on the way. Recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell