JERUSALEM FALLS

An argument for the relevance of Jerusalem’s history, from the seventh to the 13th centuries to today’s conflicts over its status.

Hosler, a professor of military history and author of The Siege of Acre, sets his narrative during the centuries known in the West as the “medieval period.” He describes the text as a “book about conquest” covering a series of Jerusalem’s “falls” when “possession of the city passed from adherents of one religious confession to another by way of conflict.” It’s a dizzying, detailed story of faiths, ethnic and tribal communities, and sects and subgroups using military action to secure control of a city sacred to all of them. Some of these elements—Persians, Saracens, Christians, Byzantines, Fatimids, Europeans, Arabs, Turks, Sunnis and Shia Muslims—will be known to readers, yet many will be hard-pressed to keep track of the hundreds of other figures who populate the complex narrative. While a judicious attempt at balancing accounts, it’s difficult to see its relevance to the current situation in Israel. There’s no question that Jerusalem’s inhabitants during Europe’s Middle Ages experienced periods of tranquility and toleration in their multicultural, pluralistic society. However, there was also no lack of carnage, including massacres by Christian crusaders in 1099, the nadir of the city’s history. While it’s important to be reminded that, from time to time, Jerusalem was “a city for all,” the text is packed with gore, massacres, and expulsions by Christian crusaders as well as Jews and non-Christian “infidels” attempting to hold their possession in the Judean hills. Trying to balance such horrors against periods of comparative calm is a false equivalency. Nevertheless, for its factual and up-to-date solidity and skilled rendering of a deeply complex and troubling history, Hosler’s work deserves attention.

A useful historical resource aside from the stretch required to accept its central argument.