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Jerusalem: The Biography Kindle Edition
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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 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.
In this masterful narrative, Simon Sebag Montefiore brings the holy city to life and draws on the latest scholarship, his own family history, and a lifetime of study to show that the story of Jerusalem is truly the story of the world.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateOctober 25, 2011
- File size106603 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Jewish Book Council Book of the Year
"Spectacular. [Montefiore] really tells you what the life of the city has been like and why it means so much. You fall in love with the city. It's a treasure. It's a wonderful book."
—Bill Clinton, #1 Holiday Book Pick on the Today show
"Magnificent. . . Montefiore barely misses a trick or a character in taking us through the city's story with compelling, breathless tension."
—Wall Street Journal
"Impossible to put down. . . . Vastly enjoyable."
—New York Times Book Review
"A powerful achievement. . . . At once a scholarly record and an exuberantly written popular tour de force."
—New York Review of Books
"Magisterial. . . . As a writer, Montefiore has an elegant turn of phrase and an unerring ear for the anecdote that will cut to the heart of a story. . . . A joy to read."
—The Economist
"Already a classic. Jerusalem is an extraordinary achievement, written with imagination and energy. . . . Simon Sebag Montefiore tells this modern story with clarity and admirable impartiality. . . . Read this book."
—Financial Times
"Montefiore’s towering biography of the city relates in fascinating, horrific and sometimes comical detail the wars to annexe its symbolic sanctity and the daily lives of its inhabitants. This monument of scholarly research is also a compelling story: of human foibles, lust, bravery and chicanery."
—The Times of London
"Densely textured. . . . Montefiore embraces Jerusalem’s paradoxes in his chronological account, which seeks to avoid hindsight and disclaims a political agenda. He succeeds admirably in remaining evenhanded, a particularly notable achievement."
—Los Angeles Times
"A memorable and distinguished history of a city where ‘the truth is much less important than the myth’. . . . Splendidly evoked."
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
"Magnificent. . . . A spectacular book for general readers. . . . This is a book about the ages, for the ages."
—Wichita Eagle
"Sweeping and absorbing. . . . Montefiore is a master of colorful and telling details and anecdotes. . . . His account is admirably dispassionate and balanced."
—Washington Post Book World
"In his stunningly comprehensive history, Simon Sebag Montefiore covers 3,000-plus years of the Earth’s most fiercely contested piece of geography. . . . Not only has Montefiore delivered a piece of superb scholarship, he has done so in an extremely easy-to-read style. The author tells the history of the complex relationships that existed between long-dead peoples in a manner that makes them seem human and understandable. . . . Meticulously researched."
—The Newark Star-Ledger
"Few historians have demonstrated the vision, mastery, and boldness necessary to publish on a subject so vast and in such detail as Montefiore. . . . A marvelous panorama."
—Library Journal
“This is an essential book for those who wish to understand a city that remains a nexus of world affairs. . . . Although his Jewish family has strong links to the city, Montefiore scrupulously sustains balance and objectivity. . . . Beautifully written, absorbing.”
—Booklist (starred)
“A panoramic narrative of Jerusalem, organized chronologically and delivered with magisterial flair. Spanning eras from King David to modern Israel with rich anecdotes and vivid detail, this exceptional volume portrays the personalities and worldviews of the dynasties and families that shaped the city throughout its 3,000-year history.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
“An essential text, bathed in blood, lit with faint hope. . . . The author sees Jerusalem not just as the setting for some of history’s most savage violence but a microcosm of our world. . . . The story is horribly complex, and Montefiore struggles mightily to make everything clear as well as compelling.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Four thousand years of history absolutely romped through—a masterwork.”
—The Evening Standard (UK)
“Immensely readable. . . . Montefiore is that rarest of things: a historian who writes great, weighty tomes that read like the best thrillers. . . . [He] has a visceral understanding of what makes history worth reading. [Montefiore] manages to bring people who have been dead for two millennia alive again and make them breathe, and he has insight into the mind of psychopathic tyrants that makes you wish he were working for the U.S. secretary of state.”
