Jerusalem was in the headlines once again recently when Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed that the ancient city will forever be the nation’s undivided capital.
That Jerusalem should once again find herself in the middle of a political tempest should be no surprise. It certainly wouldn’t be to James Carroll, a former Catholic priest and the writer of the book Jerusalem Jerusalem, How The Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
In it, Carroll, who in an earlier book, Constantine’s Sword. tried to show how history-shaping events related to Christianity’s turbulent relationship with Judaism, now attempts to show how Jerusalem has been at the fulcrum, directly or indirectly, of most major events from ancient times to 9/11.
He sets himself quite a monumental task and in essence this is more of a book about the history of western civilization than a book about Jerusalem.
He starts at the beginning, literally, with the Big Bang. He then argues that for early man, our hunter-gatherer ancestor, violence was a necessary part of life. However, this human predator had thoughts and feelings, and needed to find a way to cope with his violent behaviour.
Religion, he says, began as a way of resisting and controlling these violent impulses, but through the centuries and millennia that followed, religion instead became a reason for even more violence.
In just over 300 pages, with another 100 pages of annotation, Carroll, a scholar in residence at Suffolk University and a Boston Globe columnist, guides us through almost all major events of history: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the Roman Empire, the Crusades, the Knights Templar, Christopher Columbus, the Pilgrims, Martin Luther, Spinoza, the Reformation, pogroms, the Civil War, slavery, Lincoln, the world wars, Hiroshima, Eichmann, the Cold War, Zionism, Israel, Cuba, the Yom Kippur War, Reagan, Chernobyl, al Qaeda and the Gulf Wars.
Jerusalem, Carroll claims, is lodged in the DNA of western civilization. “It became the magnetic pole of Western history.”
Tying all these events to Jerusalem and showing how it did more to “create the modern world than any other city,” works only to different degrees depending on the subject matter. Sometimes it seems forced.
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are obviously all connected to Jerusalem and related to each other through the patriarch Abraham. In fact, the significance of the Binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah is probably the strongest point Carroll makes.
When God sent an angel to prevent Abraham from sacrificing his son, this was God’s way, Carroll says, of saying that humans were no longer required to perform human sacrifice, a well-established religious ritual of early man. Significantly, it was on this hilltop, many believe, that the early Hebrews settled and built Jerusalem.
The problem came when people started to interpret this story differently. Religious zealots started to argue that like Abraham we must show our love for God by being willing to sacrifice our children. To this day, as he shows in the rest of the book, sending our children out to fight wars and die in the “ultimate sacrifice” remains acceptable and honourable.
“What began in Genesis as a celebration of the end of child sacrifice was reversed, with the founding father glorified, not for obeying the divine command to spare his son, but for his readiness to plunge the knife into the boy’s heart,” he writes.
Moving forward to the Babylonian Exile, Israel’s hope was for the restoration of the kingdom in the Messianic age.
In an apocalyptic battle between the forces of Good and the forces of Bad, no price was too high to pay. This “led to an unprecedented emphasis on martyrdom with the expectation that faithful death would be rewarded by physical resurrection.”
During the war with the Romans, the Jewish resisters “embraced martyrdom to the point of mutual suicide…The ultimate in holiness,” he writes, “is readiness – if not to slay a son, to see him slain.”
The prophet Daniel’s apocalyptic visions were enhanced by the Christian Bible, especially in The Book of Revelation. Apocalyptic fervour would soon give rise to “God-sanctioned Total War” where a destructive battle between good and bad “could be contemplated as somehow fulfilling a divine plan.”
After the Holocaust, he argues, every Israeli struggle became an apocalyptic struggle for her existence. Israel’s temptation was to “regard every adversary as Hitler brought back to life, both threatening annihilation and deserving to be killed.”
He cites as an example the 1973 Yom Kippur War showing how Golda Meir was ready to sacrifice the earth and risk World War III by threatening to launch nuclear bombs at Cairo and Damascus.
“That Jerusalem nearly triggered the doomsday catastrophe is a fact of such magnitude that it must eventually be reckoned with. This paradox – the ultimate in child sacrifice – defines the moral conundrum that lies at the heart of the tragedy of Israel,” Carroll writes. “The fate of Jerusalem is the fate of the earth.”
As a concise history of the western world, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, makes for fascinating reading. But in addition to his love for cute little one-liners, “The Bible is so full of violence because it came into being to resist violence,” there is a tendency for Carroll to generalize and rely on unsubstantiated supposition.
For instance saying that the Jews were written into the Christian passion narrative as the bad guys as payback for their rejecting the Gospel writers 40 or so years later is an interesting theory. But we’ll never know the motives of the Gospel writers for sure.
That said, when he’s on point describing the dichotomy of Jerusalem between the actual city and the apocalyptic fantasy it has inspired for generations, then Jerusalem, Jerusalem makes for a thought-provoking and enjoyable read.
