world: israel | From the Heart of Europe

See here for methodology, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set within what are usually called the 1967 internationally recognised borders of Israel.

To get one thing out of the way: I disqualified the Bible. A lot of it is simply not sufficently narrative in format that you can reasonably describe it as being set in a particular locality, and a lot of the rest is set in places other than the Holy Land, and a lot of what is set in the Holy Land is the wrong side of the 1967 border for my purposes here. Otherwise it would have won this week’s list by a long way.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
The Dovekeepers	Alice Hoffman	80,485	3,327	5,986
Exodus	Leon Uris	101,539	4,532	2,629
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil	Hannah Arendt	34,384	4,895	3,480
The Bronze Bow	Elizabeth George Speare	28,331	5,728	2,276
The Source	James A. Michener	45,782	4,318	1,337
The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East	Sandy Tolan	18,910	1,362	1,773
A Tale of Love and Darkness	Amos Oz	12,981	2,587	823
A Horse Walks into a Bar	David Grossman	15,864	856	1,846

This is the first time since I started incorporating StoryGraph numbers that I’ve had three different books topping the charts on the three different systems. The winner on StoryGraph, and the overall winner (second on Goodreads but only fifth on LibraryThing) is The Dovekeepers, about the siege of Masada in 72-73 CE, published in 2011 and adapted for television in 2015, which will have helped its sales. The LibraryThing winner, The Bronze Bow, is also set in the first century CE, but a little earlier, about a boy who is a contemporary of Jesus and fights the Romans.

The Goodreads winner, Exodus by Leon Uris, which I had honestly expected to top the charts overall, is a novel about the twentieth-century creation of Israel, a topic also addressed by The Lemon Tree (a novel about the inhabitants of a particular house in Ramla) and A Tale of Love and Darkness (an autobiography).

The Source is the only one of these that I have read; it’s a set of stories set across the centuries mostly in a particular (fictional) ancient city, with the framing narrative being the twentieth-century archaeologists who dig it up.

Given that Adolf Eichmann’s trial was in 1961, there is no question that the location of Eichmann in Jerusalem is the right side of the line for my purposes.

Finally, A Horse Walks into a Bar is about a comedian in Tel Aviv.

Including the StoryGraph numbers meant gaining A Horse Walks into a Bar at the expense of The Attack, by Yasmina Khadra, also set in Tel Aviv.

I don’t find any record that Hannah Arendt became an Israeli citizen. In that case, the top book by an Israeli woman, set in Israel, is Exit Wounds, a graphic novel by Rutu Modan. (Yasmina Khadra is Algerian and a man, despite his female pen-name.)

I disqualified a couple of books about the history of Jerusalem, which are clearly mainly about the Old City (the other side of the 1967 border); a couple of books about the history of Mossad, which concentrated on its operations abroad; and a couple of books about the history of Palestine, which seemed to be mainly addressing the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. We’ll get to some of those in due course.

Next, a run of European countries – Hungary, Austria and Switzerland – followed by a jump to Africa for Sierra Leone.

Second frame of third chapter:

The Emperor Constantine prepares for a decisive battle against his rival Maxentius.

A chunky 250-page history of one of the world’s most contested cities, taking us from Biblical times up to the present day (2022), and telling the story from the perspective of an 4000-year-old olive tree on the Mount of Olives outside the Old City. There are a lot of facts here, some of which I knew and some of which I didn’t. The two that particularly jumped out at me as new were the destruction of the Mughrabi Quarter in 1967 and the destruction of the al-Aqsa minbar in 1969. This is a location where political violence has never been monopolised by one side.

A review by Roy Schwartz of the American Jewish Historical Society accuses the book of blatant historical bias, though to be honest I expect that a review from the other side might make similar complaints in the other direction. Schwartz has very reasonable grounds, however, to complain that most of the modern-era Jewish characters are depicted with hooked noses. Vincent Lemire is a well-known French historian of Jerusalem, and he should have restrained his artist colleague Christophe Gaultier from stereotypes. The graphic novel format is not ideal for delivering facts, but it should not distract from them either.

You can get Histoire de Jérusalem in the original French here, and you can get the English translation, The History of Jerusalem: An Illustrated Story of 4,000 Years, here.

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Tag Archives: world: israel

The best known books set in each country: Israel

Histoire de Jérusalem, by Vincent Lemire and Christophe Gaultier