Did you know that Joseph Stalin could sing with perfect pitch? Or that he was so scared of his wife that he would hide from her in the bathroom? Did you know that Peter the Great liked to surround himself with naked dwarfs? Did you know that Catherine the Great—long smeared as a nymphomaniac—was actually a lovelorn monogamist? Or that King Herod’s genitals once exploded with maggots? Most historians bore you with dry accounts of battles and treaties, and it’s hard to remember any of it. But not Simon Sebag Montefiore, who writes 900 pages that you cannot put down. Sebag is one of the most important historians alive today. His many books, like Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, The Romanovs, and Catherine the Great & Potemkin are essential to understanding power, politics, revolution, dictatorships, and above all, human nature. While most of Sebag’s books are biographies of people, Jerusalem is a biography of a city—a city, as he writes, that is “the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions, and the only city to exist twice in heaven and on earth.” The book takes you through Jerusalem’s 3,000-year history, from King David to Bibi Netanyahu. It is a must-read. It has sold more than a million copies, and it has just been reissued in paperback. With the ceasefire deal underway in Israel and with Trump a few weeks into his second presidency, we could not think of a better person to talk to than Simon about this moment and how to understand it. Header 6: The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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From the free press, this is honestly live in New York City. Thank you.
Hell yeah! I'm Barry Weiss, and I am thrilled to be here with you tonight. Did you guys know that Joseph Stalin could sing with perfect pitch? Or that he was so scared of his wife that he would hide from her in the bathroom? Did you know that Peter the Great liked to surround himself with a lot of naked dwarves?
Did you know that Catherine the Great, long smeared as a nymphomaniac, was actually a lovelorn monogamist? Or that King Herod's genitals once exploded with maggots? Most historians bore you with dry accounts of battles and treaties, and honestly, I don't remember any of it. But not my guest tonight, not Simon Sebag Montefiore, who writes 900 pagers that you cannot put down.
Sebag is one of the most important historians alive today. His many books, like Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar, The Romanovs, and Catherine the Great, to name a few, are essential to understanding power, politics, revolution, dictatorships, and above all, human nature. Most of his books are biographies of people, but Jerusalem is a biography of a city.
A city, as he writes, that is the house of the one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions, and the only city to exist twice, in heaven and on earth. The book takes you through Jerusalem's 3,000-year history, from King David to Bibi Netanyahu. It is a must-read. It has sold more than a million copies, many of them in China, which we're going to learn about.
And it has just been reissued in paperback. With the ceasefire deal underway in Israel, with Trump, I think, 72 hours into being president again, I could not think of a better person to talk to than Sebag. So, Simon Sebag Montefiore, welcome to Honestly.
Thank you so much. It's... It's great to be here and great to see you.
It's great to see you too.
We last saw each other on election day.
Exactly. So we saw each other the afternoon of the election.
And we called it right.
We did call it right. But neither of us had the cojones to go on Twitter and say we think Trump's going to win. But we both acknowledged to each other privately that we thought Trump was going to win. And I think the feeling that both of us felt that day was a kind of nauseous anticipation and a sense that something big was coming.
And I don't think either of us felt like the big thing was Trump, but something maybe beyond him on the horizon. Can you maybe take us back to that conversation and take us to like how you felt on the eve of his election and how you're feeling today and what you think it portends?
I think that the significance of it was a crisis of confidence in the Western liberal democracies in themselves, and a crisis partly caused by an incredibly complex world crisis, many new powers rising, but also a crisis within the societies of the Western liberal democracies, which had been models of confidence in themselves since 1945.
In 1945, the victory of liberal democracies, the defeat of a totalitarian challenge sold the idea of Western capitalist democracy around the world And even new countries that were in fact dictatorships felt they had to look like democracies. They all had presidencies and legislatures and everything. They were just copying America because America was the model of victory. And for systems to win...
in the world, they have to win wars. They have to be willing to win. And that's the crisis we've really seen in the last 25 years in the United States most significantly, but also in Britain, where I come from, and in Europe.
And that is the orthodoxy that was really personified by the disasters of the Obama-Biden administration, often with the best intentions, often with the best values, but a constant self-doubting about America's place in the world, America's mission. So that is, I think, the deeper significance of the election of Trump.
I think a lot of people feel like the consensus politics that we grew up under, thinking about Clinton, I'm thinking about the idea that history had ended, as you sort of alluded to it, that liberalism and capitalism were obviously better and therefore were going to conquer the world, that now seems so naive. How did we get that so wrong?
How did so many so-called experts tell us that we had come to an end of history itself? And that's so obviously, whether it's Trump here or Maloney or Malay or I could go on and on and on, people are enthusiastically electing those that stand for a very different set of values.
Well, I think what we're coming out of is an extraordinary period. You know, we're coming out of what I would call, depending on how you calculate it, the 70-year peace or the 75-year peace. But in 1945, there was such a shock that all sorts of things became clear. All sorts of taboos were established. For example, you know, we're talking in a synagogue here, the taboo of anti-Semitism itself.
but also it became self-evident that Western liberal democracy was the right, the freest, the most open society in which to live. And the values that that engendered brought us Great advances in world affairs, the rules-based world order, supranational organization, United Nations, the idea of world human rights.
