Vincent Lemire, Denis Charbit and Simon Leys

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

It’s done with Jerusalem 1900. Supported by a massive solicitation of previously unpublished Ottoman municipal archives, the Holy City suddenly resembles a European capital more than its traditional image as a forgotten corner of Palestine, sleepy and depopulated. Lemire tackles 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, extra-mural, played a decisive demographic role. . Analyzing the poetic, even fantastical, dimension of a city of ink and paper where we find what we came to look for, a city of archaeological trickery, it highlights, a contrario, municipal activity , the managerial seriousness and the political and administrative importance of a city directly dependent on Istanbul. Thus appears at the end of this book, between 1880 and 1920, the elected and peaceful period of a city that its status asaxis of the world and ardent heart of Abrahamic monotheism constantly brings warlike tensions and religious exclusivism within reach.

At the present timewhere the term “Zionism” is limited to being a standard or an insult, and more and more difficult an object of historiographical reflection or religious meditation, the reading of What is Zionism?by Denis Charbit, proves 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, driven by the Austrian writer and journalist Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) attempted, in principle, alignment of the planets: that of language (return to Hebrew language and culture), of the earth (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 with precision 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, including the “ethical Zionism” by the philosopher Martin Buber.

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