Simon Sebag Montefiore, the renowned historian and writer, spoke to a crowd of hundreds on Sunday at the National Library of Israel about the history of Judaism in the Holy Land, and how ancient prejudices have informed the current narratives about the country.
Under the program titled “Jerusalem, Israel, and the World,” Montefiore and acclaimed journalist Matti Friedman delved into how Jerusalem – both city and symbol – functions as a stage for sweeping historical narratives, as well as a prism through which to understand Israel’s identity and its evolving place in global affairs.
During the conversation, Montefiore, whose books include the 2011 Jerusalem: The Biography, brought his sweeping historical vision that draws on his multifaceted works, while Friedman provided the journalist’s eye for nuance, storytelling, and the tensions of modern Israel, interspersed with moments of humor.
What unfolded onstage at the National Library was less a conversation than a broad historical reckoning. Montefiore and Friedman – two writers who have spent their careers excavating the myths, documents, obsessions, and catastrophes that shaped the modern world – sat before a packed hall to explore an unnervingly simple question: How did we get here? And perhaps more urgently: Why does the past feel so present again?
Montefiore’s observations framed the evening’s astonishing journey across centuries. Modern nationalism, he reminded the audience, was not ancient. “The Greeks were the first to do it in 1820 to 1824,” he said, with the formation of the modern Greek state after revolt against the Ottomans.
That nationalist spark – rooted in a romanticized medieval past – spread rapidly. Slavic peoples began weaving their own epics of origin, curating medieval myths to build modern identity. “And, of course,” Montefiore added, “the Turks themselves were affected by it, even though they were the rulers of a multinational, multi-ethnic, multisectarian empire. And, of course, the Arabs became infected with it. And, of course, the Jews. And here we sit.”
It was the first of many moments in which ancient and modern sat uncomfortably side by side with mythical and political.
Montefiore’s latest book, The World: A Family History of Humanity, he explained, explores a world shaped not by purity but by movement – “created by refugees, migrations, the merging of peoples.” Nations, he argued, are largely “invented concepts,” fictions we agree to inhabit. And yet, as Friedman dryly noted, this invention rarely applies in the eyes of people discussing their own nation. The audience laughed, knowingly and perhaps uncomfortably.
This launched them into another of Montefiore’s long-running fascinations: dynasties. He teased his own pull toward the Romanovs, Catherine the Great, and Prince Potemkin – figures whose personal passions redrew maps, annexed territories, and founded cities still fought over today. “Your Russian interest has led you into some kind of… contact with Vladimir Putin,” Friedman prompted carefully, “or some kind of relationship.”
What followed was perhaps the night’s most extraordinary anecdote.
Montefiore recounted that after publishing one of his books on Russia, he received a quiet request from the Russian embassy in London. Putin – then a new, hopeful reformer – wanted an essay explaining how Catherine the Great and military leader Grigory Potemkin conquered Ukraine and Crimea. “Of course I did it,” Montefiore said. “It really wasn’t a question,” Friedman rejoined.
Putin arranged for the book to be published in Russia and even offered Montefiore a gift: first access to Stalin’s personal archives. That act made his next book possible. But when Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar came out, the Kremlin turned cold. “Your book is not approved,” Montefiore was told. “We don’t remember you.” The archives were locked again.
History, he suggested, is never merely past. It breathes. It chooses its moments to reassert itself.
From Russia, the conversation shifted homeward, to Jerusalem, to Britain, to the strange imaginative geography that binds them. Friedman recalled a line about Jerusalem. Arthur Stanley, dean of Westminster in the 1860s, claimed that the Land of Israel was “more dear to us from our childhood even than England.”
Another Victorian figure, the Earl of Shaftesbury, coined a phrase later attributed to Zionists: “A country without a nation for a nation without a country.” Shaftesbury himself was driven not by Jewish sovereignty but by an evangelical desire to return Jews to the Holy Land as a precursor to the Second Coming.
These obsessions were not marginal.
They shaped the Balfour Declaration and the foundations of British policy. Montefiore described how Protestantism’s return to biblical text, predating Herzl and modern Zionism, fueled a belief that Jews must be restored to their ancient land.
By the mid-19th century, figures, notably Moses Montefiore, were already supporting Jewish communities across the four holy cities. Even in the 16th century, Solomon the Magnificent’s court had advisers such as Joseph Nasi, a Jewish duke who tried to settle Jews in Tiberias and Safed.
The roots, in other words, run much deeper than the 19th-century diplomatic record.
But Friedman’s implicit question “Why the strange perspective on this place and the people who live here?” felt sharpened by the present moment.
Montefiore did not flinch. The same Western fascination that once manifested as evangelical philosemitism, he argued, has been “inverted” into a new moral crusade against Israel. “Chaim Weizmann said ‘Beware of the philosemites; they’re exactly like antisemites,’” Montefiore reminded the crowd. Today’s progressive accusations – of colonialism, of original sin – draw from the same deep well of Western conviction that the Holy Land belongs not only to its inhabitants but to the imagination of Europe.
Friedman then pushed the discussion into its rawest terrain: the collapse of the illusion that history was over. He spoke of the response to Oct. 7 abroad, particularly in London, telling the audience that the response “feels medieval.”
Montefiore agreed.
Oct. 7, he argued, resembled nothing so much as the Crusaders’ sack of Jerusalem in 1099. He noted that Hamas’s ideology, too, draws deeply from European conspiracy texts, namely the fabricated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The parallels, Montefiore emphasized, are not accidental.
What emerged over the course of the evening was a sweeping recognition: The illusions that Zionism solved Jewish vulnerability and that liberalism solved Western extremism have shattered.
The systems built after World War II are dissolving. History – messy, cruel, and unlinear – has returned.
As the event neared its conclusion, Friedman observed that reading Jerusalem: The Biography today feels profoundly different from a decade ago. The book’s scenes of conquest and devastation no longer seem distant. They feel like warnings – or reminders.