And then in the 60s, what I call the great liberal reformation of gay rights, abortion, the pill, all this sort of thing. none of that was challenged by anyone for a very long time. So America could go about its mission of selling those ideas to the world. And then, of course, the Soviet Union fell. But it's interesting to realise that there'd never been a period like this in world history.
This wasn't normal. Normally, everybody's against everybody. Most world history is about a multiplayer game. But that was a game of chess between two great players, Soviet Union and United States. When that ended, America lost its way, and America was the unipower.
And for whatever reasons, some of them understandable, some of them preposterous, America squandered that moment, partly with the disaster of the Iraq War. And out of that has come a reordering, a return to normalcy, in which it's ever more important that our society, especially liberal democracies, keep their solidarity, their coherence.
And it's at this very moment that we're actually eating ourselves in an act of self-mutilation. I mean, there's become a challenge from within society itself.
the entitlements and the entitlements that people believe are owed to them by their societies, some of them financial in the comfort democracies of Europe, like Britain, Canada, and some of them the result of law itself, out of human rights law. But all of these things have created loyalties that are greater than to the state.
And as Rousseau said, you know, if someone says, like, what does the state mean to me? The state is lost. And JFK quoted that as well because it's a quote that makes you realize the stakes at the moment are very high. So many things became unsayable and so many things lack sense that it's very easy for populists from right and left to claim that they can solve these problems.
But the point is that one of my great heroes, the historian Ibn Khaldun, the Arab historian from the 14th century, he said many fascinating things. But one of the things he said, like, he said, states don't fall from military defeats. They usually fall because of psychology. And that's worth thinking about.
If you had to diagnose the psychology of America and the West right now in a few lines, what would it be?
a crisis of self-confidence, a crisis in which people have forgotten that the freedoms and values that they hold were fought for. And the wars are pretty unpleasant things, but those fights were worth joining. And that is the crisis today. I mean, if you look at our nation, we kind of generally agree that nation states are the best way to organize countries and empires aren't a good thing.
But of course, nation states are very flawed things. They exclude people.
They have borders.
They have borders. And if you're not in the nation, however that nation is defined, that can be an uncomfortable situation. So there are flaws from nation states. But I just wonder, you know, the young people that went off to fight for democracies in World War II, for example, how many of the present young generation would fight for their nation now?
And yet those nations can represent the highest ideas and values. I'm kind of old-fashioned, but I believe that America represents the highest values of freedom. I believe in that stuff.
Well, if you polled most Israelis, there wouldn't be a question. If you polled most Americans, and there are polls, the number of conservatives or Republicans, I'm forgetting the details, that would serve as higher than they are for Democrats, but they're low across the board in America.
I want to pick up on what you were saying about the return to normalcy, like the return to the mean of history, and this idea that the things that growing up I took for granted, like gravity, now seem up for debate, or at least not at all guaranteed.
I think that the expression that's been used so much in the American Jewish community since October 7, and really the whole diasporic Jewish community, is this sense that the old world is shattered. And people have been talking about how they felt like they were on a holiday from history, and that is over. I want to ask you about that phenomenon.
Has there ever been a people, ever, that had the luxury of being on a holiday from history?
Like, how did we even get that luxury? Well, it's an extraordinary thing. The word golden age has been used a lot in the last couple of days. But most of us here looking around grew up in the golden age of the Jewish nation, of the Jewish great, of the Jewish people. a unique phase that we have been so fortunate. And yes, we didn't realize how fortunate we were.
Though our sort of parents told us, but we didn't really believe them. And I guess one would date it from 1947 to sort of maybe till October the 7th. was the golden age of Jewish people, unique in history, just as the world peace, the 70-year peace known as the rules-based world order, is absolutely unique in world history.
So was the holiday, as you call it, of the Jewish people since, let's say, 1947.
Looking back, now that it feels like that age has come to a close and we're on the cusp of a new emergent age that we're not sure what it looks like, although I want to have you outline some of the characteristics of this new age, was there anything that we could have done differently to keep the golden age going? And where did we go wrong?
Well, I think the big mistake was, and this isn't just a Jewish thing, this is about liberals in the wider sense of the word, in the sense of liberal, democratic liberals, which probably includes most people in this room.
You don't mean liberals in a partisan sense. You mean it in the capacious sense of the word.
I mean in the widest sense of the word. I think education and supranationals and non-governmental organizations, I think government has completely ignored and neglected these areas. I think people have been far too accepting of views that they knew were unacceptable, but thought didn't matter. I think that the biggest mistake is in our schools, but even more in the academy.
So, for example, just to articulate it, maybe go a little further, the idea that America is bad or evil or not the greatest, the most exceptional nation, that is an idea that I heard probably expressed in different language every single day that I was in college. And no one challenged it.
