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 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 on Jerusalem, 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 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.