This is not an account of daily life or humble devotions. It’s a little like learning about the American West by watching a John Wayne movie: everyone is a gunslinger or a sheriff, with nameless extras diving under the bar when trouble starts. Still, for a book that spans 3,000 years, it does a remarkably inclusive job.

Montefiore has chosen to organize “Jerusalem” chronologically, and it stretches from King David’s establishment of the city as his capital to the 1967 war, with an epilogue meditating on more recent events. 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.” This turns out to be a hard standard to maintain, even for a historian like Montefiore. Describing King Solomon’s dedication of the Temple, he notes: “At that moment, the concept of sanctity in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic world found its eternal home,” as if the three religions evolved simultaneously. Writing about the Jewish king Josiah, he notes that “his optimistic, revelatory reign was more influential than any other between David and Jesus,” suggesting that Jesus was a reigning king. Similarly, he uses “Old Testament” where “Hebrew Bible” is needed. This is not a mere style choice in a book about Jerusalem — the Hebrew Bible ends with II Chronicles and the exhortation to rebuild the Temple; the Old Testament — whose order was determined by Christians — ends with Malachi, whose closing words are seen as a prophetic adumbration of Christ.

These awkward locutions do not seem in the slightest religiously motivated; on the contrary, they appear to be part of this book’s desire to be all things to all people, as when Montefiore writes of Jerusalem: “The Abrahamic religions were born there.” This is certainly a stretch for Islam, born in the Hejaz, even if Mohammed originally determined that Jerusalem would be the qibla, the direction of prayer — until the Jewish tribes of Medina refused to accept his prophetic authority and he switched it to Mecca. As for Christianity, it developed on the far side of the Temple’s destruction and the Roman determination to wipe Jews and Judea off the map once and for all, which included renaming the region Palestina, after the extinct enemies of the Jews. The fallen Temple became for Christians the emblem of Judaism’s displacement by a later dispensation. It is the awkward Oedipal relationship Islam and Christianity have to Judaism, the parent that just won’t die, that makes Jerusalem a sort of Old Testament set in stone.

“Solomon, I have surpassed thee,” Justinian declared when he dedicated Hagia Sophia in 537. When Caliph Omar, who wrested Jerusalem from the Christians in 636, visited the Temple Mount, he found what one observer called “a dung heap which the Christians had put there to offend the Jews.” Omar built his mosque there precisely because of its Jewish significance, but Omar II, around 720, banned Jewish worship on the Temple Mount — a ban that stood for the duration of Islamic rule and found its absurdist fulfillment during the waning days of the Clinton presidency, when, as Montefiore reminds us, Yasir Arafat “shocked the Americans and the Israelis when he insisted that Jerusalem had never been the site of the Jewish Temple.” He also forbade Palestinian historians to mention the fact.

Montefiore’s work is a corrective to such willful erasures, just as it ably demonstrates the deep Islamic devotion to the city, as well as the Christian connection, older still. He explains that “the sanctity of the city grew out of the exceptionalism of the Jews as the Chosen People. Jerusalem became the Chosen City, Palestine the Chosen Land, and this exceptionalism was inherited and embraced by the Christians and the Muslims.” There is, unfortunately, a contradiction at the heart of this hopeful passage. The word “inherited” elides a world of woe and religious rupture, as does the transfer of “exceptionalism” from the Jews to their city.