Exactly. I mean, it's a bigger thing. It's like the idea that you can reverse history, unpick history, go back in history, and then adjudicate...
using violence now who was right and who was wrong because that is in fact what that particular ideology which whatever you call it that has taken over much of university life and we didn't really notice it we were sort of all taught it but we didn't really take it seriously and we didn't realize that it could have real life effects and i think october the 7th was
To call it a wake-up call is an understatement. The parallel is in those kind of... When you read about ethnic conflicts, you know in those ethnic conflicts, and you read about it, and you say, our families lived next door to each other for sort of 60 years, and then suddenly they came round and slit our throats. I mean, it is...
like a much more peaceful Western bland version of that, where people that we trusted, professors, journalists, charity workers, suddenly started celebrating, on October the 7th, the killing of civilians, the murder of grandmothers, the rape of girls, and the stealing of people as an act of war. And that was a terrible moment, and I think we all went through it, And it was astonishing.
And I was watching it because Twitter is so ghastly in many ways, but it's also so valuable and so unique in many ways. Because if you avoid all those horrible arguments and the trolls and the morons and the pub boars, You can actually find experts and also watch amazing historical events kind of live. So it's an amazing thing and an amazing facility.
But that day, I remember sort of watching professors who were sort of at Harvard and Yale and Princeton suddenly saying, no, no, no, this is just a wonderful act of resistance. And that was terrifying, wasn't it?
I think it's important to just underline why so many people did not stand up to lies, like the dumb one I plucked out, that America is a bad country, not worth defending. There's so many other ones. Why did people not stand up against those lies? It's because it was so... chic to go along with them.
The cost to reputation and social status and prestige, I think for a lot of American Jews, felt too high. They wanted to be in the right clubs more than they wanted to stand up for the truth.
Well, I think American Jews are such a unique... I mean, we're in a very interesting time in history in the Jewish nation because basically all Jews now live in Israel or in America. I mean, obviously there are big communities in France, but essentially those are the big populations. I mean, if you went back 125 years, it would be Russia and Poland where the biggest communities of Jews lived.
And so there's been this kind of... giant change obviously a huge number of jews were murdered in the war and that changed it then a huge number you know there were huge movements this is slightly going off but i think in the right direction is that the present analysis of the middle east and israel kind of ignores the fact that most nation states are created with large movements of people
And that's just a fact in history. It started with the giant migrations. I mean, most history is made by migrations. I think that's an easier way of putting it. Migration is everything in history. When it's a lot of men riding on horses, we call it an invasion. It's an army. But when they take their families along, whether in carriages or on steamed ships, it's a migration.
And all of the world, the world as we know it, is created by that. And so you have these huge civilizations. South America, created by enormous migrations. The United States, which created the greatest nation on Earth. But also Australia, Canada, and so on and so forth. All of these were created by giant movements of people.
The Arab world itself was created by giant movements, invasions of people riding across. And so... So the great challenges that we face in the future is also migration. And always, as I said at the beginning, nation states, we decided that's the best form of government for us. It's still very bad, though. It excludes people. Empires didn't exclude people. I'm not arguing for empires. Don't panic.
But nation-states, now, the first one to be created, the first modern nation to be created, 1824, Greece, the Greek rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. That led to a massive switch of population where people... One doesn't think of this, but half the people in Greece were Muslim. They had to go back to Turkey, what is now Turkey. And the Christians stayed, and they formed the Greek Republic.
And the Greek War of Independence invented how modern nation-states were made. They were all made with sort of partitions... nation swaps, because some people didn't belong in the nation. Another example, Ireland, 1921, 1922.
Turkey, you know, 1922, when the Greeks tried to seize Turkey, the Turks fought back, and all the Greeks, a million Greeks were driven out of what is now Turkey, and they went to Turkey, and more Muslims arrived in Turkey. This is the way they're created, but it's very messy.
I think the subtext behind what you just said, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that's sort of the ugly way that history is made. And yet there's one country in the world for whom that ugliness has not been forgiven. Am I putting that in an elegant way?
I think that's right. I think another way to put it is that in the present environment we're in, people don't know much history. And I actually wish we could just ignore history altogether, which is a strange thing to say to someone who lives on... You don't want to say that.
That's your business.
No, no, no, I'm leaving that business.
No, no, what... But you also do write novels.
I do write novels, too. I do write novels, too. But the thing is, the thing about history is... it's assumed an enormous power now. And the reason for that is that we don't have religion anymore in our secular societies. And so where we look for authentic, legitimate, sacred power, where we look for sanctity, we don't look to God anymore. Sorry to say this in a synagogue, but we look to history.
So when President Putin wants to invade Ukraine, He doesn't mention God. He mentions history, and he goes back to history books, and he writes a history essay. And, of course, when history is also joined with absolutist religion, as it is in the Middle East, it becomes even more powerful.
But the kind of people that are protesting against Israel, for example, they don't know the history of the region in any shape or form.
I love this idea of giving history sort of a holiness or a sanctity. If we wind back the clock to 2016, and maybe we'll start to hear some things like this again on cable news, maybe it's happening right now on MSNBC, the comparisons were being made to the 1930s. This is the 1930s, and Trump is a kind of neo-Hitlerian figure.
