A Fascinating Biography of Jerusalem Tracing Its Evolution into a Global City

Jerusalem: History of a Global City, by Vincent Lemire, Katell Berthelot, Julien Loiseau, and Yann Potin. Translated by Juliana Froggatt. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022.

How do you write a biography of Jerusalem, a city of paradoxes with an overarching mythical dimension that cannot be reduced to its local history? Four French historians strive to do so in this recent biography of the city, Jerusalem: History of a Global City. In the opening paragraph of chapter 1, the authors identify the paradox of Jerusalem: At once a town with no major strategic importance, lacking desirable natural resources, it has become the nerve center of a regional conflict with global repercussions. Today, the city’s very name, uttered by millions in their weekly liturgical assemblies, symbolizes a universal eschatological hope.1

In the introduction, the authors describe that their aim is to write “a ground-level history, respectful of ambivalences and ambiguities, closer to the fractures of time and the spirits of places.”2 They explain that they will use as their “solid bases” both history and geography “to construct a history at once contextualized and situated, diachronic and geographic,” one of “intense interaction among [foundational monotheistic] traditions, giving rise to a large number of exchanges and transfers.”3 As for the sources, the authors use recent archaeological findings with relevance to Jerusalem in neighboring countries such as Egypt, new Ottoman municipal records made available to them, and contemporaneous accounts from diverse actors.

The authors begin their history of Jerusalem with a consideration of its geography, surrounded by three valleys and in close proximity to Gihon Spring (also known as St. Mary’s Pool or ‘Ayn Umm al-Daraj in Arabic), which permitted farming during the Bronze Age. They draw on local and regional excavations, providing evidence that either corroborates or outright refutes various biblical narratives.

Chapter 1, the longest in the book, covers roughly 4,200 years. (The 22-page chronology at the end of the book is especially helpful in giving the reader a handle on the succession of rulers.) This chapter covers the Bronze Age, the period of Egyptian control, the Canaanite city, the City of David, and the extension to the Temple Mount. As with most historical accounts of antiquity, the authors highlight Jerusalem’s periods of wars, destruction, and reconstruction throughout this extensive span of time; they argue that the Temple of Jerusalem had “a fundamental role, at once social, political, and religious” and with its destruction and reconstruction during the sixth century BCE, “conferred on the city, little by little, its specificity and its greatness.”4

By the eighth or seventh centuries BCE, Jerusalem had experienced an urban boom and “was thus an extensive, developed, and prosperous city, a true religious and administrative center of the Kingdom of Judah” that stretched across 148 acres.5 The Babylonian invasion and destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE was followed by the Persian period and Jerusalem’s rebirth. Then, the rule of the Ptolemies during the Hellenistic era was a period of expansion across the hills to the west of the city, an area then known as the Upper City.

The archaeological evidence indicates that Jerusalem was a prosperous town in the first century. The authors describe that neighborhoods consisted of diverse populations and standards of living, largely thanks to King Herod, who was an enthusiastic builder, leaving his mark on the city and beyond, including the palaces of Jericho. In Jerusalem, he built two towers and a palace in what is now the Old City’s Armenian Quarter; he restored Jerusalem’s first wall and built a second one; and he renovated and enlarged the Temple, with impressive results. By 45 CE, the city covered 1.8 square kilometers and was home to 90,000 residents. It also became “a city of pilgrimage, to a degree never before reached in its history.”6

As for the crucifixion of Christ, believed today to be the watershed event of Pilate’s prefecture, the authors have the following to say:

War broke out with Rome and dragged on for seven years between 66 and 73 CE, during which the Temple was destroyed yet again, followed by looting and “a veritable slaughter.”8 The center of Judaism thus moved toward the Galilee and the coast. Jerusalem was rebuilt in accordance with a Roman plan, but it was “dethroned,” rendering it little more than a Roman colony.

Chapter 2 covers 500 years, picking up the story from the destruction of the Second Temple to the Arab conquest between 635 and 638 CE. The authors describe these years as “the era when it was the privileged theater of the long genesis and refinement of the three monotheisms,” and “without doubt the least well documented period in Jerusalem’s history.”9 They explain how Jerusalem became a provincial city during the first two centuries in examination, an ecclesiastical district headed by a bishop, and a place of pilgrimage.

