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 - Mount Athos by John Julius Norwich, Reresby Sitwell and A. Costa

 Mount Athos by John Julius Norwich and Reresby Sitwell with photographs by the Authors and A. Costa

London: Hutchinson, 1966

"The monastic republic of the Holy Mountain is an autonomous protectorate that occupies a remote peninsula in northern Greece. Twenty 'Ruling Monasteries' share government and own the land. In addition, a number of dependencies are to be found: some resemble the monasteries and others vary in size and appearance from small villages to the precarious cliff-dwellings of anchorites. A survival of the Byzantine way of living, set in a landscape that has remained unchanged since antiquity."

The above quote from this book is one of the best short descriptions of what Mount Athos is that I have read. It is the first paragraph of the second part of this multi-authored work, an attractive quarto in which the text is interspersed with pictures from the Holy Mountain. It is an account both of the history of Mount Athos (the first section of the book, written by Norwich), and a description of the authors journey to most of the monasteries and some of the other establishments in the early 1960s (the second section, written by Sitwell).

John Julius Norwich, while an expert on Byzantine history, is no lover of religion. His history of the Mount is shot through with what seems to this reader to be a disdain for the monks there and how they live their lives, with little insight into the religion which sustains them - much as in his history of the Papacy he refused to discuss theology at all. The trip was organised so the authors could see and photograph the architecture and the art, and Norwich's dismay at the treatment of the art and buildings comes from a secular viewpoint of a historian and antiquarian, which is at odds with the religious view of the material world held by the monks. It seems from his disparaging remarks about the food and the monks that Norwich did not have any sort of spiritual experience while on the Mountain. However, his potted history of the peninsula is a good one.

Sitwell's description of their journey is somewhat more sympathetic to the monks and their way of life. He seems to have been able to appreciate the timelessness of life on Athos better than Norwich, and his descriptions of their travels by boat, mule and on foot bring to the reader a flavour of what it must be like to visit and stay at the various monasteries - or at least what it was like in the sixties.

One enduring theme from both writers is that they felt they had visited the Mount just before it ceased to be. Many monasteries were in poor repair, most of the monks and holy men were of advanced years, and weren't being replaced by those younger. Sitwell and Norwich put this down to the advance of western materialism, and, importantly, that many of the countries from which monks were sourced had become Communist and banned religion. They saw their trip as a cataloguing of a way of life that was about to pass.

Fortunately for Athos, and the World, that hasn't happened. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Second World has led to a revival of Orthodox religion, and consequently the revival - to some degree - of Athos. More men are choosing to go there and live the religious life, and many of the monasteries have refreshed both their buildings and their personnel. There is life in the Mountain yet.

A big part of this book are the 63 plates, which are a mixed bag, photographically speaking. There are some wonderful pictures, but others not so good. They do, however, give the reader some insight into life on the peninsula.

As someone who has a fascination with Mount Athos, I found this book interesting, but really it's a fairly minor work on the subject. One for completists only.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell