Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore Read Free Book Online

Ottomans, for over a thousand years afterwards. 7
    No one knows how many people died in Jerusalem, and ancient historians are always reckless with numbers. Tacitus says there were 600,000 in the besieged city, while Josephus claims over a million. Whatever the true figure, it was vast, and all of these people died of starvation, were killed or were sold into slavery.
    Titus embarked on a macabre victory tour. His mistress Berenice and her brother the king hosted him in their capital Caesarea Philippi, in today’s Golan Heights. There he watched thousands of Jewish prisoners fight each other – and wild animals – to the death. A few days later, he saw another 2,500 killed in the circus at Caesarea Maritima and yet more were playfully slaughtered in Beirut before Titus returned to Rome to celebrate his Triumph.
    The legions ‘entirely demolished the rest of the city, and overthrew its walls’. Titus left only the towers of Herod’s Citadel ‘as a monument of his good fortune’. There the Tenth Legion made its headquarters. ‘This was the end which Jerusalem came to’, wrote Josephus, ‘a city otherwise of great magnificence and of mighty fame among all mankind’.
    Jerusalem had been totally destroyed five centuries earlier by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon. Within fifty years of that first destruction, the Temple was rebuilt and the Jews returned. But this time, after AD 70, the Temple was never rebuilt – and, except for a few brief interludes, the Jews would not rule Jerusalem again for nearly 2,000 years. Yet within the ashes of this calamity lay the seeds not only of modern Judaism but also of Jerusalem’s sanctity for Christianity and Islam.
    Early during the siege, according to much later rabbinical legend, Yohanan ben Zakkai, a respected rabbi, had ordered his pupils to carry him out of the doomed city in a coffin, a metaphor for the foundation of a new Judaism no longer based on the sacrificial cult in the Temple. 8
    The Jews, who continued to live in the countryside of Judaea and Galilee, as well as in large communities across the Roman and Persian empires, mourned the loss of Jerusalem and revered the city ever after. The Bible and the oral traditions replaced the Temple, but it was said that Providence waited for three and a half years on the Mount of Olives to see if the Temple would be restored – before rising to heaven. The destruction was also decisive for the Christians.
    The small Christian community of Jerusalem, led by Simon, Jesus’ cousin, had escaped from the city before the Romans closed in. Even though there were many non-Jewish Christians living around the Roman world, these Jerusalemites remained a Jewish sect praying at the Temple. But now the Temple had been destroyed, the Christians believed that the Jews had lost the favour of God: the followers of Jesus separated for ever from the mother faith, claiming to be the rightful heirs to the Jewish heritage. The Christians envisaged a new, celestial Jerusalem, not a shattered Jewish city. The earliest Gospels, probably written just after the destruction, recounted how Jesus had foreseen the siege of the city: ‘ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies’; and the demolition of the Temple: ‘Not one stone shall remain.’ The ruined Sanctuary and the downfall of the Jews were proof of the new revelation. In the 620s, when Muhammad founded his new religion, he first adopted Jewish traditions, praying towards Jerusalem and revering the Jewish prophets, because for him too the destruction of the Temple proved that God had withdrawn his blessing from Jews and bestowed it on Islam.
    It is ironic that the decision of Titus to destroy Jerusalem helped make the city the very template of holiness for the other two Peoples of the Book. From the very beginning, Jerusalem’s sanctity did not just evolve but was promoted by the decisions of a handful of men. Around 1000 BC , a thousand years before Titus, the first of these men captured