—Newsweek
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The history of Jerusalem is the history of the world, but it is also the chronicle of an often penurious provincial town amid the Judaean hills. Jerusalem was once regarded as the centre of the world and today that is more true than ever: the city is the focus of the struggle between the Abrahamic religions, the shrine for increasingly popular Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism, the strategic battlefield of clashing civilizations, the front line between atheism and faith, the cynosure of secular fascination, the object of giddy conspiracism and internet mythmaking, and the illuminated stage for the cameras of the world in the age of twenty-four-hour news. religious, political and media interest feed on each other to make Jerusalem more intensely scrutinized today than ever before.
Jerusalem is the Holy City, yet it has always been a den of superstition, charlatanism and bigotry; the desire and prize of empires, yet of no strategic value; the cosmopolitan home of many sects, each of which believes the city belongs to them alone; a city of many names—yet each tradition is so sectarian it excludes any other. This is a place of such delicacy that it is described in Jewish sacred literature in the feminine— always a sensual, living woman, always a beauty, but sometimes a shameless harlot, sometimes a wounded princess whose lovers have forsaken her. Jerusalem is the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions and she is the only city to exist twice—in heaven and on earth: the peerless grace of the terrestrial is as nothing to the glories of the celestial. The very fact that Jerusalem is both terrestrial and celestial means that the city can exist anywhere: new Jerusalems have been founded all over the world and everyone has their own vision of Jerusalem. Prophets and patriarchs, Abraham, David, Jesus and Muhammad are said to have trodden these stones. The Abrahamic religions were born there and the world will also end there on the Day of Judgement. Jerusalem, sacred to the Peoples of the Book, is the city of the Book: the Bible is, in many ways, Jerusalem’s own chronicle and its readers, from the Jews and early Christians via the Muslim conquerors and the Crusaders to today’s American evangelists, have repeatedly altered her history to fulfil biblical prophecy.
When the Bible was translated into Greek then Latin and English, it became the universal book and it made Jerusalem the universal city. Every great king became a David, every special people were the new Israelites and every noble civilization a new Jerusalem, the city that belongs to no one and exists for everyone in their imagination. And this is the city’s tragedy as well as her magic: every dreamer of Jerusalem, every visitor in all ages from Jesus’ Apostles to Saladin’s soldiers, from Victorian pilgrims to today’s tourists and journalists, arrives with a vision of the authentic Jerusalem and then is bitterly disappointed by what they find, an ever-changing city that has thrived and shrunk, been rebuilt and destroyed many times. But since this is Jerusalem, property of all, only their image is the right one; the tainted, synthetic reality must be changed; everyone has the right to impose their “Jerusalem” on Jerusalem—and, with sword and fire, they often have.
Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century historian who is both participant and source for some of the events related in this book, noted that history is so “eagerly sought after. The men in the street aspire to know it. Kings and leaders vie for it.” This is especially true for Jerusalem. It is impossible to write a history of this city without acknowledging that Jerusalem is also a theme, a fulcrum, a spine even, of world history. At a time when the power of Internet mythology means that the hi-tech mouse and the curved sword can both be weapons in the same fundamentalist arsenal, the quest for historical facts is even more important now than it was for Ibn Khaldun.
A history of Jerusalem must be a study of the nature of holiness. The phrase “Holy City” is constantly used to describe the reverence for her shrines, but what it really means is that Jerusalem has become the essential place on earth for communication between God and man.
We must also answer the question: Of all the places in the world, why Jerusalem? The site was remote from the trade routes of the Mediterranean coast; it was short of water, baked in the summer sun, chilled by winter winds, its jagged rocks blistered and inhospitable. But the selection of Jerusalem as the Temple city was partly decisive and personal, partly organic and evolutionary: the sanctity became ever more intense because she had been holy for so long. Holiness requires not just spirituality and faith but also legitimacy and tradition. A radical prophet presenting a new vision must explain the centuries that have gone before and justify his own revelation in the accepted language and geography of holiness—the prophecies of earlier revelations and the sites already long revered. Nothing makes a place holier than the competition of another religion.
