A personal Jerusalem syndrome
Two authors’ contrasting views of Israel, one non-fiction and hostile, one fiction and affectionate
Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City
IProfile Books, £16.99
n one of his most celebrated clerihews, E.C. Bentley wrote that “geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps”. No longer. The publishing industry’s latest wheeze is the invention of biographies of places. Bookshops are full of them, and now along comes Matthew Teller with “a new biography of the Old City”, the city being Jerusalem, of course. Biographies of places are about the people who live in them as much as the history of the buildings they live and work in; Teller aims to do both. If, however, you are expecting an impartial guide to one of the most fascinating places on earth, you will be disappointed.
As a Progressive British Jew (who celebrated his barmitzvah at the Western Wall), Teller, on the evidence of this book at least, has two pet hates: 1) Britain and 2) Israel. His general thesis is that Jerusalem (i.e. the Old City) was a sort of Shangri-La before the British started interfering in the mid 19th century and then taking over in 1917. As for what Israel has done to the place since 1967, don’t get him started.
His specific thesis is that the Old City shouldn’t be seen as divided into four Quarters — Muslim, Armenian, Christian and Jewish — but nine, which would more accurately reflect the real character of the place. It’s quite an interesting conceit, though not perhaps as earth-shattering as Teller seems to think. The real villains behind the four Quarters business are — of course — the British, in particular the Reverend George Williams, a young English cleric who arrived in Jerusalem in 1842 as chaplain to the new Protestant bishop of Jerusalem, and stayed for 14 months before leaving, never to return. He subsequently wrote a book, The Holy City, which reproduced a map of the city produced by two other Britons, Royal Engineers Edward Aldrich and Julian Symonds, in 1841. But Williams added his own gloss, coming up with the four quarters notion, which has persisted ever since. Teller gets very worked up about this “ill-informed dismissive judgementalism of a jejune Old Etonian missionary… it’s shameful”.
Others might think it merely an interesting historical curiosity. Similar hissy-fits punctuate the book, to a tiresome extent.
In Teller’s eyes, the British could do nothing right after 1917. The town planner Charles Ashbee ordered the clearing away of the shops clustered outside the Jaffa Gate in order to expose Suleiman the Great’s wonderful walls and decreed the use of Jerusalem limestone for all new buildings, which is still the case a century later and, many might think, far-sighted, but not Teller. “It’s hateful,” he declares.
In his wanderings through the Old City’s streets, Teller does turn up some interesting residents, such as the Dom (Gypsy) community by the Lion’s Gate and a longestablished African settlement.
He even gets round to the restored Jewish Quarter after 237 pages. But this is an overwhelmingly anti-Israel book, a portrait of a historic enclave most of whose inhabitants are seen as routinely oppressed by the Israeli authorities.
If you want a decent book about Jerusalem, read Simon Sebag Montefiore’s splendid history. Still, Teller’s book must be an early contender for Amnesty International’s Travel Book of the Year.
On this evidence, Teller has two pet hates: Britain and Israel