When the Bible was translated into Greek then Latin and English, it became the universal book and it made Jerusalem the universal city. Every great king became a David, every special people were the new Israelites and every noble civilization a new Jerusalem, the city that belongs to no one and exists for everyone in their imagination. And this is the city’s tragedy as well as her magic: every dreamer of Jerusalem, every visitor in all ages from Jesus’ Apostles to Saladin’s soldiers, from Victorian pilgrims to today’s tourists and journalists, arrives with a vision of the authentic Jerusalem and then is bitterly disappointed by what they find, an ever-changing city that has thrived and shrunk, been rebuilt and destroyed many times. But since this is Jerusalem, property of all, only their image is the right one; the tainted, synthetic reality must be changed; everyone has the right to impose their ‘Jerusalem’ on Jerusalem – and, with sword and fire, they often have.
Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century historian who is both participant and source for some of the events related in this book, noted that history is so ‘eagerly sought after. The men in the street aspire to know it. Kings and leaders vie for it.’ This is especially true for Jerusalem. It is impossible to write a history of this city without acknowledging that Jerusalem is also a theme, a fulcrum, a spine even, of world history. At a time when the power of internet mythology means that the hi-tech mouse and the curved sword can both be weapons in the same fundamentalist arsenal, the quest for historical facts is even more important now than it was for Ibn Khaldun.
A history of Jerusalem must be a study of the nature of holiness. The phrase ‘Holy City’ is constantly used to describe the reverence for her shrines, but what it really means is that Jerusalem has become the essential place on earth for communication between God and man.
We must also answer the question: of all the places in the world, why Jerusalem? The site was remote from the trade routes of the Mediterranean coast; it was short of water, baked in the summer sun, chilled by winter winds, its jagged rocks blistered and inhospitable. But the selection of Jerusalem as the Temple city was partly decisive and personal, partly organic and evolutionary: the sanctity became ever more intense because she had been holy for so long. Holiness requires not just spirituality and faith but also legitimacy and tradition. A radical prophet presenting a new vision must explain the centuries that have gone before and justify his own revelation in the accepted language and geography of holiness – the prophecies of earlier revelations and the sites already long revered. Nothing makes a place holier than the competition of another religion.
Many atheistic visitors are repelled by this holiness, seeing it as infectious superstition in a city suffering a pandemic of righteous bigotry. But that is to deny the profound human need for religion without which it is impossible to understand Jerusalem. Religions must explain the fragile joys and perpetual anxieties that mystify and frighten humanity: we need to sense a greater force than ourselves. We respect death and long to find meaning in it. As the meeting-place of God and man, Jerusalem is where these questions are settled at the Apocalypse – the End of Days, when there will be war, a battle between Christ and anti-Christ, when the Kaaba will come from Mecca to Jerusalem, when there will be judgement, resurrection of the dead and the reign of the Messiah and the Kingdom of Heaven, the New Jerusalem. All three Abrahamic religions believe in the Apocalypse, but the details vary by faith and sect. Secularists may regard all this as antique gobbledegook, but, on the contrary, such ideas are all too current. In this age of Jewish, Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, the Apocalypse is a dynamic force in the world’s febrile politics.
Death is our constant companion: pilgrims have long come to Jerusalem to die and be buried around the Temple Mount to be ready to rise again in the Apocalypse, and they continue to come. The city is surrounded by and founded upon cemeteries; the wizened body-parts of ancient saints are revered – the desiccated blackened right hand of Mary Magdalene is still displayed in the Greek Orthodox Superior’s Room in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Many shrines, even many private houses, are built around tombs. The darkness of this city of the dead stems not just from a sort of necrophilia, but also from necromancy: the dead here are almost alive, even as they await resurrection. The unending struggle for Jerusalem – massacres, mayhem, wars, terrorism, sieges and catastrophes – have made this place into a battlefield, in Aldous Huxley’s words the ‘slaughterhouse of the religions’, in Flaubert’s a ‘charnel-house’. Melville called the city a ‘skull’ besieged by ‘armies of the dead’; while Edward Said remembered that his father had hated Jerusalem because it ‘reminded him of death’.
This sanctuary of heaven and earth did not always evolve providentially. Religions begin with a spark revealed to one charismatic prophet – Moses, Jesus, Muhammad. Empires are founded, cities conquered, by the energy and luck of one warlord. The decisions of individuals, starting with King David, made Jerusalem into Jerusalem.
There was surely scant prospect that David’s little citadel, capital of a small kingdom, would become the world’s cynosure. Ironically it was Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of Jerusalem that created the template for holiness because that catastrophe led the Jews to record and acclaim the glories of Zion. Such cataclysms usually led to the vanishing of peoples. Yet the Jews’ exuberant survival, their obstinate devotion to their God and, above all, their recording of their version of history in the Bible laid the foundation for Jerusalem’s fame and sanctity. The Bible took the place of the Jewish state and the Temple and became, as Heinrich Heine put in, the ‘portable fatherland of the Jews, the portable Jerusalem’. No other city has its own book and no other book has so guided the destiny of a city.
The sanctity of the city grew out of the exceptionalism of the Jews as the Chosen People. Jerusalem became the Chosen City, Palestine the Chosen Land, and this exceptionalism was inherited and embraced by the Christians and the Muslims. The paramount sanctity of Jerusalem and of the land of Israel was reflected in the growing religious obsession with the restoration of 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. A single individual often had several loyalties to different identities, the human equivalent of Jerusalem’s layers of stone and dust.