This is actually my cousin’s book but I borrowed it during his housewarming party last month. Yes, I am the person who takes things away during a housewarming (but with every intention of bringing it back!).

Jerusalem is a sweeping biography of the city, starting from the reign of King David and ending in the present day. As you can imagine, covering about three millennia (give or take a few centuries) of history in about 550 pages is no mean feat, but Montefiore has managed to do an admirably impartial job. You could probably expand this book into a couple hundred volumes but as an introduction to Jerusalem, this does the job very well.

The book is divided into nine sections:

1. Judaism
2. Paganism
3. Christianity
4. Islam
5. Crusade
6. Mamluk
7. Ottoman
8. Empire
9. Zionism

Each section represents the dominant power in Jerusalem at that time. While I am familiar with the information in the Judaism section, since the Bible as historical document was used as a reference, I learnt a lot about what happened to the city during the times of the Roman empire (before the rise of Christianity) and what happened after. I won’t do a detailed summary, but basically the history of Jerusalem can be summarised as: many wars happened. It’s not just during the crusades (which the book shows are not as one-sided as we may think) but in the years before and after. It’s sad that these fights are still continuing – I couldn’t help but think that if the two-state solution was accepted by the Arabs during the formation of Israel, the situation might not be so bad right now. Instead, it seems like both sides are now opposed to compromise, which means that the conflict is doomed to continue (at least, that’s how it looks like to someone all the way in Asia, I’m sorry if I am reading things wrongly).

The prose is lyrical and sweeping. This generally works to rush you along the centuries and give you a birds-eye view of all that is happening, but this sometimes comes at the expense of needed detail. For example, during the period of Herod and Mariamme, the book tells us that Herod had plans to put Mariamme to death if he should die. The book also tells us that when Mariamme revealed to Herod that she knew of his plans, he had her guardian, his uncle, put to death. What the book did not tell us was why – I had to read Wikipedia to find out that this was because that Herod thought that the only way Mariamme would have found out his plans was if she was intimate/had betrayed him with his uncle.

Incidentally, I’d love to learn more about Mariamme and the other queens of Jerusalem. Any recommendations?

And while I think that the book is generally objective towards Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, I do disagree with a few of the book’s interpretations. For example, the book says that Jesus “did not call himself the Messiah” – something that I disagree with based on versus such as Matthew 16:16-17 and John 4:25-26. Such disagreements are few, especially compared to all the information in the book, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Overall, I found this book to be hugely educational. There’s three thousand year’s worth of history in this book and it’s definitely something that needs to be slowly read and digested. It’s not a light read, but it’s definitely accessible to a general reader (like me).

Featured Image: Photo from Canva