Michael: Most of the world's most fought-over cities have something obvious going for them: deepwater ports, major trade routes, vast natural resources. But what if the most contested city in history, the one that has caused more ink and blood to be spilled than any other, has… none of that? Kevin: Hold on, none of it? No strategic harbor, no oil, not even on a major river? That seems like a terrible business plan for a city. What’s the secret sauce then? Michael: That is the central, mind-bending question at the heart of Simon Sebag Montefiore's epic work, Jerusalem: The Biography. He argues the power comes from something else entirely: a story. Kevin: Ah, Montefiore. He’s a serious historian, right? I remember he’s got a Cambridge PhD and has written these massive, award-winning biographies of Russian leaders. But I also heard he has a personal connection to this story. Michael: He does. His great-great-uncle was Sir Moses Montefiore, a major figure who helped build the first Jewish neighborhoods outside the Old City walls in the 19th century. So he’s approaching this with both the historian’s detached rigor and a deep family legacy. Kevin: Okay, but a 'biography' of a city? That sounds a bit… grand. How does one even do that without getting lost in 3,000 years of bewildering history? It feels like trying to write the biography of the ocean. Michael: That's the genius of his approach. He doesn't try to explain it all at once. Instead, he presents Jerusalem as a living character, defined by a fundamental, and often brutal, paradox.

Kevin: A paradox? What kind of paradox are we talking about? Michael: On one hand, you have the idea of the Celestial Jerusalem. The 19th-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli put it perfectly, saying, "To see Jerusalem is to see the history of the world; more, it is to see the history of Heaven and Earth." It’s this divine, sacred ideal. The center of the universe. Kevin: I can see that. It’s the city on a hill, the end-point of pilgrimages, the place where three of the world’s great religions converge. It’s a powerful symbol. Michael: Exactly. But then Montefiore slams us with the other side of the paradox, quoting a medieval Arab geographer, Muqaddasi, who described the city in a very different way. He said, "Jerusalem is a golden goblet filled with scorpions." Kevin: Whoa. That’s a much darker image. A golden goblet filled with scorpions. What are the 'scorpions' in this analogy? Is he talking about the constant conflict? Michael: He’s talking about everything. The conflict, yes, but also the charlatans, the bigotry, the suffocating fanaticism that can grow in such a spiritually intense place. Montefiore points out that for all its holiness, Jerusalem has historically been a small, poor, provincial town in the Judean hills. It’s coveted by empires, yet it lacks any real strategic or economic value. Kevin: So the 'gold' is the idea, the myth, the divine connection. But the 'scorpions' are the messy, violent, all-too-human reality of what happens when people try to possess that idea exclusively. Michael: Precisely. And this tension can have a very real psychological effect. Montefiore even discusses the "Jerusalem Syndrome." Kevin: Wait, is that a real medical condition? Or a metaphor? Michael: It’s very real. Every year, dozens of tourists are admitted to psychiatric care in Jerusalem. They arrive with this idealized, biblical vision of the city in their heads, and the clash with the noisy, complicated, modern reality is so profound it triggers a psychotic break. They start believing they are the Messiah, or John the Baptist, or the Virgin Mary. Kevin: That's incredible. The idea of the city is literally so powerful it can break your mind. It really drives home that the fight for Jerusalem isn't just over stones and buildings. It's a battle over a narrative. Michael: It is. And Montefiore is a master storyteller. I will say, some academic critics have pointed out that he favors this narrative style, sometimes at the expense of diving into the nitty-gritty of archaeological debates. They argue it can read more like a gripping novel than a dry history. Kevin: Honestly, for a topic this dense, that might be a feature, not a bug. If you’re going to tackle 3,000 years, you need a guide who can tell a good story. Michael: And to understand how that story became so potent, so world-shaping, Montefiore argues we have to go back to the single most traumatic and formative event in the city's ancient history: its complete and utter destruction by the Roman Empire.

