Jerusalem: City of the Book
By Merav Mack and Benjamin Balint
Yale, 272pp, £20/$30
Is there anything new that can be said about Jerusalem, the most contested city on earth, where three religions coincide and, indeed, collide? And yet this book, by a pair of Israeli writers, does precisely that: it creates for the reader a new landscape of the mind, and it reminds us why, even though we may feel we have heard enough of the Holy City, it remains a place of marvels.
The trick, and it is certainly a clever one, is to approach Jerusalem through its archives and libraries. The results of this approach are astonishing – after all, manuscripts, scrolls and ancient codices in obscure languages are not immediately interesting. But, using material that might be as dry as dust in the hands of others, the two authors produce what is at once a cultural history, a guidebook and in many ways an elegy for a past that lives on only in archives.
