City of Peace—and War

Great cities generally have a reason for being where they are. New York, Athens, Alexandria and Shanghai are seaports, gateways to a continent. London, Paris, Vienna and Berlin straddle a navigable river. Montreal, Madrid and Beijing command strategic heights.

Alone among great cities, Jerusalem has no obvious purpose. It lacks access to a sea or waterway and surveys nothing grander than scrubby hills on one side and desert on the other. The ancient trade routes from Asia to Europe ran 150 miles north through Aleppo and south through Petra. In military terms the city is indefensible, easy to besiege. For want of water, it spouts rivers of blood.

Jerusalem: The Biography

By Simon Sebag Montefiore
Knopf, 650 pages, $35

Jerusalem, a gift from God to man, or vice versa, is founded on faith—a willing suspension of disbelief. Hebrew for "city of peace," Jerusalem has provoked 3,000 years of war. Though the city has only 800,000 inhabitants, it is in the news almost every week. A builder cannot move a brick without provoking international outrage. It is a city of hyper-sensitivities, a war zone of all the senses.

If you subscribe to the Richard Dawkins doctrine of rationalism, you cannot explain Jerusalem. Church bells tintinnabulate on Sunday mornings. Muezzins compete contrapuntally across valleys five times a day. At sundown on Friday, a Jewish siren sounds, and Sabbath silence descends, a momentary hush unlike any other.

"Many atheistic visitors are repelled by this holiness, seeing it as infectious superstition," remarks Simon Sebag Montefiore near the start of "Jerusalem: The Biography." "But that is to deny the profound human need for religion without which it is impossible to understand Jerusalem. Religions must explain the fragile joys and perpetual anxieties that mystify and frighten humanity. . . . As the meeting place of God and man, Jerusalem is where these questions are settled."

But for all the pathological hatreds, Jerusalem possesses a rare tranquility. The light at dawn and dusk is a peculiar hue. The sky turns yellow in a near-static khamsin wind, silvery in snow. The air—"translucent as wine," hymned one poet—quickens the heart. There are other bodily reactions: A scientist once assured me that the Jerusalem air restored his manly virility and saved his marriage.

There have been many histories of Jerusalem, from Jeremiah's sixth century B.C. monody to "For Jerusalem," a premature happy ending (written in the 1970s) by a successful mayor, Teddy Kollek. But Mr. Sebag Montefiore's book is the city's first "biography"—a panoptic narrative of its rulers and citizens, heroes and villains, harlots and saints. In 550 pages, Mr. Sebag Montefiore barely misses a trick or a character in taking us through the city's story with compelling, breathless tension. The lone drawback to his book's impressive scope is a lack of nuance in appreciating the filigree detail of Hebrew and Arabic.

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Michael DeFreitas/Robert Harding World Imagery/Corbis

The Western Wall and Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem's Old City. The Mount of Olives overlooks the site.

Like all life stories, this "biography" benefits from inside family knowledge. The author is a descendant of Sir Moses Montefiore, the 19th-century English philanthropist who built a new Jerusalem outside city walls. A financier who retired at 40 in 1824, after making a fortune with his Rothschild brother-in-law, Sir Moses became a devout Jew on his first sight of Jerusalem in 1855. He rent his garments and pledged a "national restoration of the Israelites," Mr. Sebag Montefiore writes, building a windmill and alms houses (they still stand) for the city's indigent Jews and negotiating an upgrade in their settlement rights with the Turkish sultan and the czar of Russia. After a fifth visit, in his 80s, Montefiore sired an illegitimate child "with a teenage maid" (anticipating, perhaps, my amorous scientist).

This book, though, opens with the city's deepest trauma: the destruction of the second temple in A.D. 70, which set off "a mourning for generations." The Temple sat on Mount Moriah, where the Patriarch Abraham was asked by God in the Book of Genesis to sacrifice his son, Isaac. David, king of Israel a millennium later, made it his capital and called the city a "vista of beauty, joy of the land." Seek the peace of Jerusalem, he sang, that her lovers may enjoy rest. His son, Solomon, built a temple to God in 964 B.C.; 370 years later, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon laid it waste.

A second temple rose in 538 B.C. and, after five centuries, was sacked by the Romans. Titus, son of the freshly minted emperor Vespasian, sacked the city, burning 6,000 women and children he found hiding in a treasury chamber. A million Jews were slaughtered across the land, the terrors chronicled with tabloid zeal by a turncoat historian, Flavius Josephus, whose eye for sensational detail is shared by Mr. Sebag Montefiore. During the siege of the city, our author tells us, rival Jewish gangs fought one another within the walls, "driving stakes up their victims' rectums to force them to reveal their stock of grain."

Jerusalem was left to the jackals. It lay fallow for three centuries before a Roman emperor embraced Christianity because, as Mr. Sebag Montefiore puts it, "he adored his mother, Helena." An early convert, Helena traveled to Jerusalem in the year 326 and, discovering what she said was the true cross, built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Her grandson, Julian the Apostate, proposed to rebuild the Jewish Temple. Jews prayed for it. Nothing happened.

