Jerusalem. The Biography

the Jews to Israel and the Western enthusiasm for Zionism, its secular equivalent, between the sixteenth-century Reformation in Europe and the 1970s. Since then, the tragic narrative of the Palestinians, with Jerusalem as their lost Holy City, has altered the perception of Israel. Thus Western fixation, this sense of universal ownership, can work both ways – it is a mixed blessing or a double-edged sword. Today it is reflected in the scrutiny of Jerusalem and the Israel–Palestine conflict, more intense, more emotional than any other on earth.
    Yet nothing is quite as simple it seems. The history is often presented as a series of brutal changes and violent reversals but I want to show that Jerusalem was a city of continuity and co-existence, a hybrid metropolis of hybrid buildings and hybrid people who defy the narrow categorizations that belong in the separate religious legends and nationalist narratives of later times. That is why, wherever possible, I follow the history through families – the Davidians, Maccabees and Herodians, the Umayyads and the houses of Baldwin and Saladin, up to the Husseinis, Khalidis, Spaffords, Rothschilds and Montefiores – which reveal the organic patterns of life that defy the abrupt incidents and sectarian narratives of conventional history. There are not just two sides in Jerusalem but many interlinked, overlapping cultures and layered loyalties – a multi-faceted, mutating kaleidoscope of Arab Orthodox, Arab Muslims, Sephardic Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, Haredi Jews of legion courts, secular Jews, Armenian Orthodox, Georgians, Serbs, Russians, Copts, Protestants, Ethiopians, Latins and so on. Asingle individual often had several loyalties to different identities, the human equivalent of Jerusalem’s layers of stone and dust.
    In fact, the city’s relevance has ebbed and flowed, never still, always in a state of transformation, like a plant that changes shape, size, even colour, yet always remains rooted in the same place. The latest, glib manifestation – Jerusalem as media ‘Holy City sacred to three religions’ and twenty-four-hour-news show – is relatively recent. There have been centuries when Jerusalem seemed to lose religious and political importance. In many cases, it was political necessity, not divine revelation, that again stimulated and inspired religious devotion.
    Whenever Jerusalem has seemed most forgotten and irrelevant, it was often the bibliolatry, the devoted study of biblical truth by people in faraway lands – whether in Mecca, Moscow, Massachusetts – who projected their faith back on to Jerusalem. All cities are windows into foreign mindsets but this one is also a two-way mirror revealing her inner life while reflecting the world outside. Whether it was the epoch of total faith, righteous empire-building, evangelical revelation or secular nationalism, Jerusalem became its symbol, and its prize. But like the mirrors in a circus, the reflections are always distorted, often freakish.
    Jerusalem has a way of disappointing and tormenting both conquerors and visitors. The contrast between the real and heavenly cities is so excruciating that a hundred patients a year are committed to the city’s asylum, suffering from the Jerusalem Syndrome, a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion. But Jerusalem Syndrome is political too: Jerusalem defies sense, practical politics and strategy, existing in the realm of ravenous passions and invincible emotions, impermeable to reason.
    Even victory in this struggle for dominance and truth merely intensifies the city’s holiness for others. The greedier the possessor, the fiercer the competition, the more visceral the reaction. The law of unintended consequences reigns here.
    No other place evokes such a desire for exclusive possession. Yet this jealous zeal is ironic since most of Jerusalem’s shrines, and the stories that go with them, have been borrowed or stolen, belonging formerly to another religion. The city’s past is often imaginary. Virtually every stone once stood in the long-forgotten temple of another faith, the victory arch of another empire. Most, but not all, conquests have been accompanied by the instinct to expunge the taint of other faiths while commandeering their traditions, stories, sites. There has been much destruction, but more often the conquerors have not destroyed what came before but reused and added to it. The important sites such as the Temple Mount,the Citadel, the City of