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Jerusalem: The Biography

by Simon Sebag-Montefiore

Other authors: See the other authors section.

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
2,161427,297 (3.95)66
Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths; it is the prize of empires, the site of Judgment Day and the battlefield of today's clash of civilizations. From King David to Barack Obama, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict, this is the epic history of three thousand years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism and coexistence. How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the "center of the world" and now the key to peace in the Middle East? In a gripping narrative, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals this ever-changing city in its many incarnations, bringing every epoch and character blazingly to life. Jerusalem's biography is told through the wars, love affairs and revelations of the men and women -- kings, empresses, prophets, poets, saints, conquerors and whores -- who created, destroyed, chronicled and believed in Jerusalem. As well as the many ordinary Jerusalemites who have left their mark on the city, its cast varies from Solomon, Saladin and Suleiman the Magnificent to Cleopatra, Caligula and Churchill; from Abraham to Jesus and Muhammad; from the ancient world of Jezebel, Nebuchadnezzar, Herod and Nero to the modern times of the Kaiser, Disraeli, Mark Twain, Lincoln, Rasputin, Lawrence of Arabia and Moshe Dayan. Drawing on new archives, current scholarship, his own family papers and a lifetime's study, Montefiore illuminates the essence of sanctity and mysticism, identity and empire in a unique chronicle of the city that many believe will be the setting for the Apocalypse. This is how Jerusalem became Jerusalem, and the only city that exists twice -- in heaven and on earth. - Publisher.… (more)
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» See also 66 mentions

Showing 1-5 of 37 (next | show all)
Though this is a very good book, I found I needed to take a break after about 200 pages. The accounts of horrific massacres and gruesome murders were getting to be just too much.

That said, this is a gripping, fast-moving survey of the history of a city everyone has heard of, for good or ill. The writing is also very good. The footnotes, though, are a mixed bag. Some are very long and not all seem strictly necessary. I did learn a few things from them, however!

A thoroughly worthwhile read then, if you can take it. Recommended. ( )
  Devatipan | Nov 1, 2023 |
Oh, Jerusalem. There is no other place on Earth quite as tragic, drenched in both blood and history.

And it makes for reading that cannot be put down.

Here's the short version of why you should read Simon Sebag Montefiore's history of Jerusalem: In just under seven hundred pages, Jerusalem: The Biography is a satisfying, narrative-based history one of the most contested pieces of real estate in world history, if not the most contested. In those relatively few pages, Montefiore manages to give at least the appearance of objective attention to each of the major religions that dominate the city's history, as well as to the many, many conquerors that pass through its gates over its thousands of years of history. With all the sordid intrigue of an Italian opera, Jerusalem: The Biography is painfully tragic, proceeding chronologically with the march of history as it demands to be read from the introduction to the last page. Not a tale of the daily, mundane, or pedestrian, it is a story of kings, rulers, and the powerful. The average Jerusalemite appears only as a pawn of history, to be butchered, starved, driven-out, or resettled.

As a Christian, it's hard to deny the allure of the holy city that was the setting for Jesus Christ's life. Indeed, even Christianity's god bemoaned the city, already ancient when he appeared, for its tragic past while alluding to the blood that would spill in its streets in coming years. And yet, as the reader turns through pages filled by debauchery, sieges, massacre, and horror, it is difficult to turn away from Montefiore's writing. Full of detail, Jerusalem is full of more detail than could possibly be necessary to know the history of the three-thousand-year old city,

To point to how varied and thorough the detail Montefiore brings to bear as he tells his story, New York Times reviewer Jonathan Rosen started randomly opening pages throughout the book:

"[O]n Page 4, Roman soldiers are crucifying 500 Jews a day in the run-up to the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70; on Page 75, Alexander Jannaeus, a much-loathed Jewish king of the first century B.C., after slaughtering 50,000 of his own people, celebrates his victory “by cavorting with his concubines at a feast while watching 800 rebels being crucified around the hills.” Crucifixion was so common in the ancient world, Montefiore notes in one of his many fascinating asides, that Jews and gentiles alike had taken to wearing nails from victims as charms, anticipating what became a Christian tradition. And when the population dwindled — as after the First Crusade, which like a neutron bomb eliminated the infidels but preserved the holy places — you could always dash across the Jordan, like Baldwin the crusader king in 1115, and bring back “poverty-stricken Syrian and Armenian Christians, whom he invited to settle in Jerusalem, ancestors of today’s Palestinian Christians.”"

Despite his penchant for detail, Montefiore never seems to lose control of his narrative. Where tedium might threaten, a danger when facing a constant march of dates, names, and places, Montefiore seems to imbue his story with a kind of epicness... It is a city that is larger than history, exerting a magnetism on the peoples and nations that seem unable to avoid its attraction. Like a black hole, it seems to distort the laws of history and the decisions of otherwise rational actors who come too close to its gravitational pull.

And yet, the city is by no means as romantic as each successive re-writer of history would imagine it. From the barbarity of the crusaders at the turn of the first millennium to the dung-heap on the Temple Mount Caliph Omar found when he took the city in the 600s, to the modern-day controversies (including Yassir Arafat's head-scratching claim that Jerusalem had never been the site of the Jewish Temple). Still, Montefiore takes pains to be fair to Jewish, Christian, and Islamic relationships to the city, all while correcting oft-repeated myths and politically charged rewrites of history.

