Jerusalem: The Biography

Much later, it is impossible to write about the nineteenth century without feeling the shadow of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said, a Palestinian Christian born in Jerusalem who became a literary professor at Columbia University in New York and an original political voice in the world of Palestinian nationalism, argued that the ‘subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture’, particularly among nineteenth-century travellers such as Chateaubriand, Melville and Twain, had diminished Arab culture and justified imperialism. However, Said’s own work inspired some of his acolytes to try to airbrush these Western intruders out of the history: this is absurd. It is true, however, that these visitors saw and understood little of the real life of Arab and Jewish Jerusalem and, as explained above, I have worked hard to show the actual lives of the indigenous population. But this book is not a polemic and the historian of Jerusalem must show the dominating influence of Western romantic-imperial culture towards the city because it explains why the Middle East so mattered to the Great Powers.

Similarly, I have portrayed the progress of British pro-Zionism, secular and evangelical, from Palmerston and Shaftesbury to Lloyd George, Balfour, Churchill and their friend Weizmann for the simple reason that this was the single most decisive influence on the fate of Jerusalem and Palestine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I end the main body of the book in 1967 because the Six Day War essentially created the situation today and it provides a decisive stop. The Epilogue cursorily brings the politics up to the present and ends with a detailed portrait of a typical morning in the three Holy Places. But the situation is ever changing. If I were to continue the history in detail up to today, the book would lack any clear ending and have to be updated almost hourly. Instead I have tried to show why Jerusalem continues to be both the essence of and obstacle to a peace deal.

This work is a synthesis based on a wide reading of the primary sources, ancient and modern, on personal seminars with specialists, professors, archaeologists, families and statesmen, and on innumerable visits to Jerusalem, the shrines and archaeological digs. I have been fortunate to uncover some new or rarely used sources. My research has brought three special joys: that of spending much time in Jerusalem; that of reading the wondrous works of writers from Usamah bin Munqidh, Ibn Khaldun, Evliya Celebi and Wasif Jawhariyyeh to William of Tyre, Josephus and T. E. Lawrence; and, thirdly, that of being befriended and helped, with such trust and generosity, amid ferocious political crises, by Jerusalemites of all sects – Palestinians, Israelis and Armenians, Muslims, Jews and Christians.

I feel I have been preparing to write this book all my life. Since childhood, I have been wandering around Jerusalem. Because of a family connection, related in the book, ‘Jerusalem’ is my family motto. Whatever the personal link, I am here to recount the history of what happened and what people believed. To return to where we started, there have always been two Jerusalems, the temporal and the celestial, both ruled more by faith and emotion than by reason and facts. And Jerusalem remains the centre of the world.

Not everyone will like my approach – after all, this is Jerusalem. But in writing the book I always remembered Lloyd George’s advice to his Governor of Jerusalem, Storrs, who was being savagely criticized by both Jews and Arabs: ‘Well, if either one side stops complaining, you’ll be dismissed.’¹

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have been helped in this huge project by a wide cast of scholars outstanding in their fields. I am deeply grateful to them for their help, advice and, where stated, reading and correcting of my text.