Jerusalem: History of a Global City by Vincent Lemire, Katell Berthelot, Julian Loiseau, and Yann Potin

The first thing to note about this new volume about the history of Jerusalem is its claim to being the only comprehensive volume that documents the full 3,000-year history of Jerusalem in the English or French language (2).¹ Although this claim, at first, seems preposterous—given the number of books written about Jerusalem—the authors suggest that no “real” single-volume scientific history with a single narrative voice (English or French) has seen publication in recent years. On the one hand are the many scholarly books covering various aspects of the 3,000-year history, often as anthologies comprising chapters with multiple authors—for example, the Routledge Handbook on Jerusalem, which boasts thirty-five chapters by thirty-five different authors!² On the other hand are the abundant single-authored books that purport to cover the history of Jerusalem, but not even their own authors consider them to be “real” history books—for example, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem:...