Jerusalem. The Biography

certainly do not claim the right to judge whether the divine wonders and sacred texts of the three great religions are ‘true’. Anyone who studies the Bible or Jerusalem has to recognize that there are many levels of truth. The beliefs of other religions and other epochs seem strange to us, while the familiar customs of our own time and place always appear eminently reasonable. Even the twenty-first century, which many seem to regard as the very acme of secular reason and common sense, has its own conventional wisdoms and quasi-religious orthodoxies that will appear incomprehensibly absurd to our great-grandchildren. But the effect of the religions and their miracles on the history of Jerusalem is undeniably real, and it is impossible to know Jerusalem without some respect for religion.
    There are centuries of Jerusalem’s history when little is known and everything is controversial. Being Jerusalem, the academic and archaeological debates are always venomous and sometimes violent, even leading to riots and fighting. Events in the last half-century are so controversial that there are many versions of them.
    In the early period, historians, archaeologists and cranks alike have squeezed, moulded and manhandled the very few sources available to fit every possible theory which they have then advocated with all the confidence of absolute certainty. In all cases, I have reviewed the original sources and the many theories and come to a conclusion. If I covered myself comprehensively in every case, the most common words in this book would be ‘maybe’, ‘probably’, ‘might’ and ‘could’. I have therefore not included them on every appropriate occasion but I ask the reader to understand that behind every sentence is a colossal, ever-changing literature. Each section has been checked and read by an academic specialist. I am fortunate that I have been helped in this by some of the most distinguished professors at work today.
    The most fraught of these controversies is that of King David, because its political implications are so charged and so contemporary. Even at its most scientific, this debate has been conducted more dramatically and with greater harshness than one would find in any other place on any other subject, except perhaps the natures of Christ or Muhammad. The source for the story of David is the Bible. His historical life was long taken for granted. In the nineteenth century, the imperialistic-Christian interest in the Holy Land inspired the archaeological quest for David’s Jerusalem. The Christian nature of this investigation was redirected by the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 which gave it passionate religious-political significance because of David’s status as the founder of Jewish Jerusalem. In the absence of much evidence of the tenth century, revisionist Israeli historians downsized David’s city. Some even questioned whether he was a historical character at all, much to the outrage of Jewish traditionalists and to the glee of Palestinian politicians, because it undermined the Jewish claim. But the discovery of the Tel Dan stele in 1993 proved that King David did exist. The Bible, though not written primarily as history, is nonetheless a historical source which I have used to tell the story. The extent of David’s city and the trustworthiness of the Bible are discussed in the text and for the present conflict over the City of David, see the Epilogue.
    Much later, it is impossible to write about the nineteenth century without feeling the shadow of Edward Said’s
Orientalism
. Said, a Palestinian Christian born in Jerusalem who became a literary professor at Columbia University in New York and an original political voice in the world of Palestinian nationalism, argued that the ‘subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture’, particularly among nineteenth-century travellers such as Chateaubriand, Melville and Twain, had diminished Arab culture and justified imperialism.However, Said’s own work inspired some of his acolytes to try to airbrush these Western intruders out of the history: this is absurd. It is true, however, that these visitors saw and understood little of the real life of Arab and Jewish Jerusalem and, as explained above, I have worked hard to show the actual lives of the indigenous population. But this book is not a polemic and the historian of Jerusalem must show the dominating influence of Western