'The history of Jerusalem is the history of the world'

The great-great nephew of Sir Moses, acclaimed historian Simon Sebag Montefiore took his latest project, a chronicle of Jerusalem, suitably seriously

By AKIN AJAYI
Simon Sebag Montefiore (photo credit: Courtesy)
Simon Sebag Montefiore
(photo credit: Courtesy)
‘It almost killed me, writing it,’ Simon Sebag Montefiore confides.
We are in the lobby of the capital’s American Colony Hotel, an appropriate location for our interview, given that it’s just off the dividing seam of what is often referred to as “the most contested piece of real estate on earth.”
We are talking about his new book, Jerusalem: The Biography, an accomplished exploration of the eponymous city’s rich historical tapestry. But it isn’t merely the long hours of research and writing that Sebag, 46, is talking about, even though the three years it took to write would take a huge toll on anyone. Rather, he is referring to the awesome responsibility of producing a work that is neither circumscribed nor partial.
“It is incredibly difficult to write a history of the city,” he says, and one cannot accuse him of overstatement. Three faiths, three competing narratives; the stakes are very high indeed.
However, Sebag is perhaps the perfect person to confront the historical complexities of the great city, synthesizing them into a meaningful narrative. There is, for one thing, the advantage of his familial connection to the city; his greatgreat- uncle was Sir Moses Montefiore, financier, philanthropist, the preeminent British Jew of the 19th century. Montefiore senior devoted much of his life and wealth to promoting the well-being of Jewish communities in Palestine, among many other things founding Mishkenot Sha’ananim, the first settlement of the New Yishuv. The family’s connections with Israel remain strong almost two centuries after Sir Moses’s first visit to the Holy Land; Sebag recalls spending many happy summers in Jerusalem as a child.
Then there is his reputation as an acclaimed historian. His first history book, Catherine the Great & Potemkin, was shortlisted for the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction; Young Stalin, published in 2008, won the Costa Book Award for Biography and the LA Times Book Prize for Biography. His books have been translated into more than 40 languages, and he has written and presented several history documentaries on television – his most recent visit to Jerusalem, incidentally, was to film a forthcoming three-part series for the BBC about the city.
But for all these impeccable qualifications, it took Sebag a while to actually get around to penning the book he was perhaps born to write.
“I am very much influenced by my family,” he acknowledges. “I grew up with Jerusalem on the lips of my parents; my ancestor’s history was very much a part of my childhood.”
He shows me a ring on his finger. “This signet ring, for instance has the Montefiore crest on it, and the family motto is ‘Yerushalayim.’ Ever since I was a child, I’ve wanted to know more about Jerusalem; when I became a historian, obviously I always dreamed of returning to Jerusalem. But it couldn’t be my first book.”
Why not? His answer speaks volumes about the reverence he brings to the subject: “I had to be ready before I could come to the biggest subject in the world. Because the history of Jerusalem is the history of the world.”
FOR A book that covers over 2,000 years of history, it manages the rare feat of being both informative and entertaining.
One reason for this is that it is primarily a social history of the city; one that focuses not just on the great military and political events of the epoch, but also introduces the human stories that have populated the city.
“There are literally thousands of books about Jerusalem, but the majority of them are about the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Crusades, Jesus Christ or King David,” he notes.
“I’ve always wanted to read a book that was about the people that made up the city. And as Disraeli said,” he continues in jest, “when I want to read a book, I write it.”
And what would such a book be made up of? “The city is really made by the people,” he elaborates, “and they are often missing.
The grit of life, the music, the sex, the food, the ambition. Even the passion of religion was often missing from these histories.
I knew I wanted to read a book like this, and I couldn’t find it. So I wrote it.”
Sebag’s path to becoming a historian was circumambulatory, but had a certain inevitability about it. Boarding school (Harrow), a gap year working down in the mines in South Africa, a history degree at Cambridge, a brief interlude as an investment banker. But he was desperate for adventure: “I’d lived a pretty sedate life.”
So off he went to the Caucasus as a war journalist, reporting on the break-up of the former Soviet Union from Chechnya, Georgia and Nagorno-Karabakh. It was an exciting period, but also a dangerous one.
“I was just living for the moment,” he recalls. “It was a very exciting time in my life, but I also had very frightening experiences in the wars. I was almost killed a couple of times.”
This prompted a personal reevaluation: “I knew that what I really wanted to do was to write books that endured.” And so he channeled his energy and enthusiasm to the more considered – and certainly safer – outlet of history.
But reporting from the front line gives his writing an important edge, an eye for detail that captures the reader’s attention and imagination. One thing that distinguishes Jerusalem from other historical accounts of the city is the great lengths to which Sebag has gone in producing an authentically panoramic, inclusive account of its history. The book opens with an account of the future emperor Titus’s siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. It is a remarkably visceral, grisly account that brings to life the full horror of the event. It is undoubtedly a pivotal moment in the history of the Jewish people; but given that the biography sets out to be an ecumenical history of the people of the city, I wonder why he chose to begin with this.
“The main reason is that it was such an absolutely vital point in the development of the three major religions, and of Jerusalem’s history,” Sebag explains. “The destruction of the [Second] Temple was really the moment that modern Judaism, as we understand it, was created.”
He elaborates: “Before 70 AD, Judaism was really about sacrifice at the Temple, worship at the Temple. But after this, it was really about the Torah and the study of the Law.”
And for the other religions? “It was the point where Christianity became a really separate religion from Judaism,” he notes. “And it was – if one jumps forward about 600 years – a key point in Islam. The destruction of the two Temples – by Nebuchadnezzar and by Titus – proved to the early Muslims that God had withdrawn his blessings from the Jews, and bestowed it on the new revelation of Islam.”