Kevin: Its destruction? That seems counterintuitive. How does wiping a city off the map make its story more powerful? You’d think that would be the end of it. Michael: You would. But what happened in 70 AD was so cataclysmic, it burned the idea of Jerusalem into the world's consciousness forever. Let me set the scene Montefiore paints. It’s the year 70. The Roman general Titus, son of the Emperor Vespasian, has laid siege to the city. Inside the walls, it’s chaos. Kevin: Not just from the Romans, I assume? Michael: Far from it. The city was tearing itself apart. Rival Jewish factions, the Zealots, were engaged in a bloody civil war. They were purging moderates, assassinating priests in the Temple courts, and burning each other's food supplies in a mad scramble for power. They were essentially doing the Romans' work for them. Kevin: So the city was already starving and bleeding from the inside before the final Roman assault even began. Michael: Exactly. And the conditions became inhuman. This is where Montefiore shares one of the most harrowing accounts from the historian Josephus, who was an eyewitness to the siege. It’s the story of a woman named Marie. Kevin: Okay, I'm bracing myself. Michael: Marie was from a wealthy family, but the Zealots had stolen all her food. She was starving, driven to madness by hunger. And she had an infant son. In her desperation, she did the unthinkable. She killed her child, roasted him, and ate half of his body. Kevin: Oh, man. That's just… horrifying. It's hard to even process that. Michael: The smell of the roasting flesh drifted from her house and attracted a group of starving Zealot fighters. They burst in, demanding food. And Marie, with this terrifying calm, presented them with the leftover remains of her son and invited them to share her meal. Kevin: What did they do? Michael: Even these hardened killers, who had seen and committed countless atrocities, were so horrified they fled in terror. The story spread through the city like a plague, a symbol of how far Jerusalem had fallen. It was a city consuming itself. Kevin: It’s the ultimate symbol of a society’s collapse. When a mother eats her own child, there’s nothing left. Michael: And that was the backdrop for the final Roman assault. On the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av—the same day, tradition holds, that the First Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians centuries earlier—a Roman soldier, against Titus’s supposed orders, threw a torch into the Second Temple. Kevin: And it went up in flames. Michael: It was an inferno. The Temple was built with cedarwood beams, gold plating, and rich fabrics. It burned with an impossible heat. Josephus describes the scene: the roar of the flames, the screams of thousands of people trapped inside, the Roman soldiers slaughtering anyone they could find, their blood mixing with the melting gold from the sanctuary. They razed the entire city to the ground, plowing it over with salt so nothing would grow again. Kevin: A total, absolute annihilation. So I have to ask again: how does a city, a people, a faith, come back from that? How does that not become the final page of the book?

Michael: That is the ultimate paradox Montefiore presents. The physical city of Jerusalem was destroyed. It ceased to exist. But in its place, the idea of Jerusalem became more powerful and more permanent than ever before. Kevin: How does that work? How does a memory become stronger than a reality? Michael: Because the memory could be perfected and made portable. For the Jewish people, who were scattered across the world in the diaspora, the Bible became what the historian Heinrich Heine called their "portable homeland." The rituals, the laws, the stories of Zion—they all existed in the text. You could be in a village in Poland or a city in Spain, but you could still live 'in Jerusalem' through study and prayer. The physical city was gone, but the celestial city was now everywhere. Kevin: So the destruction forced the religion to evolve from one centered on a physical place—the Temple—to one centered on a text. Michael: Precisely. And for the small, fledgling sect of Christians, the destruction was something else entirely. It was divine proof. Jesus had prophesied the Temple's destruction. To them, its fall was a sign that God had abandoned the old covenant and forged a new one with them. They were the inheritors, and their focus shifted to a "New Jerusalem," a heavenly city to come. Kevin: Wow. So the same event is interpreted in two completely different, world-altering ways. One group sees it as the catalyst for a global, text-based faith, and the other sees it as validation for a brand new one. Michael: And centuries later, Islam would also incorporate Jerusalem into its sacred narrative, building the Dome of the Rock on the very same Temple Mount. The destruction of 70 AD didn't kill the city; it turned it into a sacred stage upon which the dramas of three global religions would be played out. It made the city immortal and infinitely contestable. Kevin: That’s why it still has such an iron grip on the imagination. The fight isn't just over a piece of land. It's a fight over which version of that immortal, post-destruction story is the 'true' one. It’s a battle of myths, and the city is the battlefield. Michael: It is. And Montefiore's book is a stunning, often heartbreaking, chronicle of that battle. He shows that Jerusalem is a city built as much on faith and fantasy as it is on stone and mortar. Kevin: It really makes you think about how much of our world is shaped not by what physically exists, but by the stories we tell about what used to exist, or what we hope will exist. Michael: It’s a profound thought. It makes you wonder, what other places in our own lives are more powerful as ideas than they are as physical locations? A childhood home, a university, a place you once visited? Kevin: That's a deep one to end on. We’d love to hear your thoughts on that. What's a place that holds that kind of power for you? Find us on our socials and join the conversation. Let us know what your 'Jerusalem' is. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.