(Reviewer: Gary Selikow, Vol. 67, No. 3, Chanukah 2012)
Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s acclaimed and bestselling history of Jerusalem is an intriguing read, full of interesting lesser known facts, personages and new angles. At times, it reads like a well-paced novel, and is as hard to put down. Certainly, it provides a timely, as well as carefully balanced, account of this extraordinary city’s long history, from the earliest times to the present day.
The prologue of this heavy volume begins with the destruction of the Second Temple and genocide of Jerusalem’s Jewish population by the Roman legions commanded by Titus. Thereafter, it moves back in time, with the first chapter commencing with the period of Jerusalem’s beginnings. The father of the Israelite nation, Abraham, is greeted by the priest-king of Salem Melchizedek, in the name of El-Elyon’, the Most High God. This is the city’s first mention in the Bible, suggesting Jerusalem was already a Canaanite shrine, ruled by priest-kings.
Next to be recounted is the capture of the town by King David of Israel, who made it his capital. The glorious reign of King Solomon was followed by the disastrous division of his kingdom into the realms of Judah and Israel and the later destruction of the two kingdoms -most catastrophically the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the exile of the Jews to Babylon. This was followed by the return of the Jews to their homeland at the behest of the Persian Emperor Cyrus.
An incorrect piece of terminology by the author when speaking of Israel in Biblical times is his referral to it as ‘Palestine’. In reality, that term derives from the name imposed by the conquering Roman Empire in the year 135 C.E. in an attempt to obliterate and de-legitimize the Jewish presence in the Holy Land. Before, it was known as Judea, which was the southern kingdom of ancient Israel. The Roman Procurator in charge of the JudeanIsrael territories was so angry at the Jews for revolting that he called for his historians and asked them who had been the worst enemies of the Jews in their past history. When told that these had been the Philistines, he accordingly declared that the Land of Israel would thenceforth be called ‘Philistia’ (further bastardized into ‘Palaistina’). From this emerged the name ‘Palestine’.
Following on the return from the Babylonian exile is the Hellenic period, the Maccabees and the coming of the Romans, together with the
An incorrect piece of terminology by the author when speaking of Israel in Biblical times is his referral to it as ‘Palestine’. In reality, that term derives from the name imposed by the conquering Roman Empire in the year 135 C.E. in an attempt to obliterate and de-legitimize the Jewish presence in the Holy Land. Before, it was known as Judea, which was the southern kingdom of ancient Israel. The Roman Procurator in charge of the JudeanIsrael territories was so angry at the Jews for revolting that he called for his historians and asked them who had been the worst enemies of the Jews in their past history. When told that these had been the Philistines, he accordingly declared that the Land of Israel would thenceforth be called ‘Philistia’ (further bastardized into ‘Palaistina’). From this emerged the name ‘Palestine’.
Following on the return from the Babylonian exile is the Hellenic period, the Maccabees and the coming of the Romans, together with the
tyranny and bloody intrigues of the Herodian dynasty. The author has a controversial and interesting view of Jesus and the origins in Israel of Christianity. This is followed by the Jewish Wars against Rome, the destruction by Titus of Jerusalem and exile of Jews from the city.
After the crushing of the Bar Kochba rebellion of 130 CE, Cassius Dio wrote of the Jews that “…very few survived. Fifty of their outposts and 985 villages were razed to the ground and many more [died] by starvation, disease and fire”. Roman Emperor Hadrian expunged the name
Jerusalem and renamed it Aelia Capitolina. Writes the author, “Seventy-five known Jewish settlements simply vanished. So many Jews were enslaved at the Hebron slave market that they fetched less than a horse. Hadrian not only enforced the ban on circumcision but banned the Jews from even approaching Aelia on pain of death. Jerusalem had vanished. Hadrian wiped Judea off the map…”
Interesting episodes in this digest include the brief return of Jerusalem to the Jews in 614 by Persian Emperor Shabaraz, known as the Royal Boar. Two years later, he expelled the Jews and restored Christian rule.
In the section of the book on Mohammed, it is interesting to note that in persecuting the Jews for refusing to adopt Islam, he then changed the direction of prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca. This has two very pertinent implications. By rejecting Jerusalem, Mohammed was ironically confirming Jerusalem’s Jewish essence, and one further cannot make the claim that Jerusalem is as central to Islam as it is to Judaism. This relates to a quibble this reviewer has with Montefiore regarding the book. Montefiore espouses the thesis that Jerusalem belongs equally to Jews, Christians and Muslims. However, it is self-evident in the history covered here that Mohammed rejected Jerusalem and made Mecca the main center of Islam.