Many atheistic visitors are repelled by this holiness, seeing it as infectious superstition in a city suffering a pandemic of righteous bigotry. 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: we need to sense a greater force than ourselves. We respect death and long to find meaning in it. As the meeting-place of God and man, Jerusalem is where these questions are settled at the Apocalypse—the End of Days, when there will be war, a battle between Christ and anti-Christ, when the Kaaba will come from Mecca to Jerusalem, when there will be judgment, resurrection of the dead and the reign of the Messiah and the Kingdom of Heaven, the New Jerusalem. All three Abrahamic religions believe in the Apocalypse, but the details vary by faith and sect. Secularists may regard all this as antique gobbledegook, but, on the contrary, such ideas are all too current. In this age of Jewish, Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, the Apocalypse is a dynamic force in the world’s febrile politics.
Death is our constant companion: pilgrims have long come to Jerusalem to die and be buried around the Temple Mount to be ready to rise again in the Apocalypse, and they continue to come. The city is surrounded by and founded upon cemeteries; the wizened body-parts of ancient saints are revered—the desiccated blackened right hand of Mary Magdalene is still displayed in the Greek Orthodox Superior’s Room in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Many shrines, even many private houses, are built around tombs. The darkness of this city of the dead stems not just from a sort of necrophilia, but also from necromancy: the dead here are almost alive, even as they await resurrection. The unending struggle for Jerusalem—massacres, mayhem, wars, terrorism, sieges and catastrophes—have made this place into a battlefield, in Aldous Huxley’s words the “slaughterhouse of the religions,” in Flaubert’s a “charnel-house.” Melville called the city a “skull” besieged by “armies of the dead”; while Edward Said remembered that his father had hated Jerusalem because it “reminded him of death.”
Product details
- ASIN : B004LROX8S
- Publisher : Vintage (October 25, 2011)
- Publication date : October 25, 2011
- Language : English
- File size : 106603 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 966 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #22,165 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #3 in Religious Studies - History
- #6 in History of Israel & Palestine
- #10 in General History of Religion
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Simon Sebag Montefiore is the internationally bestselling author of prize-winning history and novels. HIs books are now published in 48 languages.
His latest book is THE WORLD: A FAMILY HISTORY - a history of humanity, unlike any previous world history: it uses family, the one thing all humans have in common, to tell the story. It is genuinely global, spanning all eras and all continents, from the perspective of places as diverse as Haiti, Congo and Cambodia as well as Europe, China and America. From the stone age to the drone age, it features a cast of extraordinary span and diversity: as well as rulers and conquerors there are priests, prophets, charlatans, artists, scientists, doctors, tycoons, gangsters, rockstars, lovers, husbands, wives and children. All human drama is here - all the way to Putin and Zelensky. A dazzling achievement as spellbinding as fiction, The World is both a celebration and an indictment that takes the human story, in a single narrative by a master storyteller.
He is the author of a Russian Quartet on Russian potentates: THE ROMANOVS: the story of the Russian Empire 1613-1918; CATHERINE THE GREAT & POTEMKIN: Love, Power and the Russian Empire; YOUNG STALIN and STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR.
His wider history of the Middle East, JERUSALEM: THE BIOGRAPHY, chronicles the Holy City and the region, covering from pre-history to 2020, from King David to today.
He has curated two anthologies of speeches and letters - VOICES OF HISTORY: SPEECHES THAT CHANGED THE WORLD and WRITTEN IN HISTORY: LETTERS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD.
As a novelist, he is the author of the Moscow Trilogy: SASHENKA, ONE NIGHT IN WINTER and Red Sky at Noon.
Montefiore has written a series of childrens’ novels - ROYAL RABBITS OF LONDON - with Santa Montefiore.
Montefiore has won prizes for his works, both non-fiction and fiction. His novel, ONE NIGHT IN WINTER won the Best Political Novel of the Year Prize (UK) and was longlisted for the Orwell Prize. CATHERINE THE GREAT & POTEMKIN was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson, Duff Cooper, and Marsh Biography Prizes (UK). STALIN: THE COURT OF THE RED TSAR won the History Book of the Year Prize at the British Book Awards. YOUNG STALIN won the Costa Biography Award (UK), the LA Times Book Prize for Biography (USA), Le Grand Prix de la Biographie Politique (France) and the Kreisky Prize for Political Literature (Austria). JERUSALEM: THE BIOGRAPHY has now sold over a million cover internationally: it won the Wenjin Book of the Year Prize (awarded by the Library of China, People's Republic of China) and the Book of the Year Prize from the Jewish Book Council (USA). THE ROMANOVS won the Lupicaia del Terriccio Literature Prize (Italy), was chosen as one of Oprah Winfrey's Books of the Year (USA).