In the sixth century, under the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, Christians massacred Jews. But Christianity, in Mr. Sebag Montefiore's tale, is little more than a sideshow in the Jerusalem story, an eyeblink in a foreground struggle between Arabs and Jews.

Muhammad, born 570, adopted the Jerusalem Temple as his first qibla, his direction of prayer—inspired by the Jewish Bible and the ambition to supplant Judaism. He turned away to Mecca when the Jews refused conversion. Two years after his death, his armies took Jerusalem and built two mosques on Temple Mount, Omar and Al-Aqsa. Islam teaches that the Dome of the Rock marks the spot where the Prophet eventually ascended to heaven.

The Crusades, launched by Pope Urban II in 1095, were the big attempt at a Christian comeback. They brought carnage to Temple Mount. "Wonderful sights were to be seen," noted one crusader. "Our men cut off the heads of their enemies, others shot them with arrows so that they fell from towers, others tortured them . . . Piles of heads, hands and feet were to be seen on the streets." As Christians battled Muslims, Jews were burned in synagogues, the heads of babies dashed upon walls, before the Crusaders marched in song to the Holy Sepulchre, where their schisms were cruelly exposed. Greek Orthodox priests who refused to reveal remnants of the True Cross were tortured to confession by a Norman bishop.

The Crusader kingdom was short-lived, and Jerusalem was firmly back in Muslim control by the end of the 13th century. Arabs ruled and Jews prayed forlornly for the messiah under Ottoman rule. Judah Halevi, the Spanish poet, sang: "My heart is in the east, while I am in the midst of west." A few Jews trickled back to die in God's land. Napoleon, aiming to cut British routes to India in 1799, landed at Acre and planned to arm the Jews in a bid to seize Jerusalem. He never got past the crossroads town of Ramla. In retreat to Egypt, he ordered 800 of his own plague-stricken French soldiers to be poisoned, in order not to suffer delay.

Moses Montefiore's epiphany, in the mid-1800s, was part of a general quickening of interest in the Jerusalem legend. Benjamin Disraeli, Gustave Flaubert, William Thackeray, Herman Melville and Mark Twain came in search of a story. Resident American consuls, one madder than the last, served tea on the Mount of Olives in preparation for the Second Coming. An American Colony was founded by a group calling themselves "the Overcomers"; they were accused of child kidnapping and threatened by one consul with a bullwhip. Among such frenzied revivalists, the tall, patrician Sir Moses seemed sane and reasonable in what Mr. Sebag Montefiore calls his "constant dream" to make Jerusalem "the seat of a Jewish empire."

Jewish renewal was sparked at last by a Viennese journalist, Theodor Herzl. Alarmed by Russian pogroms and the anti-Semitic Dreyfus trial in France, Herzl wrote a manifesto, "The Jewish State" (1895), and a novel, "The Old-New Land" (1900), before bearding the German Kaiser at the gates of Jerusalem. In 1917, the British, whose Gen. Edmund Allenby was poised to conquer Jerusalem, issued a declaration of support for a Jewish homeland. The rise of political Zionism coincided with resurgent Arab nationalism, an unreconciled collision that continues to occupy our front pages.

Cut in half by the Arab-Jewish war of 1948, rejoined together in 1967, Jerusalem today, as Mr. Sebag Montefiore points out, enjoys a religious tolerance without precedent in its history. Jews, under Arab and Christian rule, were forbidden to pray at the Western Wall of their long-mourned Temple. Christians, for more than a millennium of Muslim rule, were barred from tolling church bells.

Tense as the geopolitics can get, the peace of Jerusalem prevails on the ground—until, from time to time, Orthodox priests beat up Copts for precedence at the Holy Sepulchre, or Jews and Muslims create "a monotheistic traffic jam" in narrow alleyways when the high holy days coincide with the conclusion of Ramadan. "Jerusalem is a tinderbox that can ignite our region," warned King Abdullah II of Jordan; he should know. His namesake was murdered in 1951 by a Palestinian zealot in the doorway of Al-Aqsa.

The Hebrew poet who called Jerusalem air "translucent as wine," was Naomi Shemer, an Israeli secularist whose song "Jerusalem of Gold" first broadcast on May 15, 1967, prophesied the city's reunification three weeks later. It is now sung, bizarrely, at the solemnization of Jewish weddings.

The story of Jerusalem rolls on and on, creating more myths than clarity.

This magnificent, troubling biography presents Jerusalem to its fourth millennium in a vivid amalgam of love and darkness, denying neither one nor the other. Closing my eyes at the foot of a page, I can hear the silence, smell the myrrh.

—Mr. Lebrecht's "Why Mahler?" is out this month as a Vintage paperback. He lived in Jerusalem for five years.