Jerusalem was later conquered by invading Arabs and absorbed into their empire. In the section on the Mamluks, the next Muslim occupiers of the city, there is a discussion on the great Torah scholar Rabbi Moses ben Nachman (the Ramban), who believed that the Jews should not merely mourn Jerusalem, but return, settle and rebuild it before the coming of the Messiah. In other words, the Ramban was a pioneer of religious Zionism, and Zionism itself is a movement that has existed and developed since the Roman exile.
The reader can discover more in this volume about the Islamic persecution of Jews in Jerusalem and the Levant. It is simply a self-serving proIslamic myth that Jews were well treated under Muslim rule. In this period, Jews in Jerusalem were prohibited from wearing white on their Sabbath or Muslim headgear or to wear nails in their shoes. Christian lived under similar ordinances. Both had to make way for Muslims in the streets. Oppressive fees were enforced with cruel violence. Montefiore writes, “When a stray dog wondered onto the Temple Mount, the qadi ordered the killing of every canine in Jerusalem. As a special humiliation, every Jew and Christian had to deliver a dead dog to a collection point outside the Zion Gate. Gangs of children killed dogs and then gave their carcasses to the nearest infidel”. The Jews were extorted and robbed and many left the city for this reason.
Later, we read of how the Polish Ashkenazis were finally broken in 1720 through imprisonment, banishment and bankruptcy. The synagogue was burned down, and became known as the Ruin – the Hurva Synagogue. It remained a wreck for over a hundred years before being reconstructed in the 19th Century, but was destroyed once more by the Jordanians in 1967.
In the 19th Century, the plight of the Jews under Ottoman rule worsened. After a visit to Jerusalem, Karl Marx wrote in the New York Daily Tribune in April 1854, “None equals the misery and suffering of the Jews of Jerusalem, inhabiting the most filthy quarter, constant objects of Musulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins”. The British vice-consul James Finn reported that a Jew who walked past the gate leading to the Holy Sepulcher was beaten because it was illegal for a Jew to pass it. Another was stabbed by an Ottoman soldier and a Jewish funeral was attacked by Arabs.
The idea of Jews anywhere in the Middle East being a sovereign people in an independent state, not subjugated to Muslim rule and humiliated under Dhimni status, is what was intolerable to the Arabs. This is at the root of the violent Arab rejection of the state of Israel, and before that of the migration of Jews into the territory.
The first real challenge in centuries to Muslim dominance was posed by Napoleon Bonaparte, who in 1799 entered Palestine from Egypt, conquered Jaffa and laid siege to Acre. On 20 April, at Ramle, 25 miles from Jerusalem, he issued a call for the restoration of Jewish rule in their ancient homeland, the Jews being the rightful heirs.
There are interesting chapters on the nascent restoration of Zionism in the 19th Century, when there was already a considerable Jewish presence in the Land of Israel, and a Jewish majority in Jerusalem from 1860. Particularly compelling are the chapters on the British Mandate period, featuring the pogroms carried out by Arabs against Jerusalem’s Jews at the instigation of the Mufti Amin el Husseini in 1920 and 1929 and the Nazibacked 1936 Arab Revolt. In 1936 the mufti called the German consul in Jerusalem to pledge his support for Nazism and his desire to cooperate with that regime.
The closing chapters discuss Jerusalem during World War II, when the Jewish community of pre-State Israel was threatened with a Nazi invasion, given German advances in Egypt under Rommel and Nazi penetration of the Soviet Union into the Caucuses. This is followed by the ‘Dirty War’ by the British colonial forces and Jews of the Palestine Mandate, the War of Independence, the first twenty years of the restored State of Israel and finally the unification of Israel after the Six Day War.
The Epilogue discusses the conflict until today and the author’s views on it. Here, Montefiore saliently points out: “It is often forgotten that all the suburbs outside the Jerusalem walls were new settlements built between 1860 and 1948, by Arabs as well as Jews and Europeans. The Arab areas such as Sheik Jarrah are no older than the Jewish ones and no more or less legitimate”. Given this, it is difficult to understand why he should then oppose the growth of Jewish communities in East Jerusalem and Judea after 1967 on the grounds that they are an ‘obstacle to peace’. In the view of this writer, it cannot be illegitimate for Jews to build anywhere in the City of David or Judea. In some of his conclusions, the author seemingly aims to please everybody. However, he does pertinently point out the absurdity of the claims by the PLO, Palestinian Authority and Hamas et al that the Jewish Temple never existed in Jerusalem, something that is easily disproved by the architectural, archaeological and written historical record. The denial of the Jewish connection to Jerusalem and Israel should be regarded as being just as offensive to the Jewish people as denial of the Holocaust, and no less dangerous. The same is true of the wicked claim that the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland somehow constituted an act of ‘colonialism’.
Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore, Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, Illustrated.650 pp.
Gary Selikow is a researcher and media activist. His reviews of books of Jewish and Middle East interest appear regularly online and elsewhere.