Many of his books are now being developed as TV drama series or movies.
Montefiore read history at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University where he was awarded his Doctorate of Philosophy. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Visiting Professor at the University of Buckingham, Dr Montefiore has written and presented fiver BBC TV series including Jerusalem (2011); Rome (2012) and Istanbul/Constantinople - 'Byzantium: a tale of 3 cities' (2013); Spain - 'Blood & Gold' (2015) and Vienna (2016).
Follow the author on twitter: @simonmontefiore. On Instagram: @simonsebag_montefiore
For more information: www.simonsebagmontefiore.com
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The characters and personalities are sketched magically by the author and their differing legacies are explored in detail.
It’s over all effect on the reader is powerful and lends deeper understanding and appreciation for the City and her complicated past.
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.
A rich and intriguing book, and packed with detail that makes for slow progress
I have read this book as part of a graduate course I am taking on the Biblical Lands. It is packed with information, almost too much so, in that it covers Jerusalem from its beginnings as a small Jebusite town of less than 15 acres and 1,200 inhabitants to the present as an urbane, divided, internally warring city of great economic and political contrasts. Jerusalem is presently controlled by the State of Israel and parts of it are nominally shared with the Palestinian Authority. It stands at the cross roads of vast political and economic conflict between Western powers and developing Islamic national, and pan-national resistance to that control. The one time cooperation of the Muslims to “go along to get along” has gone and now Jerusalem and neighboring Muslim nations are in a virtual state of war with the so called “Islamic State” which seeks to impose its political control across national boundaries and implement fundamentalist Islam, such as has not been seen in millennia. To implement this “Islamist” control the ISIS fighters have mounted a war of terrorism, imprisonment and decapitation which is made real to the world through media disseminated via the internet.
What is most striking to me is that Jerusalem is the holy site for three monotheistic religions and the essence of what Montefiore reports is the wholesale slaughter, plundering, and looting of the occupants of Jerusalem, and the political despotism that has controlled Jerusalem across the millennia. The political elite of Jerusalem have come from across the face of the earth and seemingly the prime motivation is not that of religious sanctity but economic and political gain. Montefiore reports that the sacred Jewish, Christian and Islamic holy sites in many instances are carried on in a carnival atmosphere focused on the core economic activity of Jerusalem, tourism.
Montefiore recites very carefully the history of those that have controlled and directed the destiny of Jerusalem. Always that control has been vested in one or another religious group of the three monotheistic religions. What I find ironic and of note is what Montefiore reports in Chapter 40, entitled “Arab City, Imperial City 1870-1880.” His opening sentence of the chapter, is telling: “The real Jerusalem was like a Tower of Babel in fancy dress….Ottoman officers wore embroidered jackets coupled with European uniforms; Ottoman Jews, Armenians and Arab Christians and Muslims sported frock-coats….” He continues on page 377 and comments that all of the religions, after the end of the Islamic Ramadan fast celebrated with a feast and fair mode outside of the city walls. “During the Jewish festival of Purim, Muslim and Christian Arabs dressed up in traditional Jewish costumes, and all three religions attended the Jewish Picnic held at the tomb of Simon the Just north of the Damascus Gate. Jews presented their Arab neighbors with matzah and invited them to the Passover Seder dinner, while the Arabs returned the favor by giving the Jews newly baked bread when the festival ended. Jewish mohels often circumcised Muslim children.” And on the chapter continues reciting the ways that Jews, Christians and Muslims cooperated in that 19th century period; all of which has now come crashing down.
Bottom line, this is a wonderful book that requires concentration and persistence. One is also helped by a love of history and a passing acquaintance with many of the issues and historical periods covered.
Top reviews from other countries
The book is visually very beautiful.
Reviewed in Spain on January 14, 2021
The book is visually very beautiful.
I like how the book appears to illuminate all sides of the Story, of which there are many on a topic like Jerusalem.
It is in classic chronological order without fuss or Gimmicks, and I am enjoying it very much.