Jerusalem: The Biography. By Simon Sebag Montefiore. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 638 pages; £25. To be published in America by Knopf in October; $35. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World. By James Carroll. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 418 pages; $28. Buy from Amazon.com

And there Jerusalem's pillars stood

Correction to this article

IT TAKES almost 100 pages for Simon Sebag Montefiore's magisterial biography of Jerusalem to come to Jesus Christ. By that time the city had been fought over by Babylonians, Israelites, Jews, Philistines, Jebusites, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Macedonians, Maccabees, Romans and Herod and his descendants. Jerusalem was, as Mr Montefiore says, a veritable “tower of Babel in fancy dress”.

The prize of empire-builders through the ages, Jerusalem had been dashed time and time again to the ground, only to rise up anew—physically, politically, even spiritually. At the time of Christ's birth it was already the shrine of one faith and about to become that of a second; half a millennium later the Muslims would claim it as the shrine of a third. It is the site of the Judgment Day. Unlike anywhere else it exists in two places at once; on earth and in heaven. No other city, not even Athens in ancient times, has been fought over so much as Jerusalem.

Mr Montefiore is related to Sir Moses Montefiore, an Italian-born British Jew (described by Lord Shaftesbury as “that grand old Hebrew”) who was knighted by Queen Victoria and became the first European to be allowed by the Ottomans to visit the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in 1855. Known for his early work on Josef Stalin and Catherine the Great, Mr Montefiore, now 45, has, nonetheless, been preparing all his life to write this particular book. And he has given much thought to how it should be approached.

The story of Jerusalem is told chronologically through the lives of the men and women—prophets, poets, peasants and soldiers, kings and conquerors—who shaped it. Among the thousands of books on Jerusalem very few are narrative histories, and this straightforward approach works well. Mr Montefiore steers a clear path through the religious animosities and political intrigues that continue to this day, adopting a strikingly apolitical tone.

He adds richness by including sources not usually available in English. One example is the diary of Wasif Jawhariyyeh, an Orthodox Christian who studied the Koran. Born at the tail end of the 19th century and steeped in the cosmopolitanism of Jerusalem, Jawhariyyeh displayed an early gift for the lute or oud, which, in a city that loved music, gave him access to everyone high and low. His lyrical account of Jerusalem life over 40 years is astonishingly still only available in Arabic, but the author had it translated and makes good use of Jawhariyyeh's material.

As a writer, Mr Montefiore has an elegant turn of phrase and an unerring ear for the anecdote that will cut to the heart of a story. When Queen Victoria's son, the 20-year-old Prince of Wales and future King Edward VII, rode into Jerusalem in 1862, escorted by 100 Ottoman cavalrymen, the plump princeling could think of little else but getting a Crusader tattoo on his arm; when Hussein, the Sherif of Sherifs, became Emir of Mecca in 1908, his telephone number was Mecca 1. It is this kind of detail that makes “Jerusalem” a particular joy to read.

Mr Montefiore's chronicle stops in 1967, when the Six-Day War saw Jerusalem come under Israeli rule, a cut-off date that allows him neatly to sidestep the consuming quarrel of our age. James Carroll, by contrast, has no such qualms. His history also begins in ancient times and he goes on to analyse the importance of the Crusades. However, his modern focus is on the tension between Christian Jerusalem, Jewish Jerusalem and Islamic Jerusalem, between Israeli Jerusalem and Palestinian Jerusalem, and how the bible-based myth of Jerusalem shaped new-world thinking, from Governor Winthrop to Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Reagan.

“Jerusalem fever”, inextricably tied to Christian fervour is, he says, the “deadly, unnamed third party to the Israeli-Palestinian wars.” Some readers will balk at the leaps Mr Carroll takes to link American religiosity to Islamic terrorism and the inevitability of nuclear war, but he explains why some Americans support Israel so fiercely. The full restoration of Eretz Israel, the biblical land, with Jerusalem at its centre, will, according to the Book of Revelations, hasten the return of the Messiah. Mr Carroll's book is a far more frightening work than Mr Montefiore's, but they are well worth reading together.





Correction: The original version of this article suggested that Jerusalem was divided in 1967. That was actually the year it came wholly under Israeli rule. Sorry. This was corrected on March 22nd 2011.