In Jerusalem: City of the Book, Merav Mack and Benjamin Balint focus on the holy city’s libraries and repositories of books and manuscripts, many unknown or closed to the public. The work spans some 2,000 years of history, as Lewis Glinert writes in his review:
There was Josephus, the Jewish military leader turned Roman historian, one of the few witnesses to write about the sacred library at the Jewish Temple that laid the basis for the Jewish Bible. There were the monks of Mar Saba, an ancient monastery on a desert cliff outside the city, who created a Christian literature in Arabic following the Muslim conquest. There is His Beatitude Nourhan Manougian, the current Armenian patriarch of Jerusalem, who grants the authors permission to view some of the treasures of the Saint Toros library, the greatest in Jerusalem’s Old City, home to 4,000 manuscripts and (perhaps wisely) not connected to the electricity grid. . . . There was Hajj Matityahu, one of 2,000 Persian Jews forcibly converted to Islam in 1839, who eventually absconded to Jerusalem and whose great-grandson Efraim Halevi manages an almost unknown Sephardic Council archive, much of it in a Ladino cursive that few but he can decipher.
While Glinert finds the book “arresting” and “even entertaining”—although sometimes confusing—he notes a telling flaw:
Taking advantage of the regnant scholarly passion for narratives, Mack and Balint felt free to infuse a narrative of their own, one promising a reconciliation between Jew, Arab, and all other interested parties in the Holy City, based on a faith in “the compromises of partial return” (of Palestinian Arabs), thus creating “a place where Israelis and Palestinians ground their respective identities.” But lest the Jewish claim to Jerusalem appear too strong, the authors have unabashedly rewritten the history of the city to marginalize its Jewish connections.
For almost a millennium and a half, the Jews seem to vanish. Was Jerusalem really judenrein from the Roman conquest until they suddenly reappear in 1492? In actual fact, they played an important part in briefing the 7th-century Arab conquerors about the religious significance of the Temple Mount . . . and continued to live and study there except for a hiatus during the Crusades, attracting such greats as [the medieval sages] Moses Naḥmanides and Obadiah da Bertinoro. Alas, little survived of Jerusalem’s synagogues or their libraries under Crusader, Mamluk, or Ottoman rule—only a Jewish literature that fortunately was nurtured in other places.