Other historians, I'm thinking of, you know, Walter Russell Mead has compared this era to a kind of pre-World War I era. Neil Ferguson, a free press columnist, has said it's a kind of new Cold War that's starting to get very, very hot in places. At the risk of sort of forcing you to make a crude comparison to this moment, What does this moment remind you of?
Because everyone's sort of reaching for a way to explain it. And the only way they seem to be able to do that is to look to the past.
Well, I think we do need the past, because the past holds very distinct moral lessons. And that's why history should be very entertaining. It is great fun to read it. But it also has real lessons. But it requires a breadth of history. And it also requires the history to be real and to be correct. And that's very relevant when it comes to Israel, for example.
But I love all the historians you've mentioned, by the way. I don't think it is quite the 30s, even though whatever arm movements people make, let's put it like that.
But... Well, let's just touch on it. Yay or nay? What did you think that was? We're talking about Elon Musk, of course.
I'm confused about it, actually. What do you think?
Nay. Okay.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think we're dealing with Nazis here.
And I think that my view on the last election was... And I think one of the things that's so amazing about that incident is the people that were most up in arms about it have had either nothing to say about the explosion of anti-Semitism over the past year and a half especially. But... Or they have literally apologized for it. So like, forgive me if I'm not tearing my hair out.
No, these people wouldn't know fascism if it stood right in front of them. So we don't have to listen to them. To be more sort of precise about it, I think it was a huge mistake of the Democratic Party to use the fascist word during the election. And I think they themselves would agree with that now.
I fully agree with that. I also wonder, just thinking about the ways that words have been leeched of their power, I wonder if the Jewish community sort of made the mistake of calling. I remember that when I was 16 or 17 years old,
that Hebe magazine, which was like this kind of dirtbaggy, really fun, I don't know, radical magazine, that the ADL put out a press release about how it was a danger to the Jews, it was made by Jews, because it was anti-Semitic. And now looking back, it's not only quaint, it's sort of tragic.
Maybe the ways that we overuse that word, and now that we're in a moment where we so need it, it doesn't feel available to us in the same way.
I think that's right. I remember at Hay-on-Wye Festival in England once, I was doing a conversation with Simon Sharma, who's a friend of mine. So for joke, we just called it Two Jews. And we got a massive number of complaints from people accusing the festival of anti-Semitism at the time. But those were happy times when that was the biggest problem. But I think that's right.
I think we've vastly overused anti-Semitism I think the Israeli government has vastly undermined... Actually, this is a slight side issue, because there is real anti-Semitism, but I think the Israeli government, by accusing everybody of anti-Semitism whenever they criticise Israel, has done us a huge disservice, actually. And I think...
When the Israeli ambassador, after October 7th, put on the yellow Star of David, the yellow badges on his thing, and wore it, it was such a clumsy... I think Netanyahu and the present government in Israel have grossly, grossly overused it to the extent that it's become meaningless. So I think, I'm afraid, our own side has made colossal errors in this. But language is hugely important. And...
the strange phenomenon of omni-anti-racist. Everybody says they're anti-racist, but we hate Israel. I think the sort of homogenization and romanticization and universalization of the Holocaust is a tragedy of history and of morality because I think as Jews, we wanted to include other people in this story. And by the way- Why?
Why do we want to do that?
Well, this brings us back to what you were saying about Jews in America, because everything's about America. America's the center of the world and the center of world culture. I think the experience of the Jews of America is unique. I think that American Jews started off as an immigrant population like others and then became one of the ruling establishments in the American Republic.
And I think that Jews found this extremely uncomfortable. I think they found it uncomfortable because Jews are liberal leaning. And I think that becoming a ruling class in a republic with its background in slavery and racism
led many jews first of all to feel that they didn't have to fight for their position anymore because they were in this amazing powerful position and secondly and this is an absolutely credible and wonderful thing about jewish people to start to think about other people But the problem is they thought too much. That has led to many Jews lowering their guard.
And I think that has been a tragedy, and that leads us back in full circle to what happened in academia, that we lost control of... values in academia, and we surrendered academia to an ideology that we felt was virtuous, we hoped was virtuous, we hoped it corrected the mistakes in American history and world history that Jews in America had so benefited from.
And I also think this isn't just about Jews. This is also about politicians in America and public service workers in America and charity workers and people who cared about democracy in America literally took their eye off the ball and thought, okay, this sounds kind of good. This sounds kind of virtuous. It's anti-racist. It's against anti-Semitism.
And there are dark things in all of our histories. And by the way, as a historian, there's no problem with writing about the dark things in American history, in British history, in imperial history, in Israeli history. There's nothing wrong with writing about this stuff. This stuff happens.
it doesn't mean that we have to turn our society around into a sort of witch hunt and to simplify everyday life into a battle of goodies and baddies.