In some senses, it can be hard to read Jerusalem: The Biography and see a god in all of this violence. And yet, it is not any god that has brought the seemingly unending death and war to the Holy Land, but the errant followers of the faiths that call Jerusalem home.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-evIyrrjTTY




( )
  publiusdb | Apr 4, 2023 |
While it took me a couple of months to work my way through this book, that is not a sign that it was at all boring or disengaging. Rather, the episodic structure of the book makes it a delight to dip into. Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in history or travel. ( )
  SuzieD | Jan 3, 2023 |
At times a slog and so much detail that little of the specifics will stick in my brain. I kept wanting to read just a history of the area in 500 year increments. An achievement nontheless, one I'm glad I finally read. ( )
  moekane | Nov 7, 2021 |
When I visited Jerusalem for the first time in several years a month ago, the tension ran thicker than ever. Alternate realities browbeat into parallel lines, to never intersect -- scenes of palpable tension, e.g. (this quotidian Shabbat one, for some reason, has congealed in my mind most of all as the prime example of this underlying feeling), a Hassidic man dashing past the Damascus Gate down a street of Arab shopkeepers late on Friday evening toward the Western Wall, sucking out all the energy of the candy counters and shawarma joints and tourist stores from the street, seemingly balancing on his gargantuan fur-trimmed hat the whole century-old conflict, the nexus of stone-faced glares from all around him.

I picked up this book in an attempt to disentangle that tension, to brush it off my back, to fathom the millenia-old narratives. And, in part, the book succeeded. As a survey of the whole history of the city -- a monumental task -- it did its job. First, I was riveted and stunned by information conveyed in some parts of the book. To think that Judaism pre-70 AD was a sacrificial, imperial cult whose focus was a singular material edifice that allegedly preserved the singular point of connection with the deity, a Judaism with practices so different from the ones I am familiar with today! So many tragic events (destruction of the Temple, Jesus' death) would come to embody, guide, and haunt the destinies of millions of people. And tails of persecution, conquest and redemption that seemed to mirror and outdo each other, century after century after century... Montefiore definitely helped me fathom these events and their influence on the coming centuries.

But the book, at times, was a slog. In the Crusades, in the Ottoman era, it pushed through history with a tail between its legs, almost as if, at those times, Jerusalem doesn't serve to have a "biography" written about it. Perhaps a different structure would've been more helpful. A focus on a dozen personalities, rather than a hundred; a closer glimpse at five critical eras, rather than a snaking bird's-eye view through all of recorded and non-recorded history. Perhaps a deeper thematic focus on the archeology, which seems like the only domain that can maintain its grip on the true record of what transpired on that parcel of land, layer after embedded layer.

The writing throughout was passable, fleetingly vivant, mostly very competent history. There was no sparkling analysis of personalities' most difficult or monumental decisions, no poignant recounting of large-scale events -- just the humdrum, dispassionate account of battles, transfers of power, and lots and lots of sieges. Overall I did enjoy this book, but I definitely feel like I will not remember many of its most prominent stories, simply because there were so many of them. ( )
  Gadi_Cohen | Sep 22, 2021 |
Showing 1-5 of 37 (next | show all)
This is not an account of daily life or humble devotions. It’s a little like learning about the American West by watching a John Wayne movie: everyone is a gunslinger or a sheriff, with nameless extras diving under the bar when trouble starts. Still, for a book that spans 3,000 years, it does a remarkably inclusive job.
added by LiteraryFiction | editNew York Times, Jonathan Rosen (pay site) (Oct 28, 2011)
 
Montefiore's narrative is remarkably objective when considering his own family's close links with Jewish Jerusalem. One might quibble with certain details, but overall it is a reliable and compelling account, with many interesting points.
 
Nonetheless, this is compendious and fleet-footed history of a city where the glorification of God has always been built on bloodied soil.
 

» Add other authors (18 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Simon Sebag-Montefioreprimary authorall editionscalculated
Bischoff, UlrikeTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Figueiredo, Maria JoséTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Götting, WaltraudTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Lee, JohnNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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To my darling daughter

Lily Bathsheba
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(Preface) The history of Jerusalem is the history of the world, but it is also the chronicle of an often penurious provincial town amid the Judean hills.
(Prologue) On the 8th of the Jewish month of Ab, in late July AD 70, Titus, the Roman Emperor Vespasian's son who was in command of the four-month siege of Jerusalem, ordered his entire army to prepare to storm the Temple at dawn.
When David captured the citadel of Zion, Jerusalem was already ancient.
(Epilogue) At 4 a.m., Shmuel Rabinowitz, rabbi of the Western Wall and the Holy Sites, wakes up to begin his daily ritual of prayer, reading the Torah.
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Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths; it is the prize of empires, the site of Judgment Day and the battlefield of today's clash of civilizations. From King David to Barack Obama, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict, this is the epic history of three thousand years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism and coexistence. How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the "center of the world" and now the key to peace in the Middle East? In a gripping narrative, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals this ever-changing city in its many incarnations, bringing every epoch and character blazingly to life. Jerusalem's biography is told through the wars, love affairs and revelations of the men and women -- kings, empresses, prophets, poets, saints, conquerors and whores -- who created, destroyed, chronicled and believed in Jerusalem. As well as the many ordinary Jerusalemites who have left their mark on the city, its cast varies from Solomon, Saladin and Suleiman the Magnificent to Cleopatra, Caligula and Churchill; from Abraham to Jesus and Muhammad; from the ancient world of Jezebel, Nebuchadnezzar, Herod and Nero to the modern times of the Kaiser, Disraeli, Mark Twain, Lincoln, Rasputin, Lawrence of Arabia and Moshe Dayan. Drawing on new archives, current scholarship, his own family papers and a lifetime's study, Montefiore illuminates the essence of sanctity and mysticism, identity and empire in a unique chronicle of the city that many believe will be the setting for the Apocalypse. This is how Jerusalem became Jerusalem, and the only city that exists twice -- in heaven and on earth. - Publisher.

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