Within roughly a quarter of a century, control of Jerusalem changed hands three times: from the Byzantines to the Persians in 614; from the Persians to the Byzantines in 628; and from the Byzantines to the Arabs between 635 and 638. According to the authors, neither the date nor the identity of the Arab leader who laid siege to Jerusalem has been identified with certainty; they reductively attribute this to the Arab Empire being “still too young and too unsure of its destiny to write its own history.”11

Caliphs ruled Jerusalem from the 7th to the 11th centuries (chapter 3). The authors describe the arrival of Caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab to Jerusalem and his integration of Jerusalem into the new Islamic order. The Dome of the Rock is described in detail and shown to present both harbingers of End Times as well as a link between Jerusalem and the Prophet’s Night Journey:

By the end of the 10th century, the city was referred to by its residents as al-Quds, though scholars and geographers also used the term Bayt al-Maqdis.

So what was it like to live in Jerusalem in the year 1000? Geographer al-Muqaddasi described it as a wonderful place to live, with its stone houses, plentiful water, clean markets, delicious produce, pleasant inhabitants, numerous places of worship, and more. The city had a majority Christian population and a vibrant Jewish community. But between then and the First Crusade in 1096, the city experienced a “period of tribulations” in the form of the partial destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, ordered by a caliph in Cairo; an earthquake, which destroyed the al-Aqsa Mosque and parts of the Old City walls; and conquest by the Seljuk Turks in the 1070s.13

The First Crusade swept in to “liberate” Jerusalem from the Muslims in mid-July 1099, and what the Crusaders did during the less than nine decades of their presence in Jerusalem is the subject of chapter 4. As the Crusaders approached Jerusalem, the Arab Fatimids who were in power expelled the city’s Christians and banned them from return out of fear they would betray them and aid the invading forces. Upon seizing the city, the Franks massacred an estimated 3,000 Muslims and Jews at the al-Haram al-Sharif. But the Franks did not allow the Christians to return; the authors observe that the Franks regarded Jerusalem’s Christians, who did not pay homage to Rome, as heretical, with strange customs and beliefs.

With the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate exiled, the Catholic Crusaders set up a Frankish Kingdom in Jerusalem, and all subsequent Frankish kings were coronated and buried in the Holy Sepulchre, the seat of the Latin Patriarchate. The authors identify as the main legacies of the First Crusades the delineation of the Via Dolorosa, which formed part of Jerusalem’s Christian topography, and the architecture and decorative flourishes of the more than 80 churches they built.

But following the expulsion of the city’s Christians and the slaughter of its Muslims and Jews, the biggest problem the Crusaders faced was repopulating the city, which had become a ghost town. According to the account of William of Tyre, the Frankish king wanted to “obtain citizens” and found Christian candidates in what is today Jordan; he sent for them, and they came.14 In 1115, Melchites, Maronites, and Jacobites from Syria, followed by Christians from overseas places, were invited to settle in the Holy City. Thus, by the mid-12th century, Jerusalem was a prosperous city again, thanks in part to the pilgrim economy and the establishment of hospitals and hospices.

But barely 87 years after the Franks took control of Jerusalem—a city, the authors remind us, “of only secondary military importance”15—they were ousted by the Muslim warrior Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi in 1187 after a two-week siege (chapter 5). The city thus came back under Muslim rule, and the authors describe the work performed on the al-Haram al-Sharif to restore its function as a Muslim site of worship. This included replacing place names, creating access points to the sanctuary, and performing fortification work in preparation for the next siege.

Indeed, Jerusalem changed hands many times over the centuries; even its capture by the Crusaders, which seems significant to readers today, was seen at the time as “just another episode”16 in the ongoing war against the Byzantines. But under the Ayyubids, attention was given to turning Jerusalem into an Islamic city, though Jews were allowed to remain and the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate was allowed to return from exile. In the authors’ elegant wording: “The resettlement of Jews in Jerusalem is paradoxically the most eloquent testimony of the Holy City’s return to the Abode of Islam.”17

The authors summarize Salah al-Din’s accomplishments over a four-year period:

Salah al-Din died in 1193. By the terms of the Treaty of Jaffa, concluded in 1229, control over Jerusalem was divided between the Franks, who took charge of the city, and the al-Haram al-Sharif, which remained within the Abode of Islam. The city changed hands seven more times before the Turkic Mamluks seized control after their victory against the Mongols in Ayn Jalut in 1260, ushering in a period of relative stability to Jerusalem that lasted for over six centuries. Indeed, for the city’s inhabitants, the Ottoman conquest in 1516–17 simply replaced one Turkic dynasty with another.

