Jerusalem

Starred review from August 22, 2011
Popular historian Montefiore (Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar) presents a panoramic narrative of Jerusalem, organized chronologically and delivered with magisterial flair. Spanning eras from King David to modern Israel with rich anecdotes and vivid detail, this exceptional volume portrays the personalities and worldviews of the dynasties and families that shaped the city throughout its 3,000-year history. Montefiore explains how religious and political influences created the city’s character, while fostering its stature as a center of the Western religious world. He effectively demonstrates how political necessity stimulated and inspired religious devotion and how the portrayal of Jerusalem as a holy city sacred to three religions is relatively recent. Chapters are organized by epochs: Judaism, paganism, Christianity, Islam, Crusade, Mamluk, empire, and Zionism, with the body of the book ending with the Six-Day War. A balanced epilogue considers Jerusalem in the context of recent events. Drawing upon archival materials, archeological findings, recent scholarship, and his own family’s papers (he is descended from the 19th-century Jewish leader Moses Montefiore), Montefiore delivers Jerusalem’s unfolding story as epic panorama and nuanced documentary history, suitable for general and scholarly audiences. Photos and maps.

Starred review from September 15, 2011

The sanguinary story of thousands of years of conflict in the home city of religions.

Perhaps it's impossible to write disinterested history, but Montefiore (Young Stalin, 2007, etc.) endeavors to do so—and largely succeeds. The author sees Jerusalem not just as the setting for some of history's most savage violence—some of the butchery makes Titus Andronicus look like a Sesame Street segment—but a microcosm of our world. Our inability to achieve sustained peace there is emblematic of our failures around the globe. Montefiore begins in 70 CE with the assault of the Roman leader Titus (not Andronicus) on Jerusalem, an attack featuring thousands of crucifixions of Jews—not to mention eviscerations to extract from the bowels of the victims the valuables they'd swallowed. The author then retreats to the age of the biblical David, and away we go, sprinting through millennia, pausing only for necessary explanations of politics, religion, warfare and various intrigues. The story is horribly complex, and Montefiore struggles mightily to make everything clear as well as compelling, but the vast forest of names, places, events sometimes thoroughly conceals some small treasure at its heart. Still, the history is here: Nebuchadnezzar, the Herods, Alexander the Great, Jesus, Pilate, Caligula, Paul, Titus, Justinian, the Arabs and the Muslims, the Crusades, Richard the Lionheart, Saladin, Suleiman, Ottomans, Napoleon, Disraeli, Lawrence of Arabia, Zionism. There are even some guest appearances by Thackeray, Twain and Melville. Suddenly, we are in the 20th century, and only the names and the killing technology have changed. The author ends with the 1967 Six-Day War and with some speculations about the future.

An essential text, bathed in blood, lit with faint hope.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 1, 2011

There at the creation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Jerusalem--now more than ever--is central to the history of the world. Montefiore tell the city's story by recounting the lives of individuals who have shaped it--a smart approach from someone whose Young Stalin won a passel of biography awards (e.g., Los Angeles Times Book Prize). Montefiore ranges from King David, Jesus, and Muhammad, to Cleopatra and King Hussein, to Sir Moses Montefiore, his ancestor, who in the 1860s helped found the first new Jewish settlements in Palestine, just outside Jerusalem's city wall. An important topic, and Montefiore is a felicitous writer. With a four-city tour; a 60,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2011
If, as some have maintained, the word Jerusalem means city of peace, it is a grand historical irony. For, as this beautifully written, absorbing, but often grim account shows, there are few stones of the city that have not been stained with the blood of its inhabitants during the past 3,000 years. Acclaimed historian and biographer Montefiore views Jerusalem as a living, breathing organism bearing the genetic imprint of many conquerors, including Jews, Greeks, Arabs, crusading Franks, Turks, and the British. Although his Jewish family has strong links to the city, Montefiore scrupulously sustains balance and objectivity in the book's chronological presentation of the development of the city from the prebiblical time of the Jebusites to the present. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, Jerusalem truly is a holy city, yet that status has been tragically used to justify bigotry, fanaticism, and appalling massacres, some of which Montefiore describes in horrifying detail. While sometimes painful to read, this is an essential book for those who wish to understand a city that remains a nexus of world affairs.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)