I wonder if there is an analogy to the following situation. If you go and walk through the University of Pennsylvania or Yale or Harvard or Princeton or some of the greatest museums in the world, which are in this city, or you look at the people that founded organizations like Human Rights Watch, and I could go on. You guys get the picture. These are Jews who have donated, who have
poured themselves into these institutions, in many cases founded the institutions themselves. And yet right now those institutions are playing host and are in fact dominated by a profoundly anti-Jewish ideology. Has there ever been, in your language, a ruling class that has overseen their fortunes so poorly as the American Jewish community over the past several decades?
Well, I think many, because I think that the human capacity for self-sabotage and self-mutilation, and for suicide, in fact, is endless. So I think history is filled with this happening. Give us an example. Well, I mean...
Because I don't understand the impulse to suicide.
I really don't. Just about every society you look at has at various times destroyed itself. I mean, I write about Russian history. I mean, the Russian Empire, the Tsarist Empire, destroyed itself partly through anti-Semitism. It embraced...
in seeking to control the Russian empire in a time of nationalism, instead of embracing an idea of multinational, multi-sect, multi-ethnic empire, it embraced an ever narrower Russian empire. Orthodox nationalism excluded literally 50% of the people in the Russian Empire. This is an example for which we have no sympathy. But it's just, you said there's an example. There's an example.
So by the time of Alexander III and Nicholas II, the Russian Empire was being run in a completely nonsensical way that turned every single ethnic minority, including Ukrainians, who were actually sort of almost Russians at the time, but alienated all of them. And so when push came to shove, none of them would support the empire.
That's a classic example, but in our own time, let's just jump ahead and say that you have here a fascinating society, complex society, more complex than societies have ever been, because there are so many estates in this society. There are working people, there is the media, But then also there are new forces. There is the internet, the discourse of the internet, which has a power too.
All of these estates have enormous influence and complicate things. There's academia. But at the moment, the architecture is darkened by the fact that many of these institutions have been captured by ideological forces.
Is that the nature of things, though? I guess that's what I'm getting at. Is this just sort of the tragedy of history, the tragedy of institutions as they start out with one mission, they inevitably drift, they inevitably decay, people then go and start new ones? Or is there something unique and particularly rotten that happened here that we're now seeing in full?
Well, I think it is the nature of institutions. And also, history is filled with examples of tiny groups of activists seizing control of giant institutions, whole countries, because they're better organized and because they have the passion of belief. and which is very powerful.
And also, one has to look at, you know, we're often asked in our own predicament at the moment, like, why is it that, for example, gay rights activists are supporting Hamas that would murder them if they actually met them? And why it is the case? And this is a wider malaise in a society like ours, which is highly secular, highly skeptical about all belief.
And yet we're amazingly impressed with religious fanaticism because we feel that these people must have something that we don't have. They have the passion.
So it's like we're jealous of jihadis?
We're jealous. We're jealous because they have a passion that they believe in. We don't know where we're doing. Every day we try a new fad. You know, every day we're trying a new diet. But these people, they know. They know. So I think that they... We're jealous that they have a passion that they are devoted to. And we're not sure what we have. That's the nature of an open society.
So, given your study of history, do you think that we would be a healthier, more self-confident society if we had a religious revival?
And I think that, I don't know what that revival would look like, but I think that the predicaments and dilemmas and conundrums of our society, the coming world of crisis that we're facing, means that I think there will be some sort of religious revival. What it would look like, will it be in traditional religions, Christianity and Judaism, et cetera? Or will it be in a new manifestation?
But I think that we do need meaning in our life.
This is a perfect transition to talking about Jerusalem. The word was carved into your ancestors' bed. Sir Moses Montefiore, people who have been to Jerusalem will, of course, know the windmill in that beautiful area of the city. Tell us, let's start personal. What is the meaning of Jerusalem to your family? You're wearing a ring on your finger that has the word, Yerushalayim, carved into it.
Tell me, take us into your family.
Moses Montefiore was such an interesting character, a fascinating character. His story really defies the sort of clichés about Victorian Britain, especially for Americans, which you think of... I know you all think of Britain as a sort of class-ridden, racist, primitive society. But actually, you know, he arrived as an Italian immigrant... with his parents in the 1790s.
By the time he died, he had a sort of several thousand-acre estate, a stately home, a hereditary title. He was friends with the royal family. He was friends with the queen. He was the equivalent of a billionaire. So... Societies are very complex, and life is very nuanced.
And I guess one of the themes of what we're saying is you need to bear many things in your mind at the same time to understand anything interesting in the world. So he arrived there. He married, by chance, he married a girl whose sister married a man called Rothschild. which is always a useful coincidence.
And because the Rothschilds were about to become the richest family that the world had ever known, really until modern times. And so when the Rothschilds went up, Montefiore went up with them. They were in business together. They lived together in the same house because the two sisters and their husbands lived together. They traded bullion and they...
But in 1827, Moses Montefiore, he was observant Jew, but he wasn't ultra-Orthodox. But in 1827, he went on this trip to Jerusalem. And Jerusalem at the time... Don't believe the sort of CNN headline of, you know, holy for free peoples, the great city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem then was an abandoned shrine. It was a monumental village in older city walls.