The Ottomans’ 400-year rule of Jerusalem is the subject of chapter 6, and from the outset, the authors make clear that they reject the Western view that the Ottoman period was one of “prolonged fall” for Jerusalem. Far from being in decline, the authors assert, Europeans had simply lost interest in the city with the end of the Crusades, and so, paid little attention to what the Turkic rulers of the city were up to. Between the mid-13th century and the early 16th century, the Mamluks established at least 86 pious institutions in Jerusalem. And it was under the Ottomans that Jerusalem flourished even more, notably during the reign of Sultan Suleiman I, who oversaw the construction of the majestic Old City walls, intact to this day, between 1535 and 1542.

The authors argue that Jerusalem underwent major changes beginning in the mid-19th century: between 1850 and 1914, the population grew from 15,000 to 70,000, and the city expanded beyond the walls Suleiman I built. Administratively, the Ottomans turned Jerusalem into a mutasarrifate—“an autonomous regional capital” with a direct link to Istanbul—in 1872.19 Palestine was in the geographic center of the Ottoman Empire, and Jerusalem was an essential link in the network of major cities, including Nablus, Bethlehem, and Hebron.

Under the Ottomans, a municipal council was established in Jerusalem beginning in the 1860s, whose work the authors are able to describe thanks to recently discovered records. These documents describe confrontations between the council and foreign consulates, who were meddling in local affairs. The authors note that “under the religious and community categories definitely observed by outside observers, other categories and other conflicts are perceptible if one takes the trouble to read local sources.”20 For example, the records show the participation of the city’s residents in collective discussions around taxation and the price of food, which concerned them all irrespective of religion. Similarly, the authors explain why the schematic of the Old City as one divided into four quarters is both simplistic and erroneous, failing to acknowledge the diversity found in its neighborhoods. Indeed, before Britain’s occupation of Palestine in 1917, the identity of Jerusalem’s residents was not compartmentalized or rigidly sectarian.

The last chapter deals with Jerusalem under the Colonial British Mandate and Israeli occupation. After relative stability under the Ottomans for four centuries, the city fell in 1917 into the careless, incompetent, and duplicitous hands of the British. For 30 years, British Mandate authorities oversaw the intercommunal unrest between the minority Jews—to whom they had promised support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine—and Palestinian Arabs, the majority, who were demanding self-determination in accordance with the terms of the covenant of the League of Nations, to which Britain was supposedly subordinate.

Symbolic of British ineptitude is their first act upon arrival in Palestine: the demolition of the clock tower just outside Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate. It was “the first interfaith monument” and “the bearer of a shared modernity” in Jerusalem, built at the end of the Ottoman period barely 11 years earlier; but the new overlords found it inconsistent with “the authentic biblical and medieval image” they thought Jerusalem should convey.21 This destruction of a landmark of great significance to the native population is symbolic of the violence and ignorance with which British Mandate forces would rule for three decades, overseeing the initial phase of ethnic cleansing of Palestine that persists to this day under Israeli rule.

In 1948, Israel was created, and Jerusalem was divided between east and west. The far smaller eastern part was incorporated into Jordan and became a marginalized city; it was no longer an Arab capital, a focus of attention for Palestinians as it had been during the mandate. Israel, on the other hand, declared the far larger western side to be its capital, renaming it West Jerusalem.

After the 1967 War and Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, Israel unilaterally claimed to “unite” the two halves of the city, but in reality, they remain profoundly divided. Soon after the conquest, Israel moved to establish so-called facts on the ground to support “the exclusively religious link that united the Jewish people in Jerusalem.”22 Toward that end, and within days of occupying the city, Israel demolished the Moroccan Quarter (Haret al-Maghariba) of the Old City to construct the prayer plaza in front of the Western Wall, expelling the area’s non-Jewish residents and creating a space that would become the state’s “symbolic heart.”

In terms of demographics, the authors indicate that about 30,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs and 40,000 Jews lived in Jerusalem in 1914 (43 percent vs. 57 percent); in the 2020s, the city had a population of 800,000, of which 300,000 were Palestinian Muslims and Christians and 500,000 were Israeli Jews (37.5 percent vs. 62.5 percent).25 

As for geography, on the eve of World War I, Jerusalem’s New City covered less than 4 square miles, and by the 2020s, it was about 77 square miles. These changes were not natural, but rather the result of deliberate policies designed to transform what had been a universal city into a political capital for Israel, even as it was simultaneously claimed by Palestinians.

In the conclusion, the authors return to the theme with which they began the book: the challenges of writing about a place that is “first and foremost an imaginary, imagined, transportable, projectable, and finally fantasized city.”26 This wonderfully written biography of Jerusalem for non-historians who want to get a better understanding of this abused city eloquently illustrates why Israeli policies to maintain Jewish dominance in the city are so unworthy of its rich and diverse history, such a regressive derailment from the promise it held before its occupation in the early 20th century.