Jerusalem Quotes

“Necessity is very often the mother of romance.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“Jerusalem has a way of disappointing in tormenting both conquerors and visitors. The contrast between the real and heavenly cities is so excruciating that a hundred patients a year are committed to this city's asylum, suffering from the Jerusalem Syndrome, a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“The European upper-class could not decide if the Jews were a noble race of persecuted biblical heroes, everyone a King David and Maccabee, or a sinister conspiracy of mystically brilliant, hook-nosed, hobbits with almost supernatural powers.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“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. This sacred work of so many epochs and so many hands contains some facts of provable history, some stories of unprovable myth, some poetry of soaring beauty, and many passages of unintelligible, perhaps coded, perhaps simply mistranslated, mystery. Most of it is written not to recount events but to promote a higher truth—the relationship of one people and their God.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“The Jews had a love-hate relationship with the Greek culture. They craved its civilization but resented its dominance. Josephus says they regarded Greeks as feckless, promiscuous, modernizing lightweights, yet many Jerusalemites were already living the fashionable lifestyle using Greek and Jewish names to show they could be both. Jewish conservatives disagreed; for them, the Greeks were simply idolaters.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“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.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“Jerusalem is the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions and she is the only city to exist twice—in heaven and on earth: the peerless grace of the terrestrial is as nothing to the glories of the celestial.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“The discipline that aims to be objective and scientific can be used to rationalize religious-ethnic prejudiced and justify imperial ambitions. Israelis, Palestinians and the evangelical imperialists of nineteenth century have all been guilty of commandeering the same events and assigning them contradictory meanings and facts.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“History is so pungently powerful here that it is repeatedly distorted:”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem

“When Moses sought the nature of this God, asking ‘What is thy name?’, he received the majestically forbidding reply, ‘I AM THAT I AM,’ a God without a name, rendered in Hebrew as YHWH: Yahweh or, as Christians later misspelt it, Jehovah.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem

“The Jerusalem I was raised to love was the terrestrial gateway to the divine world where Jewish, Christian and Muslim prophets, men of vision and a sense of humanity, met—if only in the imagination. —SARI NUSSEIBEH, Once Upon a Country”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“Jemal hanged two Jewish spies in Damascus, then he announced the deportation of all Jerusalem’s Jews: there would no Jews left alive to welcome the British. “We’re in a time of anti-Semitic mania,” Count Ballobar noted in his diary before rushing to Field Marshal von Falkenhayn to complain. The Germans, now in control of Jerusalem, were dismayed. Jemal’s anti-Semitic threats were “insane,” believed General Kress, who intervened at the highest level to save the Jews. It was Jemal’s last involvement in Jerusalem.a”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“There are hints of child sacrifice in Genesis and Exodus, including Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Human sacrifice was long associated with Canaanite and Phoenician ritual. Much later, Roman and Greek historians ascribed this dastardly practice to the Carthaginians, those descendants of the Phoenicians. Yet very little evidence was discovered until the early 1920s, when two French colonial officials in Tunisia found a tophet, with buried urns and inscriptions in a field. They bore the letters MLK (as in molok, offering) and contained the burned bones of children and the telling message of a victim’s father reading: “It was to Baal that Bomilcar vowed this son of his own flesh. Bless him!” These finds may have coincided with the time of Manasseh, implying that the biblical stories were plausible. Molok (offering) was distorted into the biblical “moloch,” the definition of the cruel idolatrous god and, later in Western literature, particularly in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, one of Satan’s fallen angels. Gehenna in Jerusalem became not just hell, but the place where Judas invested his ill-gotten silver pieces and during the Middle Ages the site of mass charnel-houses. CHAPTER 5”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“When the Byzantine emperor Isaac Angelus demanded it for the Orthodox, Saladin decided that they must share it under his supervision and appointed Sheikh Ghanim al-Khazraji as Custodian of the Church, a role still performed today by his descendants, the Nusseibeh family.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“What the fanatical Jewish conservatives regarded as heathen pollution, cosmopolitans saw as civilization. This was the start of a new pattern in Jerusalem: the more sacred she became, the more divided.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“On the evening of 7 December (1917), the first British troops saw Jerusalem. A heavy fog hung over the city; rain darkened the hills. The next morning, Governor Izzat Bey smashed his telegraph instruments with a hammer, handed over his writ of surrender to the mayor, "borrowed" a carriage with two horses from the American Colony which he swore to return, and galloped away toward Jericho. All night thousands of Ottoman troops trudged through the city and out of history. At 3 a.m. on the 9th, German forces withdrew from the city on what Count Ballobar called "a day of astounding beauty." The last Turk left St. Stephen's Gate at 7 a.m. By coincidence, it was the first day of Jewish Hanukkah, the festival of lights that celebrated the Maccabean liberation of Jerusalem. Looters raided the shops on Jaffa Road. At 8:45 a.m., British soldiers approached the Zion Gate.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“early Muslims seem to have called themselves ‘Believers’ – the word appears 1,000 times in the Koran while ‘Muslim’ appears about 75 times – and as we will see in Jerusalem, they were certainly not yet hostile to their fellow monotheists, Christians or Jews.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“Names were changed, traditions muddled, but all that matters in Jerusalem is what is believed to be true.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“Amos Oz, the late Jerusalemite writer, offered this droll solution: ‘We should remove every stone of the Holy Sites and transport them to Scandinavia for a hundred years and not return them until everyone has learned to live together in Jerusalem.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“In 312, Manichaeanism and Mithraism were no less popular than Christianity. Constantine could just as easily have chosen one of these - and Europe might today be Mithraistic or Manichaean.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“Biblia a devenit Cartea Cărţilor, dar nu constituie un singur document. Este o bibliotecă mistică alcătuită din texte ce se întrepătrund, ale unor autori anonimi care le-au scris şi le-au editat în momente diferite, în scopuri divergente.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“I apply not my sword when my lash suffices nor my lash when my tongue suffices. And even if but one hair is binding me to my fellow men, I don’t let it break. When they pull, I loosen, if they loosen I pull.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“How are the mighty fallen and the weapons of war perished!”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem

