Jerusalem, Jerusalem - 9780547195612

Jerusalem, Jerusalem is an eye-opening prism through which the ancient city—both actual place and incendiary fantasy—is seen anew.

First, in a probing journey through prehistory, Carroll excavates the deepest origins of sacred violence and human sacrifice, revealing how both had early sanctuary in Jerusalem. In Carroll's provocative reading, the Bible, for all its brutality, evolved as an act of resistance against the deep violence that threatened Jerusalem from the start. Tracing the richly intertwined threads of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim history, Carroll illuminates the mounting European fantasy of a heavenly Jerusalem as the spark that enflamed the holy wars of the Knights Templar. His brilliant and original leap is to show how, as Christopher Columbus carried his Jerusalem-centric world view to the West, America too was powerfully shaped by the apocalyptic fantasy of the City on the Hill—from Governor Winthrop to Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson to Ronald Reagan. Finally, Carroll reveals how this long fixation, meshing with anti-Semitism and anti-Arab colonialism both, is the essential but unnamed third party to Israeli-Palestinian conflict over Jerusalem today. Once again, a "rare book that combines searing passion . . . with a subject that has affected all our lives" (Chicago Tribune).