By the way, the city walls of Jerusalem are not very old. They were built at the same time as Henry VIII. by Solomon the Magnificent. The walls had been destroyed much earlier during the Crusades. But anyway, the old city of Jerusalem was half empty. There were only about 2,000 people living in Jerusalem at the time. And only a few hundred of them were Jewish.
And the rest were Christian and Muslim. Most of them were Arab. And he went there. and he saw the poverty of the Jewish community, which was literally almost like beggars. But the Islamic community was also extremely poor, exploited by its rulers, who were mainly former slaves who had become pashas and become powerful Ottoman officials. And he had a religious moment.
Literally, on the road to Jerusalem, he had a Jerusalemite Damascene conversion to the belief that the Jews had a special connection to Jerusalem, which every Jew knew, of course, in a while, but that it could happen, that the Jews could go back to Jerusalem.
What did he write about it? Tell me about it.
He wrote in his diaries about it. And he didn't necessarily see it as a Jewish state, though he's always called a sort of proto-Zionist. He wasn't really. And this brings us actually to the essence of the history of the real history of Zionism, which wasn't about... You know, we're going to create a power. We're going to go there. We're going to take over this land.
We're going to create a state there. And we're going to throw everybody else out and exclude everybody. No, he immediately became best friends with the Ottomans, the Arabs. All the elites there became great friends with him. He went back there seven times. He bought land there. He started to buy land there.
And he had a vision that Jews could go there and live with the people that were there already, the Palestinian Arabs, Turks, and other communities, and that they could live under the Sultan or under the British Empire. And that was his vision.
As you were talking before, you said he foresaw a world where Jerusalem was just at the center of life for the Jewish people, meant so much to the Jewish people. The Jewish people have yearned for Jerusalem for 2,000 years. We are living during a time of just an unbelievable historical anomaly, where Jews have returned to political sovereignty. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about how
how, I would say, miraculous it is that we're alive for that. I don't know if that's too religious a word. And also, if you could reflect a little bit on what being powerless as a nation, as a people, for 2,000 years has done to the Jews.
Because that seems to me to be something quite exceptional, to sort of maintain our status as a people, devoid of land and devoid of political power, only to return to it.
Yeah, I mean, the creation of Israel is an extraordinary story. It's bizarre. You use the word miraculous. It's unlikely. And it is the result of a concatenation of different elements. I mean, first of all, there's the ancient Jewish connection, the ancient Jewish kingdoms that existed from about 1000 BC to about the birth of Christ when Herod the Great died, the one with the exploding genitals.
Feel free to expand on that if you want. Well, Herod the Great was such a fascinating character because he was a tyrant, but he was a Jewish tyrant. They would have used the word Judean, and that's an interesting discussion I've had of people like the historian Tom Holland, who writes a lot about this too. It's like, when do you go from Judean...
to jewish because the word jew comes from judean the place the place that comes from judea and the roman word judea which was their word which was originally echud or yechud which was judah which was its name before the romans but i generally only use the word jewish after the barkokba revolt which ended after the reign of hadrian but anyway this is a whole nother discussion a fascinating one just
Exploding genitals for one second.
How did it happen? Herod the Great. Herod the Great was one of the most amazing characters. He basically built the Jerusalem that we see today. He was an amazing builder. He was the second wealthiest person in the Roman Empire after Augustus. He was a brilliant player of Roman warlords. You know, his father played Caesar. He became almost a family member.
And this is the extraordinary thing about the Roman Empire is that they regarded the Jews as a sort of weird eccentricity. But because they were so old and so much themselves, they accepted them. Other cults, they didn't accept. But the Herod family, assumed this amazing position of almost the second family in the Roman Empire. And the children were sent to Augustus' home to be brought up.
Herod is fascinating because his father was Jewish, Idomenean, probably the son of an Idomenean, Edomite convert to Judaism during the Maccabean kingdom, when the Maccabeans vastly expanded the Jewish kingdom into Syria, into Lebanon, and across into Jordan. But his mother was a Nabataean princess, so she was an Arab.
An Arab, which is why, if you look at Herod the Great's brother, his name was Fazael, Faisal, an Arab name. So Herod the Great is our kind of ideal hero for today, for an open world, because he is half Arab, half Judean.
And a tyrant, though.
And a tyrant. And that's a whole other discussion, is how to rule the Middle East. Do we try and create democracies in the Middle East? Or do we accept... whatever systems they have and work with them. That's a whole nother discussion, which of course brings us back to George W. Bush and the neocons.
But maybe let's talk about that a little, because it seems to me that so many of the paradigms that I grew up with, the two-state solution, land for peace, the idea that both the Israelis and the Palestinians fundamentally wanted the same thing, all of that is shattered or let's just say uncertain.
Is the reason for that because we were putting sort of a Western gaze or a Western paradigm on a profoundly anti-Western environment?