This context, it is fair to observe, is often overlooked by historians and everyday people alike in their partisan identification with the city.
“EVENHANDEDNESS” WAS the anchor that secured Sebag through the writing of the book, a particularly challenging concept but one he believes he was ultimately able to achieve.
“It was my greatest fear that I would not be regarded as fair. There was no point, being who I am, of writing a Zionist history, a Jewish history of Jerusalem, and it mattered to me enormously that it was evenhanded.”
Evenhandedness, of course, is not the same as pleasing everyone. Sebag recalls a famous conversation between Sir Ronald Storrs, the civil governor of Jerusalem and Judea after 1921, and David Lloyd George, prime minister of the United Kingdom between 1916 and 1922. Storrs worried about complaints made against his stewardship of the region; Lloyd George replied that when people stopped complaining, then he’d be sacked.
“If I’ve pleased all sides completely, then this book wouldn’t have done its job,” contends Sebag.
His ambition, he says, was to produce something that would both inform and engage people who, perhaps, would not be inclined to read a dry academic account of the city’s history. “The mission of this book is to show the complete history of Jerusalem in a readable way, but also in an academically accurate way.”
Given his long-standing connections with the city, one wonders whether such absolute immersion in his subject matter might have changed his engagement with the city’s history. In the book, for instance, he tells of his discovery that his long-presumed-pious ancestor had impregnated a 16-year-old maidservant at the age of 81.
“I began to revise my opinion of him after this,” he comments dryly.
But revisions go beyond the personal.
“I’ve gotten to know the city much better,” he replies pensively. “It is a different city now than it was when I was a child in many ways. It’s much tenser...” he drifts off for a moment. “But I’ve always loved Jerusalem. I’ve always adored coming here, I’ve always thought deeply about Jerusalem, and I’m always kind of dazzled by it.”
Three years of research have rounded out his appreciation of the city.
“Jerusalem has many different characters.
It’s exasperating, but it is exquisitely beautiful; it is also a city full of love, a city full of hate,” he says. “It is utterly maddening, it is chaotic, it is disorganized” – we both laugh at this – “it is impractical, but it is a city of emotions, more than any city I know.”
Context, indubitably, gives a richness to interpreting contemporary events. One fact, counterintuitive though it may seem, that comes from Jerusalem is that the city is perhaps enjoying the most peaceful period in all its history. Given the competing historical claims made upon it, this is an important – if oft-overlooked – point.
“The history of Jerusalem is a chronicle of slaughter, massacre, stormings, sieges, destructions, rebuildings,” Sebag agrees.
“By its standards, the last 40 years have been pretty tranquil – even with the two intifadas.”
This is not to suggest that all is ideal.
“I don’t approve of everything about Israeli rule of Jerusalem,” he continues, “but I have to say that the record is impressive in many ways. Since 1967, there has been, for all three religions, a freedom of worship, the freest period in all its history.”
I wonder whether this should be taken as a sign of optimism, a hint that there are possibilities to build upon, if one only remembers to take the long view. Sebag agrees that it is an important period for Jewish history, but one that should neither be taken for granted nor abused.
“The city is more Jewish now than it has ever been since the first century AD,” he notes. “There has been a great Jewish flowering in Jerusalem.”
Settlement, he continues, has been an integral aspect of the city’s character all through its history and not merely a recent aspect of Israeli state policy.
“Jerusalem’s history is completely composed of settlers, settling and building new areas in the city. When Saladin retook the city in 1187, he settled Muslim settlers in new areas from all over the Muslim world. Jerusalem is that peculiar thing, a city that is constantly created and recreated by settlers.”
In this context, he adds, the present development of the city is consistent with its historical character. But there must be caution against potential excess and abuse.
“I believe that Jews should be allowed to live wherever they want in Jerusalem, provided – and this is a big if – we do not put pressure on any other section of the population, that we don’t try to build communities in somebody else’s area.
That is the big if.”
IT’S OFTEN suggested that it is difficult to be a Jew in the contemporary United Kingdom. There is the question of demographics – there are fewer than 300,000 self-identified Jews in a country of 60 million. And beyond this, there are both historical and contemporary antecedents to back up this argument – from the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 to the virulent public atmosphere in the wake of Operation Cast Lead at the beginning of 2009.
As a practicing British Jew – his wife, the novelist Santa Montefiore, converted to Judaism in order to marry him – what weight does Sebag attribute to these suggestions? “That’s an interesting question,” he replies pensively. He acknowledges that his family history is perhaps atypical; however, he does observe that Sir Moses arrived in England as an immigrant from Italy, as did his nephew Joseph Sebag, who came from Morocco.
“But by the time they died, they had both been knighted by Queen Victoria...
and they never gave up their Judaism.”
England has always been hospitable and tolerant, he opines, and “there isn’t a day that I don’t say that I’m grateful that I was born a Jew in England.”
Tensions exist, of course; he states the insularity inherent in the island nation, as well as its complex relationship with Israel, noting a strong anti-Israeli sentiment that at times “does skate close to anti-Semitism.”
But for all this, he is clear about one thing: “[British Jews] are not cowed about fighting for ourselves, standing up for ourselves in Britain. We feel a lot safer than Jews in a lot of other places, and we’re very grateful to Britain for its tolerance and decency.”
Sebag is currently working on a work of fiction, a sequel to his novel Sashenka, a saga about a Russian Jewish family.
Then he hopes to write a short biography of the Romanovs.
“I’m always going back to Russia,” he says, half-apologetically. But he’s certain that he’ll return to Middle East history again. One might say it’s in his blood.