Jerusalem

"I just wanted something slightly different. At the beginning I was talking to you about how I wanted to see Jerusalem as a city of music, food, sex and happiness, and not just of massacres, sieges and wars. This is the book. Ottolenghi has written it with a Palestinian co-writer, Sami Tamimi. It is just wonderful. It’s one of my favourite books. It’s full of delicious, delightful things. But more than that, it’s about Jerusalem’s food and its eclecticism, its hybridity and the syncretism of the different sorts of food that you find. There are Yemenis, Germans, Palestinians and Turks. There are Georgians and Armenians. I could go on. It is the universal city. The book is very much a Sephardic Jewish/Arab combination. Ottlenghi is of Italian-Jewish descent himself. Sami is his business partner and is Arab. They founded Ottolenghi together. I love the restaurants here in London. There’s Armenian food in the book as well as, obviously, the Jewish/Arab and traditional Muslim food. It’s got everything and it really reflects modern Jerusalem, the international city. Ottolenghi is an amazing character. He’s done so much for bringing together Jewish and Arab culture. No. They’re not. They’re quite complicated. The chicken is always with things like caramelised onion and cardamom rice. There’s fish with harissa and rose. The salads are always incredibly complicated. They always have walnuts in them and beetroot. Pistachios are used quite a bit. It’s pretty sumptuous stuff. But it’s appropriate for Jerusalem. The book is just great to read. You can just open it anywhere and it will have one of these amazing dishes. I love Arabic food. Yotam and Sami are a great double act. I think they met in London twenty or thirty years ago. They were both from Jerusalem and they got together and created this little empire. I think this book is up there with Josephus and the Bible as a great Jerusalem book. There are so many Old Jerusalems. Jerusalem is ever evolving and so I don’t think anything’s been destroyed in that sense. Some old neighbourhoods have been destroyed, some have been rebuilt, some have been restored beautifully. And nothing can really spoil the amazing Temple Mount, which has the two great mosques on it—the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa—and then has the wall of Herod’s Temple around it. Nothing can beat the beauty of that—that really is ancient. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But then, how much of the rest of the old city is that ancient? Most of it was built in the late 19th century by Britain, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Its antiquity is a bit of an illusion. Most people think the walls are very ancient, but most of the walls were built by Suleiman the Magnificent. So they are no older than Hampton Court and most of the buildings within the Old City are late 19th century. They are no older than Chelsea. No, that really is old. It’s very interesting. Originally there was a Roman temple there. The first version was built by Constantine the Great in the 320s and 330s. Then it was rebuilt by the great female ruler of Jerusalem—one of the great women of Jerusalem—Melisende, who built it in the Romanesque style during the Crusades. She was the daughter of King Baldwin II of Jerusalem. That was built in the 1130s or 1140s. But the rest of the churches and all the hostels are Victorian. When people like Montefiore went there and when Disraeli visited Jerusalem in the 1820s, it was literally half-empty. The Old City was half-filled with prickly pear bushes and sand and there was almost nothing in it at all. There were only about 2,000 people living in Jerusalem. They were living amongst these amazing buildings like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the mosques and a few other buildings. But a lot of it was empty. That’s why from the 1860s onwards, suddenly the Great Powers descended on Jerusalem and started to build massive buildings, which you can see there now. That’s how it has filled up. This is what I was saying at the beginning. It’s a good circular way of approaching Jerusalem. There have been many Jerusalems and it is always changing. What seems ancient and constant is, in fact, often new and different from what one expects. No, because it was ruled from Damascus. At other times it was ruled from Acre, including during the Napoleonic period. But most of the time it was incredibly minor. But it was conquered in 1517 by Selim the Grim, the amazing Ottoman conqueror, who really changed world history. In one campaign he conquered Jerusalem, Mecca, Medina, Cairo and Damascus. It was very important to the Ottomans that Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem—the three holy cities—were treated well. His son, Suleiman the Magnificent, spent an enormous amount of money on Jerusalem. He never went there, but he built the city and the city walls. There were no walls there at the time. They had been destroyed in the 13th century, at the end of the Crusades, when Jerusalem was little more than a monumental village. Suleiman did more to build Jerusalem than anyone except David and Solomon, Constantine the Great and a few others. But after about two or three reigns the Ottomans started to lose control of the provinces of their empire and Jerusalem was ruled by corrupt pashas. It was basically neglected and, by the late 18th century, it was empty and very neglected. A few Jews lived there, but not many Turks or Palestinian Arabs. It was in a very bad way. It was restored by the great western powers and the huge pilgrimages that started in the 19th century. Jerusalem is constantly changing and there were many periods when it was neglected by Islam and Christianity. And very few Jews could afford to live there and those that did, did so in great poverty. So it’s ever-changing. The modern Jerusalem that we see today is probably the greatest it’s ever been as a city, but obviously, tragically, it’s very divided. Although, frankly, whatever you think of Donald Trump, it already was the capital of Israel. He was just recognising something that had already happened."