Next year in Jerusalem!(Jerusalem: The Biography) (Book review)

• Author: Morris, Benny

Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011), 696 pp., 25.00 [pounds sterling].

Wnehere I (partly) grew up, in the Mekor Hayim and Rassco neighborhoods, it wasn't really the Jerusalem of history. The western half of the town, which Israel controlled and which, for most of the time, served as the Jewish state's capital, was a sleepy, untouristy, provincial backwater with barely a holy site or archaeological ruin worthy of the name. The one English-language bookstore, at the bottom of Shamai Street, which sold both new and secondhand books, could have featured in a small English town, say Luton in the 1950s (and, indeed, its quiet, bespectacled owner, a yekke, eventually drifted off to Australia, perhaps like some Lutonites). The restaurants closed on Friday afternoon and reopened on Saturday night or Sunday at midday; a soldier on weekend leave could barely find a place, outside his home, to go eat.

Then came the Six-Day War and everything changed. Jerusalem was, in the Israeli government's phrase, once again "united," reverting to its former glory (or notoriety) at the center of the world, the holy city of the three monotheistic religions, the prize and bane of never-ending regional and imperial conflicts. Montefiore has described it, in various places, as "the cockpit of the Middle East" and "the battlefield of Western secularism versus Islamic fundamentalism," "in the crosshairs" of a variety of conflicts and visions. It is a city awash in history: the ruins, layer upon layer, of Judaean and Roman Jerusalem, and subsequent Arab, Persian and Ottoman constructions; the Temple Mount, set upon the rock and hill on which Abraham had almost sacrificed his son Isaac, on which the Jews had built their temples, Christ had disdainfully confronted priests and money changers, and Muhammad had, at least in dream or vision, ascended to the seventh heaven; the Old City's sixteenth-century walls, encompassing Golgotha and countless tombs--of Christ and Husayn ibn Ali, the king of Hejaz, to name just two; and the burial places outside, of Queen Helena of Adiabene, of Theodor Herzl, political Zionism's founder and prophet, and of Yitzhak Rabin.

This is the grist of Montefiore's highly readable, highly enlightening mill. He takes us, systematically and anecdotally, through the ages of Jerusalem, sketching miniportraits of the successive, often bestial, sometimes winning protagonists, from the first Davidian kings through the crusader conquerors and their Muslim nemeses, Saladin and Baibars, to the Ottoman sultans and the British governors, down to the Palestinian chieftains and Zionist settlers--who are, for the time being, victors. Montefiore devotes a great deal of space to the evolving physical contours of the town, which was constantly expanding and contracting, and to its architecture, buildings rising and falling. Archaeology buffs will find a great deal of illumination in these pages.

Montefiore bases his text on the available written records (histories, both classical and recent, travelogues by visiting Muslim and Christian writers and scholars, and contemporary memoirs) and on archaeological discoveries. He gives a great deal of credence to the Biblical narratives in reconstructing the...