Second frame of third chapter:

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.