Jerusalem: The Biography

Simon Sebag Montefiore presents a chronological history of Jerusalem spanning more than 3,000 years, treating the city as a living subject shaped by kings, conquerors, prophets, and families. His central argument is that Jerusalem's story is inseparable from the story of the world: a city sacred to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt, and never more fiercely contested than today.

The book opens at the moment of destruction. In AD 70, the Roman general Titus besieged Jerusalem with 60,000 troops. Despite his reported wish to preserve the Temple, the great shrine was consumed by fire, and thousands were executed or enslaved. Montefiore uses this catastrophe as the framing event, arguing that the destruction paradoxically elevated Jerusalem's sanctity for all three Abrahamic religions: Jews mourned the lost Temple, Christians saw it as proof that God's favor had passed to them, and centuries later Islam inherited the conviction that divine blessing had shifted again.

Montefiore surveys Jerusalem's origins, noting habitation as early as 5000 BC, before focusing on King David's capture around 1000 BC. David seized the stronghold of Zion from the Jebusites, the city's pre-Israelite inhabitants, and made it his capital, bringing the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred chest symbolizing God's presence. David's son Solomon built the First Temple on Mount Moriah, housing the Holy of Holies, where the Ark rested beneath golden cherubim. Solomon's heavy taxation and idolatry split the kingdom after his death around 930 BC, and in 586 BC the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple, deporting the Jewish elite. This catastrophe, rather than annihilating Jewish identity, created the template of mourning and hope for return that defined Judaism.

The Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon in 539 BC and allowed the Jews to rebuild their Temple. The Second Temple was dedicated around 515 BC. When Antiochus IV, king of the Seleucid dynasty that ruled Syria after Alexander the Great's empire fractured, desecrated the Temple and banned Judaism in 167 BC, a priestly family led by Judah Maccabee revolted and recaptured the shrine, an event still celebrated as Hanukkah. The Maccabean dynasty ruled for a century until the Roman general Pompey stormed the Temple in 63 BC.

Herod the Great, of Idumean and Arab descent and Jewish by religion, won Roman backing and rebuilt the Temple on a colossal scale, creating the vast esplanade whose western retaining wall survives as Judaism's holiest site. Jesus of Nazareth was born during Herod's reign. His ministry centered on the imminent Kingdom of Heaven; he entered Jerusalem at Passover, clashed with the Temple authorities, and was crucified under the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate. His followers proclaimed his resurrection, and Paul of Tarsus, who opened the movement to gentiles, transformed it into a universal religion.

After the destruction of AD 70, a final revolt led by the Jewish rebel Simon bar Kochba in 132–135 AD was crushed, and Emperor Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as the pagan city Aelia Capitolina, banning Jews from the city. Emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity in 312 transformed Jerusalem: His mother Helena identified the sites of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built over them.

In 638, the Arab Caliph Omar conquered Jerusalem and invited Jews to return for the first time since Hadrian's ban. The Prophet Muhammad's Night Journey to the "Furthest Sanctuary," identified with the Temple Mount, had already established the site's Islamic sanctity. In 691–692, Caliph Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock, inscribed with early Koranic quotations. Al-Aqsa Mosque was built nearby, making the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary), Islam's third holiest site.

In 1099, Crusaders stormed Jerusalem and massacred thousands of Muslims and Jews. The Latin Kingdom lasted nearly two centuries before the Kurdish general Saladin destroyed the Crusader army at Hattin in 1187 and retook the city. After the Mamluk slave-soldier dynasty consolidated control, the Ottoman Turks took the city in 1517. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent rebuilt the walls that stand today and assigned Jews a prayer area along the Western Wall.

The nineteenth century brought European imperial competition to Jerusalem. British evangelicals promoted Jewish return, while philanthropists like Sir Moses Montefiore funded the first Jewish housing outside the Old City walls. By 1880, Jews formed a majority of the city's population. In 1896, Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State, galvanizing political Zionism, and Jewish immigration accelerated, alarming the Arab population.

During World War One, the Ottoman military ruler Jemal Pasha executed Arab nationalists, threatened to deport Jews, and presided over famine that devastated the city. In November 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued the Balfour Declaration, promising support for "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. General Allenby captured Jerusalem the following month. The British Mandate incorporated both Zionist aspirations and promises to protect Arab rights, creating unresolvable contradictions.

The British appointed Haj Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, empowering the most radical Arab leader, who ultimately allied with Nazi Germany. The 1936–1939 Arab Revolt was crushed, but the 1939 White Paper reversed support for Zionism, restricting Jewish immigration even as the Holocaust consumed 6 million European Jews. After the war, the Irgun, a Jewish underground militant organization, bombed the King David Hotel in 1946, killing 91 people. Britain referred the problem to the United Nations.

The UN voted to partition Palestine in November 1947, and civil war erupted. In May 1948, David Ben-Gurion, the Zionist leader, declared Israeli independence. Five Arab armies invaded. King Abdullah of Jordan's Arab Legion captured the Old City, but Israel held western Jerusalem. The war created 750,000 Palestinian refugees in what Palestinians call the Nakba, or Catastrophe. Over the following decade, 800,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries, most settling in Israel.

Jerusalem remained divided until June 1967, when Israel captured the Old City during the Six Day War. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan ruled that while Israel would hold sovereignty, the Islamic Waqf, the religious trust administering Muslim holy sites, would manage the Temple Mount, and Jews would be forbidden to pray there. Israel unified the city and began building Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem.

Subsequent decades brought mixed results. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's 1977 visit to Jerusalem led to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, but Jerusalem remained intractable. The 1993 Oslo Accords between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat deferred the question of Jerusalem, but Rabin's assassination in 1995 by a Jewish extremist, the failure of the Camp David summit in 2000, and the Second Intifada, a wave of suicide bombings and military operations, destroyed trust on both sides.

The final chapters trace the hardening of positions under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Abraham Accords normalizing relations between Israel and several Arab states, and Iran's growing threat through proxy militias. On 7 October 2023, Hamas, the Islamist movement governing Gaza, launched a surprise attack killing over 1,200 Israelis in atrocities named "Al-Aqsa Flood," explicitly invoking Jerusalem. Israel responded with a full-scale invasion of Gaza.

Montefiore closes with an epilogue freezing a single dawn in Jerusalem. A rabbi prays at the Western Wall, a Muslim custodian opens the Dome of the Rock, and a Christian custodian unlocks the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with a medieval key. The sun catches the Herodian stones and the golden Dome, but the Golden Gate remains sealed, awaiting the Last Days. Montefiore contends that both peoples have legitimate claims and nowhere else to go, and that despite decades of failure, a two-state solution with a shared Jerusalem remains the only viable path.