Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World (2011 Carroll), non-fiction

<bibexternal title="Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World" author="Carroll"/>

Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World (2011) is a book by James Carroll.

Abstract

"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. ... James Carroll’s urgent, masterly Jerusalem, Jerusalem uncovers the ways in which the ancient city became a transcendent fantasy that ignites religious fervor unlike anywhere else on earth. That fervor animates American history as much as it does the Middle East, in the present as deeply as in the past. In Carroll’s provocative reading of the deep past, the Bible came into being as an act of resistance to the violence that threatened Jerusalem from the start. Centuries later, holy wars burned apocalyptic Jerusalem into the Western mind, sparking expressly religious conflict among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The heat stretched from Richard the Lionheart to Field Marshal Edmund Allenby, whose World War I conquest of the city relit the fuse for a war that still rages. Carroll’s brilliant leap is to show how, as Christopher Columbus was dispatched from the Crusades-obsessed Knights Templar’s last outpost in Iberia, the New World too was powerfully shaped by the millennial obsessions of the City on a Hill — from Governor Winthrop to Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan. Heavenly Jerusalem defines the American imagination — and always, the earthly city smolders. Jerusalem fever, inextricably tied to Christian fervor, is the deadly — unnamed — third party to the Israeli-Palestinian wars. Understanding Jerusalem fever is the key that unlocks world history, and the diagnosis that gives us our best chance to reimagine peace."--Publisher description.

Editions

Published in Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

Contents

Two Jerusalems. Heat ; Jerusalem today ; Hic ; A personal note -- Deep violence. The clock of the past ; Mark makers ; Enter Jerusalem ; Sacrifice -- The Bible resists. Wartime literature ; Wars that did not happen ; God's ambivalence ; Conceived in Jerusalem, born in exile from Jerusalem ; The empty Temple ; Abraham's kill ; Apocalypse then -- The Cross against itself. Jesus to Jerusalem ; Rome's war and its consequences ; The new Temple ; Scapegoat mechanism ; The violence of Christians ; Apocalypse now -- The Rock of Islam. No god but God ; Al Quds ; The masterpiece relic ; Jerusalem agonistes ; 1099 ; Knights Templar ; Christopher the Christ bearer -- City on a hill. Reformation wars ; Separatists ; The God of peace ; Return to Jerusalem ; Temple roots ; Jerusalem marchers -- Messiah nation. Jerusalem and exile ; The printing press and Ottoman Jerusalem ; The peaceful Crusade -- Restorationism ; Abraham's altar ; God's right arm ; Apostolic succession --Jerusalem builded here. The last Crusader ; Diaspora's end ; Waiting to baptize you ; Grand mufti ; Eichmann in Jerusalem ; Nakba ; Soap ; Twins in trauma -- Millennium. The Temple weapons ; Sacrifice operatives ; Crusade -- Good religion. Neither secular nor sacred ; Not God's way, but man's ; Learning from history

External links

• [ Google Books]