“Once again the centre of international storms. Neither Athens nor Rome aroused so many passions. When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it’s not the first time, it’s a homecoming. —ELIE WIESEL, open letter to BARACK OBAMA,”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“It is now one hour before dawn on a day in Jerusalem. The Dome of the Rock is open: Muslims are praying. The Wall is always open: the Jews are praying. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is open: the Christians are praying in several languages. The sun is rising over Jerusalem, its rays making the light Herodian stones of the Wall almost snowy—just as Josephus described it two thousand years ago—and then catching the glorious gold of the Dome of the Rock that glints back at the sun. The divine esplanade where Heaven and Earth meet, where God meets man, is still in a realm beyond human cartography. Only the rays of the sun can do it and finally the light falls on the most exquisite and mysterious edifice in Jerusalem. Bathing and glowing in the sunlight, it earns its auric name. But the Golden Gate remains locked, until the coming of the Last Days.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“Herzl concluded that Jews could never be safe without their own homeland. At first, this half-pragmatist, half-utopian dreamed of a Germanic aristocratic republic, a Jewish Venice ruled by a senate with a Rothschild as princely doge and himself as chancellor. His vision was secular: the high priests “will wear impressive robes”; the Herzl army would boast cuirassiers with silver breastplates; his modern Jewish citizens would play cricket and tennis in a modern Jerusalem.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“the most striking thing about him to the modern reader is that here was a devout Muslim who constantly made jokes about Islam that would be unthinkable today. Though this scholar could recite the entire Koran in eight hours and act as muezzin, unusually he was clean-shaven, irreverent, open-minded and an enemy of fanaticism, whether Islamic, Jewish or Christian.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“Some pilgrims were convinced that children conceived within the Church were specially blessed, and of course there was alcohol, so that the dark hours often became a candlelit, hard-drinking orgy in which good-natured hymn singing gave way to ugly brawls. The Sepulchre, said one disgusted pilgrim, was “a complete brothel.” Another pilgrim, Arnold von Harff, a mischievous German knight, spent his time learning phrases in Arabic and Hebrew that give some clues to his preoccupations: How much will you give me?
I will give you a gulden.
Are you a Jew?
Woman, let me sleep with you tonight.
Good madam, I am ALREADY in your bed.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“Fulk the Black, Count of Anjou and founder of the Angevin dynasty that later ruled England, came on pilgrimage after he had burned his wife alive in her wedding-dress having found her guilty of adultery with a swineherd.”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography

“Now in Medina, with its Jewish clans, he created the first mosque,a adopting the Jerusalem Temple as the first qibla, the direction of prayer. He prayed at Friday sundown—the Jewish Sabbath—fasted on the Day of Atonement, banned pork and practised circumcision. The oneness of Muhammad’s God rejected the Christian Trinity but other rituals—the prostration on prayer mats—owed much to Christian monasteries;”
― Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography