Cities fascinate us. They move us to travel and make pilgrimage. They give us the terms for citizenship, civilization, politics, and civic‐mindedness. Cities combine the utterly unique and particular with the ideal of the city as such. Each city is a draft of the City of God.

Jerusalem is a remarkable city. It is very ancient (about 4,000 years) and, unlike many other ancient Near Eastern cities, it has been continuously inhabited for virtually this entire duration. Most ancient cities were either abandoned or new, more convenient and greater ones, were established nearby. Cities rebuilt in this fashion were usually strategically located. They served as border fortifications, port cities, or administrative capitals in places begging for settlement and favorable to social, economic, or political aggregation.

The first Jerusalem, nestled on the watershed in the central highlands of the southern Levant between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean, was neither conveniently located nor served as border or port city. Commerce, trade, and industry passed it by and its population was sparse, especially as compared to the urban centers of Egypt and Mesopotamia. What made the city stand out over time was the extraordinary reputation it acquired as a sacred place whose fates were perceived as evidence of divine special providence. Out of the ashes of ancient Jerusalem arose a myth that was disseminated to the ends of the earth: through psalms, hymns, and prophecies, represented in word and image, and more recently through mass media and the Internet.

Beginning with the Bible, many books have been written about Jerusalem. Perhaps we should not be writing any more books about the Holy City. If it had been up to the great fourth‐century Christian scholar and translator St. Jerome, no one would write about the earthly Jerusalem at all, nor pay any special attention to it, because no one should think that one is closer to God in one place than in others. In fact, much like his great prophetic predecessors in the Bible who chided Jerusalem, he considered it not a holy city but an unholy city, a city lacking in holiness, because it lacked in justice. From this ancient critical perspective, the holiness of Jerusalem is very much in question.

The study of Jerusalem forces us to think about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as related phenomena, as a family of religions, with Jerusalem as part of their common inheritance. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim identity formation is implicated in what secular humanists refer to as “religious violence,” a violence vacillating between martyrdom and genocide.¹ In Jerusalem, the “kingdom of god on earth” appears in the paradoxical form of rocky outcroppings and caves, signs of absence, that are surrounded by magnificent shrines that commemorate and anticipate divine presence. What kind of city is holy to a god who is both present and absent, hidden and manifest? What kind of religions are these that are jostling over the right to represent an absent god?

In this holy city there is always a temptation to force the end. The ancient Jews produced an unsurpassed world heritage by giving voice to human yearning for the presence of God in His place, a demotic love‐poetry in praise of Zion and its God that inspires hope and faith in many millions of people across the globe.² But the Jewish attachment to this place is also forever associated with violence suffered and inflicted, Israelite conquest and extirpation, commanded in the laws of Deuteronomy, and the lament over the destruction of Jerusalem and its central symbol, the temple of Solomon. Over the course of the past 1,700 years, Christians and Muslims produced beautiful art and architecture and established profound civilizations, but their drive for empire, especially where frustrated, also gave rise to intra‐ and inter‐communal recrimination, mutual contempt, and perennial resentment that periodically erupts into violence. The history of Jerusalem is thus a story of divinely sanctioned conquest, rule, loss, and the desire for retrieval and rectification.

From a modern perspective, too, perhaps it would be better if there were no more books on Jerusalem. In fact, the very religious conflict that flares up at the holy places on regular occasions might be avoided if everyone turned off their cameras. Perhaps Israelis and Palestinians could relax a bit if we all turned off our devices, ignored our news feeds, and allowed the city to breathe.³

Perhaps there shouldn’t be holy places. But judging by the evidence of folklorists and ethnographers, shrine religion has been around for as long as human civilization.⁴ People always saw and revered invisible powers, depicted in many forms and invoked by many names, “on every hill and under every leafy tree,” as the Bible says about the Israelites. What Jews, Christians, and Muslims condemn as “paganism” used to be the norm. Ancient Israelite religion was no different. Archaeology tells us that YHWH, the god of the Israelites, wasn’t always alone but had a female partner. Jerusalem’s original god, after whom the city was named, was the Evening Star, twin‐brother of the Morning Star. Those were the days when not even God was a monotheist. Jerusalem’s career as the holy city par excellence commenced when one of its kings decided to banish the worship of all other gods and restricted the worship of YHWH, the nation’s ancestral deity, to the royal shrine in Jerusalem. Thus arises the notion of YHWH as a “jealous” god who demands exclusive veneration. To “appear before the LORD,” as all male Israelites were henceforth commanded, one had to go up to Jerusalem. In those days, veneration of YHWH in Jerusalem alone meant bringing or sending one’s gifts to only one shrine, i.e. to pay one’s taxes to the king and thereby strengthen the royal center of the state. That act made Jerusalem the “Rome” of ancient Israel: omnes vias hierosolymam ducunt, the place to which all roads lead. Later, when that city was nevertheless destroyed, something else happened that made Jerusalem and the god who resided in Jerusalem more consequential. Israelite prophets, lawyers, and scribes began to think of the god of Israel as different (Hebrew: qadosh), discovering the notion of an all‐powerful creator of the universe, the only god there is, inventing the very God Almighty that, to this day, inspires Jews, Christians, and Muslims and holds them in thrall. It was, as philosopher and psychologist Karl Jaspers put it, an “axial age” breakthrough whose consequences are still with us and that, for better or worse, continues to shape our idea of what it means to be human.⁵ There are important social, political, and historical consequences to biblical monotheism. If God is different, then the people he chooses are different. They are obliged to live and act differently, separate and distinguish themselves from others by dress, conduct, or both. We will have an opportunity to consider the secessionist, sectarian, and utopian apocalyptic implications of monotheism. God, capital ‘G,’ enables us to suffer and die for God as martyrs and he makes us kill for God, because he wants it (deus lo vult, as the Frankish Crusaders used to say in their medieval Latin when they waded in the blood of God’s enemies and theirs, “up to their stirrups”).⁶ Compared to this God and the forces he unleashed in the souls of believers and in the world of holy war propaganda, the old shrine religions of the peasants were downright harmless. If it weren’t for those kings who condemned the shrines, the Elijahs who wreaked havoc on the priests of Ba’al on Mount Carmel, the prophets who declared there is no God but God, perhaps no one would write books on Jerusalem today.

Before you put aside this book as the work of a cynic, let me quickly assert that I believe that religion can also be a force for good. Even Sigmund Freud – archcritic of religion and Jewish godfather of psychoanalysis – thought religion may be necessary for us to behave in civilized ways, even though he considered the Jewish and Christian religions “illusions” aimed at repressing the violent and libidinous urges that have characterized primate behavior since time immemorial.⁷ The history of Jerusalem teaches us that many of the great emperors and caliphs who cast themselves as the representatives of God on earth not only did well by Jerusalem materially but also maintained law and order for extended periods of time. Some of them, especially the Muslim ones, were master‐negotiators of the ethno‐religious differences prevalent in late antique and medieval Al‐Quds, the Holy City, and beyond. Jerusalem’s history is not all blood and gore, war and conflict. Even today, there are many wonderful people among the Jews, Christians, and Muslims who call Jerusalem home, who want nothing more than peace and are deeply invested in whatever it takes to make peace and get along with one another. They are part of a global move away from exclusivist narratives and toward ecumenism, dialogue, and conciliation between creeds and nations. In Israel, there are the courageous Rabbis for Human Rights who protect Arab farmers and their fields from aggressive hyper‐nationalist‐religious settlers.⁸ There is an Israel Interfaith Association⁹ that brings together Christian, Muslim, and Jewish clerics to discuss matters of common concern. More recently, a Jerusalem music center was transformed into a temporary common prayer space for all three of the Abrahamic religions, making the point that religion does not need to divide but can bring people together.¹⁰ Our religions are complicated things. The social and political functions of religion and the religious behavior of individuals and communities change over time. Christian missionary institutions founded by imperial regimes have turned into places of service to the community. On the other hand, Israel’s commitment, in its declaration of independence, to equal rights of access to holy places nowadays serves Jewish extremists as a legal basis to argue for a radical revision of the status quo at the holy places. Islamic notions of a greater and lesser jihad are widely exploited to seduce disoriented youths to commit suicide attacks as acts of martyrdom. Jerusalem, largely temperate in mood and climate, sometimes seems overwhelmed by too much religion and too many sacred places.¹¹ For a visitor who spends time living and studying in the city, the plethora of nations and communities attached to Jerusalem for religious and other reasons make this metropolis¹² a fascinating place, and it has been this way for a very long time. Jerusalem’s beauty and holiness strike some people, who come from afar, so strongly that they have visions or lose their minds in a condition known as the “Jerusalem syndrome.” Jerusalemites live a great variety of ordinary and extraordinary lives and the city valiantly wrestles with the complex social, economic, and political challenges that arise from its peculiar character.

This book is my prayer for the well‐being of Jerusalem. It is dedicated to my Jerusalemite friends, companions over the years during which I was privileged to visit, live, study, work, eat, drink, love, pray, walk, and drive around the hills and neighborhoods, take in different sights and perspectives, listen to different viewpoints, and think about how to tell the story of this holy city, its history, its communities, its charms, challenges, and meanings.

Though a history, this book does not strictly proceed in chronological order. I start with modern Jerusalem and I end with it. In the second part, I tell the story of Jerusalem’s emergence as a holy city in three different ways, focusing each time on another aspect of the biblical past. In the third part, I consider the transformation of Jerusalem from a formerly Jewish temple city, condemned to oblivion by its Roman destroyers, into an imperially sponsored Christian theme park, and the afterlife of that same city under later Byzantine and Muslim rulers. I also consider the age of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which strikes me as important for its architectural and ideological legacies. The medieval rhetoric of jihad that concerns us so much today used to be balanced out by protracted cultural exchanges between Frankish knights and Saracen commanders that took place at the same time.¹³ In the last part, I bring the story of Jerusalem back to the present, looking at the development of the modern city under the Ottomans and the British, the history of division and reunification, and the ongoing jostling over access to, and sovereignty over, Jerusalem’s contested holy places. In short, this book is about the idea of Jerusalem as a holy city, the emergence of that idea from an ancient political theology, its adoption and dissemination through the rhetoric of cult restoration and royal/imperial patronage, and its transformation in an age of acutely modern (though biblically inflected) competing colonial and national projects.