Vincent Lemire, Denis Charbit and Simon Leys

These are of course other dates. which we imagine spontaneously linked to the name of Jerusalem: 586 BC and 70, the destruction of the two temples; 30, the crucifixion of Christ; 1099 and 1187, the taking of the city by the crusaders and then by Saladin; 1948, the score. Let’s add October 4, 1806: the entry of the tourist Chateaubriand. But it is in the temperament of the historian Vincent Lemire, a specialist in Jerusalem hydrology, to cross the ruddy historiographical lines.

It is made with Jerusalem 1900. Supported by a massive request for unpublished Ottoman municipal archives, the Holy City suddenly looks more like a European capital than its traditional image of a forgotten, sleepy, depopulated corner of Palestine. Lemire addresses it position after position. He thus breaks the myth of a city registered in four sealed neighborhoods (Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Armenian), showing that diversity was important there and that the growing role of modern Jerusalem, outside the walls, played a decisive demographic role. Analyzing the poetic, even fantastic, dimension of a city of ink and paper where we find what we came looking for, a city of archaeological deceptions, he highlights, on the contrary, the municipal activity, the business seriousness and the political and administrative importance of a city ​​that depends directly on Istanbul. This is how it appears at the end of this book, between 1880 and 1920, the elected and peaceful period of a city that its condition ofworld axis and the ardent heart of Abrahamic monotheism constantly puts warlike tensions and religious exclusivism within our reach.

At the momentwhere the term “Zionism” is limited to being a norm or an insult, and increasingly difficult to be an object of historiographical reflection or religious meditation, the reading of What is Zionism?by Denis Charbit, is valuable. Dating from 1890, of German origin (zionism), in direct connection with the trauma of the European pogroms and the massive wave of emigration to the United States, Zionism, promoted by the Austrian writer and journalist Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) attempted, in principle, the alignment of the planets: that is, of the language (return to the Hebrew language and culture), of the land (the “Zion” of the ancestors and patriarchs) and the creation of a democracy-refuge, of a protective state for every Jew. Denis Charbit details this vision precisely and allows us to methodically consider the Zionist question. The most captivating chapter is undoubtedly the presentation of the different conceptions of Zionism, from the mystical and spiritual (Ahad Ha’am) to the statism of Jabotinsky and Ben Gurion, passing through the “Ethical Zionism” of the philosopher Martin Buber.

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