Jerusalem. The Biography

David, Mount Zion and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre do not present distinct layers of history but are more like palimpsests, works of embroidery in which the silk threads are so interwoven it is now impossible to separate them.
    The competition to possess the infectious holiness of others has led some shrines to become holy to all three of the religions successively then simultaneously; kings have decreed and men died for them – and yet they are now almost forgotten: Mount Zion has been the site of frenzied Jewish, Muslim and Christian reverence but now there are few Muslim or Jewish pilgrims, and it is mainly Christian again.
    In Jerusalem, the truth is often much less important than the myth. ‘In Jerusalem, don’t ask me the history of
facts
,’ says the eminent Palestinian historian Dr Nazmi al-Jubeh. ‘Take away the fiction and there’s nothing left.’ History is so pungently powerful here that it is repeatedly distorted: archaeology is itself a historical force and archaeologists have at times wielded as much power as soldiers, recruited to appropriate the past for the present. A discipline that aims to be objective and scientific can be used to rationalize religious-ethnic prejudice and justify imperial ambitions. Israelis, Palestinians and the evangelical imperialists of the nineteenth century have all been guilty of commandeering the same events and assigning them contradictory meanings and facts. So a history of Jerusalem has to be a history of both truth and legend. But there are facts and this book aims to tell them, however unpalatable to one side or the other.
    My aim here is to write the history of Jerusalem in its broadest sense for general readers, whether they are atheists or believers, Christians, Muslims or Jews, without a political agenda, even in today’s strife.
    I tell the story chronologically, through the lives of the men and women – soldiers and prophets, poets and kings, peasants and musicians – and the families who made Jerusalem. I think this is the best way to bring the city to life and to show how its complex and unexpected truths are the result of this history. It is only by chronological narrative that one avoids the temptation to see the past through the obsessions of the present. I have tried to avoid teleology – writing history as if every event were inevitable. Since each mutation is a reaction to the one that preceded it, chronology is the best way to make sense of this evolution, answer the question – why Jerusalem? – and show why people acted the way they did. I hope this is also the most entertaining way to tell it. Who am I to ruin a story that – to use a Hollywood cliché that is, in this case, merited – is the greatest ever told? Among thousands of books onJerusalem, there are very few narrative histories. Four epochs – David, Jesus, the Crusades and the Arab–Israeli conflict – are familiar, thanks to the Bible, movies, novels and the news, but they are still frequently misunderstood. As for the rest, I dearly wish to bring much forgotten history to new readers.
    This is a history of Jerusalem as the centre of world history, but it is not intended to be an encyclopaedia of every aspect of Jerusalem, nor a guidebook of every niche, capital and archway in every building. This is not a minute history of the Orthodox, Latins or Armenians, the Islamic Hanafi or Shafii schools of law, the Hasidic or the Karaite Jews, nor is it told from any specific point of view. The life of the Muslim city from Mamluks to the Mandate has been neglected. The Jerusalem Families have been studied by academics of the Palestinian experience, but scarcely covered by popular historians. Their histories have been and remain extremely important: some key sources are not yet available in English, but I have had them translated and I have interviewed the family members of all these clans in order to learn their stories. But they are only part of the mosaic. This is not a history of Judaism, Christianity or Islam, nor a study of the nature of God in Jerusalem: all these have been expertly done by others – most recently in Karen Armstrong’s excellent
Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths
. Nor is this a detailed history of the Israel–Palestine conflict: no subject today is so obsessively studied. But my daunting challenge is to cover all these things, I hope in proportion.
    My task is to pursue the facts, not to adjudicate between the mysteries of different religions. I