Jerusalem: The Biography

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more; it is the history of heaven and earth. BENJAMIN DISRAELI, Tancred

And this is the city’s tragedy as well as her magic: every dreamer of Jerusalem, every visitor in all ages from Jesus’ Apostles to Saladin’s soldiers, from Victorian pilgrims to today’s tourists and journalists, arrives with a vision of the authentic Jerusalem and then is bitterly disappointed by what they find, an ever-changing city that has thrived and shrunk, been rebuilt and destroyed many times. But since this is Jerusalem, property of all, only their image is the right one; the tainted, synthetic reality must be changed; everyone has the right to impose their ‘Jerusalem’ on Jerusalem – and, with sword and fire, they often have.

Jerusalem is where these questions are settled at the Apocalypse – the End of Days, when there will be war, a battle between Christ and anti-Christ, when the Kaaba will come from Mecca to Jerusalem, when there will be judgement, resurrection of the dead and the reign of the Messiah and the Kingdom of Heaven, the New Jerusalem. All three Abrahamic religions believe in the Apocalypse, but the details vary by faith and sect.

The unending struggle for Jerusalem – massacres, mayhem, wars, terrorism, sieges and catastrophes – have made this place into a battlefield, in Aldous Huxley’s words the ‘slaughterhouse of the religions’, in Flaubert’s a ‘charnel-house’. Melville called the city a ‘skull’ besieged by ‘armies of the dead’; while Edward Said remembered that his father had hated Jerusalem because it ‘reminded him of death’.

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.

The contrast between the real and heavenly cities is so excruciating that a hundred patients a year are committed to the city’s asylum, suffering from the Jerusalem Syndrome, a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion. But Jerusalem Syndrome is political too: Jerusalem defies sense, practical politics and strategy, existing in the realm of ravenous passions and invincible emotions, impermeable to reason.

The Bible became the book of books, but it is not one document. It is a mystical library of interwoven texts by unknown authors who wrote and edited at different times with widely divergent aims.

Not only was he sending the Judaean exiles home, and guaranteeing their rights and laws – the first ruler ever to do so – but he returned Jerusalem to them and offered to rebuild the Temple. Cyrus appointed Sheshbazzar, son of the last king, to govern Jerusalem, returning to him the Temple vessels. No wonder a Judaean prophet hailed Cyrus as the Messiah. ‘He is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid.’

After finishing off the Persian empire and expanding his hegemony as far as Pakistan, Alexander began his great project, the fusing of the Persians and Macedonians into a single elite to rule his world. If he did not quite succeed, he changed the world more than any other conqueror in history by spreading his version of Hellenikon – Greek culture, language, poetry, religion, sport and Homeric kingship – from the deserts of Libya to the foothills of Afghanistan. The Greek way of life became as universal as the British during the nineteenth century or the American today. From now on, even the monotheistic Jewish enemies of this philosophical and polytheistic culture could not help but see the world through the lens of Hellenism.

At Rome’s nadir in 260, the Persians captured the emperor (who was forced to drink molten gold, and was then gutted and stuffed with straw)

But the modern idea, promoted in Hollywood movies and in the backlash after the disaster of the 2003 Iraqi war, that crusading was just an opportunity for enrichment with sadistic dividends, is wrong. A handful of princes created new fiefdoms and a few Crusaders made their careers, whereas the costs were punishing and many lives and fortunes were lost in this quixotic and risky but pious enterprise. A spirit was abroad that is hard for modern people to grasp: Christians were being offered the opportunity to earn the forgiveness of all sins. In short, these warrior-pilgrims were overwhelmingly believers seeking salvation on the battlements of Jerusalem.

Arnulf placed bells in the churches (the ringing of church bells had always been banned by the Muslims).

When a stray dog wandered on to the Temple Mount, the qadi ordered the killing of every canine in Jerusalem. As a special humiliation, every Jew and Christian had to deliver dead dogs to a collection point outside the Zion Gate. Gangs of children killed dogs and then gave the carcasses to the nearest infidel.

There was nothing between Napoleon and the conquest of Jerusalem – except the Butcher, Ahmet Jazzar Pasha, the warlord of Ottoman Palestine.

It was said that the distinctive onion-shaped domes of Russian churches were an attempt to copy those in paintings of Jerusalem. Russia had even built its own mini-Jerusalem*5 but every Russian believed that the pilgrimage to Jerusalem was an essential part of the preparation for death and salvation.

Always in history, and even more in the intense hothouse of Jerusalem, short-term successes have a way of leading to consequences not just unforeseen but with the opposite effect to the ones intended and expected. Personal relationships and ideological doctrines are essential to diplomatic progress but these are often shallow and short-term foundations for national interests.

Jerusalem today lives in a state of schizophrenic anxiety. Jews and Arabs dare not venture into each other’s neighbourhoods; secular Jews avoid ultra-Orthodox who stone them for not resting on the Sabbath or for wearing disrespectful clothing; Jews fulfil their religious dreams and stir Muslim anxiety by praying on the Temple Mount; and the Christian sects keep brawling. The faces of Jerusalemites are tense, their voices are angry and one feels that everyone, even those of all three faiths who are convinced that they are fulfilling a divine plan, is unsure of what tomorrow will bring.

‘Jerusalem is a tinderbox that could go off at any time,’ warned King Abdullah II of Jordan, great-grandson of Abdullah the Hasty, in 2010. ‘All roads in our part of the world, all the conflicts, lead to Jerusalem.’