Benjamin Disraeli once said, to no one’s surprise, “If I want to read a book, I write one.” At the Jaipur Literature Festival, held from 20-24 January, Simon Sebag Montefiore quotes him laughingly, saying that he takes the dictum for his own.
This seems well within reason when you consider Montefiore’s latest book, one of 2011’s most acclaimed works, Jerusalem: The Biography. Here, Montefiore has attempted a single-volume history of one of the world’s most contested cities, bringing his considerable scholarship to bear on the political, religious and historical dimensions of its myths. The result is a long but crisp and riveting book in which Montefiore successfully answers the question of what makes this city, over all others in the West, such a lodestone for the imagination, and such a site of tragic conflict.
The personal is political: The Damascus Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem.(Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)
But Montefiore is also, famously, the scholar who has written not one, but two landmark biographies of Josef Stalin. If Disraeli’s witticism really does hold true for him, we must ask how it came to be that Montefiore wanted to live with two books about one of the least pleasant men in modern history.
“These are two books I wanted to read for myself which didn’t exist,” he says seriously. He means Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2005) and its successor, Young Stalin (2008). He thinks of them as studies of a man before and after his prime: Young Stalin is a glimpse into the divinity student and aspiring poet who grew into Vladimir Lenin’s indispensable henchman, and The Court of the Red Tsar opens, decades after that Georgian childhood, on the Stalin of late middle-age, and the closed circle of families who ruled the Soviet Union on his orders.
“I think biography is a wonderful way to do several things,” Montefiore says. “First of all, I love human lives; I’m endlessly curious about people. Biography is also accessible; an easy way for people to understand history. Thirdly, I think people recognize now how individuals change history. Most recently after 9/11, any president might have attacked Afghanistan, but only President Bush would have attacked Iraq. That’s just a small recent example of how personalities change history, even in the great democracies.”
Montefiore
His first three works of non-fiction were all based in Russia: the Stalin books came after a particularly well-regarded debut, 2004’s
Catherine the Great and Potemkin. They are bound not only by their location but also as studies of personal power, as deconstructions of myth and supposition.
So the Jerusalem project, for Montefiore, was a break from past writing, but a profound return to personal history. His family has a connection with the city which stretches well back in time: an ancestor, Moses Montefiore, began to build the quarters from which the modern city of Jerusalem would eventually spread outwards. “Because of that connection, I’ve been going to Jerusalem all my lifetime,” he says. “But that’s not why I wrote the book; I wrote the book because the book needed writing.”
It is a book that tries to make sense of how a small, dusty outcrop of civilization, well away from major water sources and trading routes alike, came to exist twice: on earth as well as in heaven, and sacred to three major religions. How could such a disputed tangle of stories be told with anything approaching fairness to all versions of history?
Montefiore knew, when embarking on the task, that a book about Jerusalem’s identity would be a book that pleased no one. “Funnily enough, it’s won a Jewish book of the year prize (The Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award) in America, and if you look on Facebook, you’ll see Palestinians who’ve written that it should win the Arab book of the year award,” Montefiore says. “But If I had pleased the extremists on either side, I’d have made a mistake.”
He wrote it, he says, because “people have to understand how we’ve reached this point”. Montefiore’s research meant that he had to talk down Israelis who didn’t want him to mention the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948, and Western historians who insisted that Ottoman Jerusalem was a model of Muslim tolerance written out of relevance by Islamophobes. He had to use the Bible and, to a lesser extent, the Quran, as historical sources. “Sacred texts are famously unintelligible,” he explains. “The Bible more so than most, as partly a collection of mythological stories, partly personal, partly stories told with a particular politico-religious aim in mind. But to write without the myths would be to write about Jerusalem without religion,” he explains. “And Jerusalem without religion is incomprehensible.”
supriya.n@livemint.com