Jerusalem: The Biography
Oct 2011 · Sold by Vintage
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About this ebook
FULLY REVISED AND UPDATED FOR 2024
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • JEWISH BOOK COUNCIL BOOK OF THE YEAR
"Spectacular. [Montefiore] really tells you what the life of the city has been like and why it means so much. You fall in love with the city. It’s a treasure. It’s a wonderful book." —Bill Clinton
"Impossible to put down. . . . Vastly enjoyable." —The New York Times Book Review
The history of Jerusalem is the story of the world: Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths. The Holy City and Holy Land are the battlefields for today’s multifaceted conflicts and, for believers, the setting for Judgment Day and the Apocalypse. How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the “center of the world” and now the key to peace in the Middle East? Why is the Holy Land so important not just to the region and its many new players, but to the wider world too? Drawing on new archives and a lifetime’s study, Montefiore reveals this ever-changing city and turbulent region through the wars, love affairs and revelations of the kings, empresses, amirs, sultans, caliphs, presidents, autocrats, imperialists and warlords, poets, prophets, saints and rabbis who created, destroyed, chronicled, and believed in Jerusalem and the Holy Land.
A classic of modern literature, this is not only the epic story of 3,000 years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism, co-existence, power and myth, but also a freshly updated, carefully balanced history of the Middle East, from King David to the new powers of the twenty-first century, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is how today’s Middle East was forged, how the Holy Land became sacred and how Jerusalem became Jerusalem—the only city that exists twice—in heaven and on earth.
“Magnificent. . . . Montefiore barely misses a trick or a character intaking us through the city’s story with compelling, breathless tension.” —The Wall Street Journal
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • JEWISH BOOK COUNCIL BOOK OF THE YEAR
"Spectacular. [Montefiore] really tells you what the life of the city has been like and why it means so much. You fall in love with the city. It’s a treasure. It’s a wonderful book." —Bill Clinton
"Impossible to put down. . . . Vastly enjoyable." —The New York Times Book Review
The history of Jerusalem is the story of the world: Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths. The Holy City and Holy Land are the battlefields for today’s multifaceted conflicts and, for believers, the setting for Judgment Day and the Apocalypse. How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the “center of the world” and now the key to peace in the Middle East? Why is the Holy Land so important not just to the region and its many new players, but to the wider world too? Drawing on new archives and a lifetime’s study, Montefiore reveals this ever-changing city and turbulent region through the wars, love affairs and revelations of the kings, empresses, amirs, sultans, caliphs, presidents, autocrats, imperialists and warlords, poets, prophets, saints and rabbis who created, destroyed, chronicled, and believed in Jerusalem and the Holy Land.
A classic of modern literature, this is not only the epic story of 3,000 years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism, co-existence, power and myth, but also a freshly updated, carefully balanced history of the Middle East, from King David to the new powers of the twenty-first century, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict. This is how today’s Middle East was forged, how the Holy Land became sacred and how Jerusalem became Jerusalem—the only city that exists twice—in heaven and on earth.
“Magnificent. . . . Montefiore barely misses a trick or a character intaking us through the city’s story with compelling, breathless tension.” —The Wall Street Journal
FULLY REVISED AND UPDATED FOR 2024
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • JEWISH BOOK COUNCIL BOOK OF THE YEAR
"Spectacular. [Montefiore] really tells you what the life of the city has been like and why it means so much. You fall in love with the city. It’s a treasure. It’s a won...
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Ratings and reviews
18 reviews
Thomas Fackler
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February 7, 2014
Jerusalem gathers the millennia betwixt its walls and pages making and remaking a sadly useless bit of land into something more humanly useful; at first a place to graze, later a simple place to worship, further along to today a place to yearn for in exile.
T H
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September 16, 2026
Amazing scholarship, great writing! This is a book worth reading again and again!
Hunter Nichols
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November 5, 2014
Looks very interesting and possibly like to have
About the author
SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE is a historian of Russia and the Middle East. Catherine the Great and Potemkin was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won the History Book of the Year Prize at the British Book Awards. Young Stalin won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, the Costa Biography Award, and le Grande Prix de la biographie politique. Jerusalem: The Biography was a worldwide best seller. Montefiore’s books are published in more than forty languages. He is the author of the novels Sashenka and One Night in Winter, which won the Paddy Power Political Fiction Book of the Year Award in 2014. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Montefiore graduated from Cambridge University, where he received his PhD. He lives in London.
SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE is a historian of Russia and the Middle East. Catherine the Great and Potemkin was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won the History Book of the Year Prize at the British Book Awards. Young Stalin won the Los Angeles Times Book Pri...
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