Dabbler and former Middle East journalist Toby Ash reviews historian Simon Sebag Montefiore’s latest book Jerusalem: The Biography.
I can remember falling under Jerusalem’s spell after my first visit there some 20 years ago. It was a last-minute trip during a university holiday that turned first into a fascination, then an academic pursuit and eventually a job as I returned to the city as a journalist.
Jerusalem has it all. It’s a one-stop-shop for anyone interested in history, politics and religion. Observant (and unobservant) Jews, Muslims and Christians navigating their way through the dimly-lit alleyways of the crumbling old city while Israeli soldiers watch atop the city’s walls. The noise and smells of the shops and eateries, seemingly unchanged for centuries. Groups of middle-aged European pilgrims carrying replica crosses up the via Dolorosa.
‘Hello Sir, do you need a guide? In the distance is the Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethesemane where, sir, you can see olive trees that were alive during the time of Jesus. Where are you from? Postcards? Oh yes, the Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven right there, yes that’s right, just above that big wall where the orthodox Jews are praying. Yes I know fur hats in the middle of summer, crazy! No, you can’t go there today. It has been closed since last week’s riots. I can take you to the spot Jesus was crucified though. It’s not far. Just watch out for the priests, they will try and rip you off…’
On a hot summer day it really is enough to drive you mad. And to madness many succumb. There is a mental health centre on the outskirts of the city that specialises in the treatment of visitors who go off the rails. Often these poor souls are picked up by the police wandering aimlessly around the city wrapped in their hotel bed sheets claiming they are the Messiah.
For a city that has been the centre of world attention for so long, I have always found the absence of a decent book about its history a little surprising. In the back of my head I have always thought that this would be a great project to get stuck into, but procrastination has always got the better of me. ‘Next year the book on Jerusalem’, as I would say.
But the void has been more than adequately filled by Simon Sebag Montefiore’s latest tome. The acclaimed Cambridge-educated biographer of Stalin and Potemkin chronicles the city’s past meticulously and beautifully. It really can’t be faulted. It’s all there in black and white. The blood, the gore, the slaughter, the carnage. Pages and pages and pages of it. Just change the names and religion but the story is much the same over the years. Battle, capture, carnage. Capture, carnage, battle. All in this little town on top of a rocky hill in the middle of nowhere.
Sebag Montefiore explains:
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 Muslims.
This is all fine if they could get along. But the fundamental problem has been that all three religions have sought exclusive possession of the city.
Even victory in this struggle for dominance and truth merely intensifies the city’s holiness for others. The greedier the possessor, the fiercer the competition, the more visceral the reaction.
The bare facts of Jerusalem’s past have been, and will continue to be, discarded. The city’s competing forces cling onto their own ‘historical’ truths leaving little common ground. The book quotes Palestinian historian Nazmi al-Jubeh, who sums it up nicely:
In Jerusalem, don’t ask me the history of facts. Take away the fiction and there’s nothing left.
Jerusalem has and continues to be largely a product of the imagination. Facts are selectively forgotten, distorted, embellished, simply made up or just confused. I remember standing in front of the Western Wall watching Friday evening prayers. Beside me a Jewish American father was making an emotional address to his family about their journey from the US and he asked them ‘to just imagine how great it must have been to be here as a Jew at the time of Jesus’. Not that great. Better under King David. But, like millions of others, this man had a confused but yet fixed version of the city’s past that had little connection to any historical evidence.
On finishing the book, it’s hard not to see the history of Jerusalem as anything but shameful. The city is more than anything else a symbol of humanity’s intolerance, greed and bigotry both past, present and, depressingly, in all likelihood the future as well. Sorry William Blake, let’s not bother building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. One is more than enough.
An awful place I hope I never have to visit.
seconded
T.E. Lawrence was pretty disparaging in Seven Pillars:
Jerusalem was a squalid town, which every Semitic religion had made holy. Christians and Mohammedans came there on pilgrimage to the shrines of its past, and some Jews looked to it for the political future of their race. These united forces of the past and the future were so strong that the city almost failed to have a present. Its people, with rare exceptions, were characterless as hotel servants, living on the crowd of visitors passing through. Ideals of Arab nationality were far from them, though familiarity with the differences of Christians at their moment of most poignant sentience had led the classes of Jerusalem to despise us all.
But Lawrence was still greatly stirred by the British army’s ceremonial entry into the city in 1917, describing this — and not Akaba or Damascus — as the “supreme moment” of his war.
Thanks for the quote Jonathan. Yes Sebag Montefiore mentions this in his book – On entering the city Lawrence bowed to the ‘mastering spirit of the place’.The myth of Jerusalem was alive and well amongst the British at this time. Lloyd George was elated at its capture from the Ottomans: ‘The most famous city in the world, after centuries of strife and vain struggle, has fallen into the hands of the British army, never to be restored to those who so successfully held it against the embattled hosts of Christendom. The name of every hill thrills with sacred memories’.
Having read and absorbed Young Stalin, Monifiore’s book is on the wish list, thanks for the review. He is nearly, but not quite, a Michael Burleigh.
Many years ago a television series, I think on BBC, made a not unreasonable fist of the holy land, someone, I think, called John Bonney fronted the show, whatever happened to it and him.
The nearest that I have ever come to the essence of the middle east was having members of Saddam’s Mukhabarat up my backside for twelve months while I attempted to turn his camel drivers into engineers, close enough for me, thanks but no thanks.
When I say nearly, will there ever again be a historian of Burleigh’s stature.
Malty, not looking for a free lifetimes supply from Captain B are we?
Er, hmm, yes.
I’ve yet to read this city-bio, if ever (love the genre though), but, on superficial browsing of book reviewers’ ashes alone, Simon Sebag never seems to have looked at his urban subject’s capaCITY[sic!] for serendipity (=”serencapidicity“?) Though I visited it just once many years ago, and have no wish to ever set foot anywhere in the Levant again—superior falafels are not enough of a reason—I have to admit to a certain fascination with its ongoing fate. Just as with New York City, a subject of far too many citygraphies to single one out[*], and the setting for countless films which keep its mirage alive, Jerusalem, too, manages to impose itself on our minds though the backdoor of endless press and tv-soundbites… that kind of place.
Now tell me, swear on your Momma’s grave, can any vacation experience ever truly match that?
[^*] save only for the deservedly-iconic “New York Spy.”