I think that for years, there have been so many Western institutions and supranational institutions geared to maintaining an intolerable situation. And I don't just mean intolerable for Israel, which constantly had to be in a state of war, really, but also intolerable for the Palestinians, too, to live in this perpetual limbo.
Let's go deeper and be explicit. Do you mean like UNRWA when you're referring to that?
Yeah, I mean like all the institutions. I mean, obviously, just to step back a stage, I've never sort of subscribed to the view of ultra-Zionist, ultra... you know, extremely religious, nationalist, Zionist Israelis who say there's never been a Palestinian people. This sort of comment shows a complete lack of knowledge of how all modern nationalities were created very recently.
And, you know, the Israeli nation is a very recent creation, and it has its own characteristics, as we all know well. The Palestinian... nation, whether these people, these ultra-nationalists in Israel like it or not, now exists. It exists. And there's no point in deluding oneself that it doesn't exist. And it exists. It's not going anywhere. The Israeli nation exists. It's not going anywhere.
I personally believe that the original ideas of partitions is a sound one because it's the way that all modern nations or many many modern nations were created and this we've been full circle from what we were talking about at the beginning very neatly Barry um brilliantly done but you know I said Turkey Greece Ireland the biggest example Indian Pakistan you
in 1947, right before the creation of Israel. All of these were created by drawing lines because when you have a nation state, you have to have boundaries somewhere, and no one knows what the right boundaries are, and humankind doesn't really fit in its sects and ethnicities doesn't fit these lines. But that's the way nation states are supposed to exist. You can't have no borders.
And so somebody had to draw those borders.
So the UN draws the borders in 1947, just to gloss the history. The Israelis accept the partition. The Palestinians reject it. A war... you know, of many Arab states begins. There have been tons of wars since then. I just want to, like, draw you out a little bit more when you're saying that there are international organizations, because you said a pretty radical thing, an important thing.
You're saying there are organizations that exist in the world to keep the conflict going and to keep Palestinians immiserated.
Why? That's the way this has developed over decades. And the Palestinians faced an unbearable trauma in the creation of Israel. There's no way around that. And they were not alone in that. A million Indians and Pakistanis suffered similar trauma in the creation of India and Pakistan. A million Greeks suffered the same experience. 11 million people...
in 1945, had to traipse and leave their homes in the fall of Germany, the creation of modern Poland, the moving of the borders westwards of the Soviet Union.
But there's no UN organization specifically dedicated to those refugees.
No, there isn't. Those refugees all settled wherever they settled, and they didn't try and go back. And the reason why this happened in Israel is because of the nature of the history of the Holy Land, and also the fact that it was the first country created by the new organization, the United Nations. and according to international law.
So everything that happens in the Holy Land is not just about anti-Semitism, and that's why I'm constantly calling on him about everything about it. It's to overlook a massively important thing, which is because of the nature of Christianity, the development of Christianity since Constantine the Great, and because of the Crusades, the Holy Land is in our consciousness.
And when I say our, I don't mean... Jewish people. I mean, it's in the Judeo-Christian consciousness. It's in Christian. There was a time in the Middle Ages when every village in England had a Jerusalem chamber with a picture of Jerusalem. You know, 100,000 people in 1095 to 1099 crossed Europe in a time of a tiny population of Europe to go and retake Jerusalem.
Jerusalem and the Holy City and the Holy Land are deeply etched in our consciousness in the West. And that is why there are activists camped outside bagel shops in New York and American universities and British universities. Those people who would be very, very, they would be very shocked if I told them that actually they are playing out unconsciously the mindset of an imperialist crusader.
But that is exactly what they're doing, because that is why they feel that Judea, Canaan, the Holy Land, Israel, Palestine is something that they have a right to pontificate upon.
Draw that out a tiny bit more. I'm imagining some of the Columbia students that took over Hamilton Hall and were calling it a human rights violation that they didn't get their gluten-free crackers. They would be shocked to find out that they have some philosophical or political DNA with crusaders. So just a few more sentences on that one.
No, it's just because, you know, they didn't care when 500,000 people died in Iraq because of a Wall of America launch. They didn't care when 600,000 people were murdered in Syria recently, very recently, in the last 10 years. They didn't care about those people. No one protested for those people. They haven't cared when 150,000 people in Sudan now in the last nine months have been killed.
No one has mentioned these people. And partly it's because of just old fashioned Western racism that they really don't associate with those people. Another part of it, though, is that Israel is the Holy Land. And the Holy Land is something that they've heard about in school, they've read about in the Bible, their parents have heard about in the Bible.
It's kind of bred into them over a thousand years.
One of the things that I think is the result of people not knowing history is that they take kind of a very American rubric and slap it on to a faraway place that they couldn't locate on a map. And I think if you went to the average Columbia student that found themselves
cheering, or I'll be more generous, you know, standing up for Hamas, sorry, that's what they were doing, they would say that the reason that they're doing it is because, again, to put it very crudely, they see the conflict as sort of whites versus blacks. Palestinians are American blacks before the civil rights movement or maybe even further before that.
