HISTORY: Jerusalem: The BiographyBy Simon Sebag Montefiore, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 638pp. £25
IF THIS ISN’T a labour of love I don’t know what is. Simon Sebag Montefiore has included 23 pages of bibliographical references, seven pages of family trees, 11 pages of maps and 50 pages of notes in
Jerusalem: The Biography
. The clue lies, perhaps, in the fact that the book is dedicated to “my darling daughter, Lily Bathsheba”. Another clue is that the Montefiore family has long been associated with the city. The author’s great-great-uncle was Moses Montefiore, an altruistic Victorian Sephardic stockbroker who built houses in Jerusalem for Jews who might want to settle there.
The author’s maternal family, from Lithuania, bought tickets to New York, it is said, but were dropped off at Cork, though they fled later to England.
If the author's research suggests the book is a challenging read, be assured it is. It is packed with dates, names and battles, but Montefiore helps us along by tempting us with titles such as War and Sex in the City, Justinian and the Showgirl Empress, and The Scented Eunuch. These headlines are so eye-catching that a mean thought enters my head: has he been reading the magazine Hello!, which frequently features his sister-in-law, the "celebrity" Tara Palmer-Tomkinson?
Still only a village when Hammurabi, in Babylon, was formulating his famous laws, Jerusalem took on a personality of its own, which Montefiore defines in the very first paragraph of his book: “But it was scarcely a city, just a small mountain stronghold in a land that would have many names – Canaan, Judah, Judaea, Israel, Palestine, the Holy Land to Christians, the Promised Land to Jews.”
The word stronghold is the operative one: what shines through the book is the staying power of this awesome city.
The founding father of the Hebrews was Abraham, who settled in Hebron, now a flashpoint city in the West Bank, in an area then known as Canaan, which means the land “promised him by God”. From this, Montefiore suggests that nearby Jerusalem was already a Canaanite shrine. Abraham’s descendant Jacob, engaged in a wrestling match with a stranger who turned out to be God, thus earning himself the name Israel: he who strives with God. This was the first use of the name Israel. King David and the Israelites followed soon after.
Some 500 pages and many centuries later, following occupation by Romans, Byzantines, Franks and Ottoman Turks, after political upheavals, betrayals, ceremonies of celebration and of mourning, we have a link from historic to modern times with the blowing up of the King David Hotel, in 1946, by the militant Zionist group Irgun. Fast-forward 60 years and still nothing is solved: Jerusalem is a maimed and divided city through which the great, the good and the infamous have walked.
Terrible things were done in times of war and in the name of religion. Noses, ears and limbs were chopped off, infidels decapitated, sons and brothers betrayed. Crucifying was a job for skilled men, the nails fashioned afterwards in the shape of a cross to ward off evil.
In 685 AD the Prophet’s successor Abd al-Malik dreamed of an Islamic empire with his creation the golden Dome of the Rock its central point. Maintained by 300 black slaves assisted by 20 Jews and 10 Christians, it was a place of prayer for both religions. Later the crusaders came in their thousands, with pilgrims ousting Jews. Hostels sprang up to cater for the pilgrims, and they were provided with sheepskin coats and slippers to help them make their way to the latrines. Muslim traders were permitted to sell their goods but had to be gone by nightfall. Later, under the Ottomans, church bells were banned, with Christians allowed only to clack wood to announce their services.
Many writers have visited the city, including Gustave Flaubert, Alexander Kinglake, William Makepeace Thackeray, Nikolai Gogol and François Chateaubriand. Many visitors saw – and smelled – a putrid mess of beggars and buildings. Flaubert found Jerusalem “diabolically grand” while Thackeray reported “there’s not a spot at which you may look but where some violent deed has been done, some massacre, some visitors murdered, some idol worshipped with bloody rites”.
By the time of the mandate in 1920, when France and perfidious Britain carved up the region, the latter saw Jerusalem as an exotic place to be colonised. The author comments that the “British public schoolboys revelled in the . . . social etiquette required for dinner parties at Government House”. So too did the Muslim and Orthodox middle classes. Montefiore is highly educated, but at Harrow and Cambridge, which may be why he uses such archaic words as “monsteress” and “Jewess”.
Middle-class conviviality continued in 1930s Jerusalem, though not for long. The mufti of Jerusalem ingratiated himself with Hitler. Palestinians and Israelis became divided among themselves about how best to hold on to Jerusalem. “Jews and Arabs,” writes Montefiore, “dare not venture into each other’s neighbourhoods.”
This is not entirely true. Things have changed since 1984, when I first started to visit Israel and the West Bank. Attitudes have hardened. Palestinian homes have been destroyed, souks depopulated. Young Orthodox Jews stride confidently, if swiftly, through east Jerusalem, on their way to the Western Wall. The old city is under siege yet again, surrounded by a sea of blue-and-white Israeli flags blowing in the warm wind.
Montefiore’s book is a table laden with every imaginable dish. Dip into it for choice titbits or gorge on one chapter after another, but remember to take it all with a pinch of salt. Nothing is ever quite as it seems in this complex and tragic city.
Mary Russell is a writer and journalist. She has travelled in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank and has worked in and written about Hebron
