Indeed, it is still poor — mainly because of the high number of ultra-orthodox haredim who don't work (another source of tension in a city that lives on its nerves). And yet it is still magnificent, luminous and utterly special. And that is because it is a city of profound spirituality and religious longing.

For both Judaism and Christianity, Jerusalem was the place where the end of days would occur; and because the Muslims knew that this was foretold by the Jewish and Christian prophets, they wanted to own it too. Like all millenarian dreams of redemption, this one exacted a horrific toll of fanaticism. To this eye-opening narrative of obsession, power-lust, and unspeakable savagery, Sebag Montefiore brings a novelist's touch: vivid vignettes, stories and descriptions that leap off the page. Indeed, we could surely do without some of this graphic detail: Roman crucifixions, Tartar disembowellings, Crusaders piling up mounds of hacked-off limbs as a kind of religious sacrament. A city of peace this never was.

Strikingly, the seething hatreds coursing through it were not just between different religions but within them. In the 18th century, different Christian denominations hated each other so much that, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, every warring sect had its own lavatorial arrangement.  

Even today in that same church, Greeks fight the Catholics and Armenians, Copts fight the Ethiopians, and the only people entrusted with keys are Muslim Arabs from two rival families, who fight each other too.

People who think the State of Israel was a by-product of the Holocaust will also be surprised to learn that the real begetters were 19th and early 20th-century Christian evangelicals. They passionately believed in the redemption of the Jews to the land of Israel, and created the environment for the 1917 Balfour Declaration which paved the way for the Jews' return to their ancestral home.

In describing these claims and counter-claims to Jerusalem, Sebag Montefiore takes pains to be totally even-handed — rather too much so. For he gives the impression that the fight for the city is between three religions with equal claims.