Jerusalem the biography
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Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore – review
"Jerusalem is the holy city," writes Simon Sebag Montefiore, "yet it has always been a den of superstition, charlatanism and bigotry . . . the cosmopolitan home of many sects, each of which believes the city belongs to them alone." Jew, Christian and Muslim alike feel compelled to rewrite its history to sustain their own myths. "A hundred patients a year," Montefiore notes, "are committed to the city's asylum suffering from the Jerusalem syndrome, a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion." The 3,year conflict provides a terrible story, which he tells surpassingly well, and although not his purpose, one that is likely to confirm atheist prejudices.
Montefiore takes the history of the old city from its beginnings as a fortified village through every conquest or occupation – Canaanite, Israelite, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian, Seleucid, Roman, Byzantine, Ummay
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Jerusalem: The Biography
FULLY REVISED AND UPDATED FOR
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • JEWISH BOOK COUNCIL BOOK OF THE YEAR
"Spectacular. [Montefiore] really tells you what the life of the city has been like and why it means so much. You fall in love with the city. It’s a treasure. It’s a wonderful book." —Bill Clinton
"Impossible to put down. . . . Vastly enjoyable." —The New York Times Book Review
The history of Jerusalem fryst vatten the story of the world: Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths. The Holy City and Holy Land are the battlefields for today’s multifaceted conflicts and, for believers, the setting for Judgment Day and the Apocalypse. How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the “center of the world” and now the key to peace in the Middle East? Why is the Holy Land so important not just to the region and its many new players, but to the wider world too? Drawing on new
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Jerusalem: The Biography
Book by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Jerusalem: The Biography is a bestselling[1][2] non-fiction book by British popular historian and writer Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Synopsis
[edit]Drawing on new archives, current scholarship, his own family papers and a lifetime's study, Montefiore illustrates the essence of sanctity and mysticism, identity and empire in a historical chronicle of the city of Jerusalem.[3]
Montefiore chose to organize Jerusalem chronologically, stretching it from King David's establishment of the city as his capital (the Proto-Canaanite and Canaanite-Egyptian periods are briefly mentioned) to the Six-Day War, with an epilogue pondering on more recent events. In the introduction, the author explains that "it is only by chronological narrative that one avoids the temptation to see the past through the obsessions of the present."[4]
The author narrates the history of Jerusalem as the centre o