Jerusalem: The Biography

"Jerusalem, a Biography" ... there can never be an agreement on the `biography'. There is no story of Jerusalem that is not rabidly contested as to `facts', natural or supernatural, analytical or anecdotal, or ... merely made up ... but there can be little doubt that Jerusalem remains the center of the human ambition to be a city possessed. This 'biography' that melds narrative with archaeology is compelling. 7000 years of history is not easily compiled for this city's role in civilization. A story free of criticism, worldview bias and angry refutations is simply not possible. The binary nature of the past reviews from 5-stars to 1 stars is an evidence to the strong personal response.For me, it was a 5-star read. It is an excellent guided tour of the city and populations in time and place. Jerusalem is in fact the story of genocide, near extermination, our more simply just destroyed. The Temples of Solomon, Zerubbabel, and the Maccabees were dug out to bedrock to build Herod's Temple complex. Roman Titus strip mined the acropolis in 70AD. The Temple traces were wiped out excepting the nearby, vital Gihon Spring which the author cites as the most archaeologically excavated site on the planet.The place can be the pinnacle of human joy only to revert in the same generation to horror^3. Yet ... it remains the spiritual center of 3 major religions for reasons not to be found in human logic. It is a rather worthless piece of real estate as property goes in rugged terrain and off the main drags of the trade routes. It rises only when power voids among the hegemons permit it. Only in the modern era does it exist at its more ancient population levels.Jerusalem is an extraordinary violent story made more violent as supernatural Good and Evil are seen to perpetually battle for control. The reader that stops at page 70 or so is missing the complex Muslim history which is every bit as lethal to Jerusalem's residents as Titus. By 1300AD, the Crusades were over, Islam was in chaos and the Jews were scattered around the world. The spiritual center of the 3 Abrahamic religions was claimed by all manner of Sultans, Popes, and European kings, but Jerusalimites numbered but 2000 leaderless peasants of which 2 were Jews, a hundred or so were Christians and most were Muslim banished North African tribes dwelling in destitution amidst the 1500 year ruins of repetitive total destruction. Not until the 1850's did much change. Is it a rational place or an irrational place to possess and to continue for the thousands of years until the present? Montefiore attempts to tell the story. To Pagans, Jews, Christians and Muslims ... Jerusalem is an equally lethal and irresistible place ... a tinder box for annihilations and of no earthly value.Jerusalem is unlike any other relic on the planet with its insignificant geographical location. The reader is left to wonder at the story. That Jerusalem survives at all is a miracle of sorts in chapter after chapter of Montefiore's work. Elsewhere in the ancient world, ancient and far more powerful cities were forever abandoned, but not Jerusalem. Mohenjo-Daro never survived. Troy was not reborn to greatness, Persepolis never survived. Neither great Nineveh nor Babylon survived. The great city at Amarna disappeared and was `undiscovered' until the past century. These other ruins do not tell the narrative from the people of the street in these great and abandoned places. They have no granular, connected narrative like Jerusalem. Millions of people go out of their way to seek this remote Judean hill town of Jerusalem where millions lived and died and some believe it to be the essence of man's final rest. These are too numerous and multi-cultural to be coincidence or merely pursuit of myth. Like moths to the flame, humans are attracted to Jerusalem.Montefiore tries mightily to render a `biography' but it is just not possible to satisfy everyone or to be rendered without an historically informed position woven through the controversy of the cities biography. The essence of any author must come through in narrative this large. An 'unbiased' accounting of Jerusalem could not be constructed that made rational sense.This is a long story that pages by quickly for the historical reader. I read it in 5 days. It could easily be doubled in size exploring the leads in the excellent footnotes. Jerusalem is one of the most important historical books the year.

Outstanding - very detailed, so requires considerable re-reading to get all the nuances, but WOW... Just WOW!

If you are a learned scholar, able to analyse the past in all it's minute detail, then I suspect you are going to pull this book apart, whether from a social, cultural, religious or historical stand point. The detail is incredible. Whether the author's motivations for writing this were from a privileged family connection (as claimed by other commentators) is irrelevant because what he has done is given us ordinary people - of which I am one - access to the confusing, bewildering, tortured background to this city that has riven asunder the peoples of not just the region but the world. Whether you are Christian or Jew or Muslim, whether an Iraqi, Palestinian, Syrian, Roman, Turk, Egyptian, French, German, Brit or any other shape, size or hue of humanity, Jerusalem has pulled and continues to entice those in search of religious comfort and salvation. God in all his glory, whatever cloak he wears stands on its walls beckoning anyone and everyone to control the uncontrollable.This book enables one to place the present ebb and flow of mayhem and slaughter over Jerusalem into context and for that I am extremely grateful to the author. Whether ALL and every detail is true is really irrelevant. I am not interested in whether the Jesus, who was crucified on the cross, in a huff really did tip over the tables of the money lenders but the vision of this grumpy Messiah doing so did make me smile. What is fact is that the religions, tribes, sects and nationalities that all want a slice of Jerusalem will continue to be denied their wishes whilst one of them holds control. How it happened that the Jews finally have Israel and control of Jerusalem is simply part of the city's history. It's their turn but those denied control are grumpy, as they have been for millennia. This book enables one to wonder at why anyone could possibly think (the arrogance of ex British PM Tony Blair comes to mind here) that they could ever mediate all parties with an interest in the city to produce everlasting peace. But what comes out of its pages is the clear fact that man, in search of eternal salvation of his soul, will not hesitate to inflict immeasurable harm on others to achieve his aims. Stand in his way at your peril. This very readable book allowed me a much deeper understanding of the turmoil that is that part of the world and especially allows one to place the atrocities of the current unrest in Syria into context. Disgruntled parties have been lobbing stones at each other - and worse, much worse - for thousands of years, Jerusalem, bombed, bruised and besieged as the ultimate prize. And so it continues.I would have given it five stars but for one fact that I found the amount of detail in names utterly bewildering and in many places, impossible to follow. But this is a learned book, the author to be congratulated on such a monumental work.