JERUSALEM ANTHOLOGY Travel Writing Through the Centuries

How did a small agricultural settlement surrounded by hostile nomadic tribes first documented in the second millennium BCE become the central earthly focus for the three great monotheistic religions? How did it cling to its arid hills despite sieges, sacks, wholesale banishments, invasions, massacres and occupations? These old stones have soaked up more blood and witnessed more pain and destruction than the human mind can comprehend, and from the late 17th century to the end of the 19th it seems that almost anyone from Europe and America with the means to do so visited Jerusalem and very few resisted the temptation to record their impressions for posterity. Further back in time are accounts written by pilgrims and soldiers, precious records of a long-vanished past in Byzantine, early-Islamic or Crusader times. Under roughly chronological chapters, each piece of writing itself or the time it describes then separate chapters describe Grand Tours and Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy places, street life, celebrations and politics. There are over 50 pieces from anonymous blood-soaked soldiers and exhausted 13th century pilgrims to well-known names such as Mark Twain, T. E. Lawrence, Gustave Flaubert, Gertrude Bell, Karl Marx and even a suitably rapturous account from 1911 (when the city was under Ottoman control) of the Easter Festival of the Cross by none other than Grigorii Rasputin. A beautifully produced pocket-sized with atmospheric sepia illus, 151pp.