Jerusalem Falls

September 19, 2022
In this meticulous history, Hosler (The Siege of Acre), a military history professor at the Command and General Staff College, chronicles the sieges, conquests, and rapprochements of Jerusalem between the seventh and 13th centuries. Pushing back against the notion that religious conflict defined medieval Jerusalem, he contends that the era tells a “story of concord and resolution.” He details such atrocities as al-Hakim of Egypt’s persecution of Christians and the bloody First Crusade, but suggests that acts of barbarity prove the exception in the city’s mostly ecumenical medieval history. Hosler posits that Jerusalem was characterized by pragmatic religious pluralism and tolerance between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and he highlights such instances of interfaith accord as Umar’s Assurance, in which Christians agreed to peacefully surrender the city to the caliph Umar after his concession that he would allow Christians to continue practicing their faith in 638 CE. Hosler argues that the city’s pluralist past encourages readers to think “about contemporary issues in new ways” and consider how diversity begets community. Unwaveringly evenhanded, Hosler succeeds in constructing a plausible and surprising counternarrative to histories of Jerusalem focused on violence and conquest. A fresh perspective elevates this sharp chronicle.

September 15, 2022
An argument for the relevance of Jerusalem's history, from the seventh to the 13th centuries to today's conflicts over its status. Hosler, a professor of military history and author of The Siege of Acre, sets his narrative during the centuries known in the West as the "medieval period." He describes the text as a "book about conquest" covering a series of Jerusalem's "falls" when "possession of the city passed from adherents of one religious confession to another by way of conflict." It's a dizzying, detailed story of faiths, ethnic and tribal communities, and sects and subgroups using military action to secure control of a city sacred to all of them. Some of these elements--Persians, Saracens, Christians, Byzantines, Fatimids, Europeans, Arabs, Turks, Sunnis and Shia Muslims--will be known to readers, yet many will be hard-pressed to keep track of the hundreds of other figures who populate the complex narrative. While a judicious attempt at balancing accounts, it's difficult to see its relevance to the current situation in Israel. There's no question that Jerusalem's inhabitants during Europe's Middle Ages experienced periods of tranquility and toleration in their multicultural, pluralistic society. However, there was also no lack of carnage, including massacres by Christian crusaders in 1099, the nadir of the city's history. While it's important to be reminded that, from time to time, Jerusalem was "a city for all," the text is packed with gore, massacres, and expulsions by Christian crusaders as well as Jews and non-Christian "infidels" attempting to hold their possession in the Judean hills. Trying to balance such horrors against periods of comparative calm is a false equivalency. Nevertheless, for its factual and up-to-date solidity and skilled rendering of a deeply complex and troubling history, Hosler's work deserves attention. A useful historical resource aside from the stretch required to accept its central argument.

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