Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World

This work traces the evolution of the belief that Jerusalem is the center of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious worlds and argues that this fixation is a main cause of the modern-day Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It uncovers the ways in which the city became a transcendent fantasy that ignites religious fervour unlike anywhere else on Earth. He shows how the conflicts within this holiest of cities underscore an important point of history: that religion and violence fuel each other. In the author's reading of the deep past, the Bible came into being as an act of resistance to the violence that threatened Jerusalem from the start. Tracing the richly intertwined threads of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim history, the author illuminates the European fixation.