And Jews, Israelis, are sort of like the white oppressor class. And this is a meme. It's really, really sticky and very powerful and something that you see absolutely everywhere. Obviously, it bears no relation to reality. But talk a little bit about, like, how do you dispel that kind of thing? It is such a profoundly... compelling idea.
It's captured in a more erudite way in Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent book, The Message. And it's something that people, young people, are being educated to in our most elite schools. What do we do about that? How do you, like, you can't go up to that person and be like, read this book, when they're seeing every Twitter and Instagram, you know, slideshow that's giving them an opposite message.
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a huge challenge when people don't read as much as they used to. But, you know, the only way to do it is just to shed light on what really happened and to propagate the real history of it, which is complicated and interesting. And believe me, you know, Israel is far from faultless in it either, of course.
But history is not really a matter of heroes and villains, or very rarely it is. And this is certainly not a moment when that is the case. So a broadening of the history is essential. I also think another sort of approach to it is like it's an enormously hubristic arrogance to project the history of your own country onto distant countries. You know, Edward Said famously wrote about Orientalism.
and that the way that Westerners projected features and characteristics, good and bad, onto the Orient or the Arab world. But in fact, there is nothing so Orientalist as the phenomenon we're seeing now, where ignorant young people project
the experience of the history of their own, their own parochial country on the complex patchwork, ancient history, the multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian world, the meandering complexities of the Middle East, another region of which they know nothing, in which they apply the simplicities of really American racial history, which is simple because... slavery was a terrible thing.
And the racial history of the United States is an amazing story of emerging freedom, emerging triumph over racism. But the Middle East has more than two sides. It has many sides, many ethnicities. And you see that, I just saw a BBC reporter talking about Syria, clearly knowing nothing about the many ethnicities in Syria, which is
you know, with the fall of Assad, you know, ignoring the fact that there are Druze, there are Kurds, there are Christians, there are Assyrians, and many other sects in this region.
So we simply have to challenge these orthodoxies and challenge them aggressively rather than doing what we've done for the last 25 years, which is abandon them for the reason that we felt that these people were somehow virtuous.
You gave an interview recently where you talked about being unable to sleep. You were asked a question about whether or not you're ever able to take off your historian hat. You said no, and you said, that's the reason I'm having trouble sleeping lately. What is keeping you up? Is it the West? Is it Israel?
When I was brought up, and I know I'm speaking to at least a partly Jewish audience here, my mother was always most concerned about me eating properly and sleeping. And every time I tried to write a big book, I went to my mother and said, How am I going to write it? And I did with this book. I did with my later books, too. And I went to him. I said, I've signed up to write a history of Jerusalem.
And I want it to, I don't just want it to be a Jewish history. I don't just want it to be a Zionist history. I want it to be an Arab history, a Christian history, a Maronite history, a Georgian church history, Armenian, everything. All of those peoples, Babylonians, Ottomans. And my mother looked at me for a while back, for a while, and she said, but you need your sleep.
I mean, you're never going to be able to write this book. And I said, well, what shall I do then? And she said, Simon, give the money back and don't write the book. But I did write it, and she lived to see me write this book. And it's extremely difficult. But the moment, I guess, and what keeps me up is the conundrums and the dilemmas of the democracies at the moment.
Because to go back to what you were saying, This isn't the 30s. This isn't 1914 either. History doesn't repeat itself. Even despite Hegel and Marx's great joke about it, history plays out as tragedy and then as comedy or farce. But actually, history doesn't follow linears or lovely parabolas History exists in spurts and spasms and contingencies, and history rebounds. One commandeers its story.
It ricochets. It flies around and comes back and hits you. So there are no rules in history, which is why historians never, and CIA agents, never predict the great events of history, whether it's the 7th of October or the fall of the Shah or whatever. But... What keeps me awake is one is the dilemma of the West, the battle of the systems that we are now fighting. And that is what we are.
And in that sense, it is like the 30s when you had democracies versus totalitarianism. But it's also like 1914 where you had the two camps, the two armed camps, or the Cold War. So in all these cases, and there are many, many other examples of this, we are now in a battle of systems. And our system needs to win.
Our system is the better system, the open society of a liberal, capitalistic democracy. It's filled with flaws, faults. We know them all well. But the opposite side, that of Iran and Russia and Ukraine and North Korea and China, is worse. And we need to defeat it.
But let's choose maybe a dichotomy that's a little more uncomfortable. Jews in Hungary report being safer than Jews in England. And that is a reality. What are we meant to take from that?
I think the dilemma of being a Jew in the 21st century, in the 2020s, is a really difficult thing, and one that we didn't think we'd have to face again. But we were short-sighted. And now we need to take nothing for granted. in our safety. And it's not that as if, but for most of us in America or Britain, we are in immediate physical danger all the time.
But there is a real feeling, and I don't know if you all feel this, but there is a real feeling of unease now and a real feeling of changes that could ultimately menace us. Because let's be frank, the anti-Zionism, as it's called, is almost impossible to separate in most cases. from anti-Jewish racism.
And that's a very uncomfortable position because someone like me finds a lot to criticize in the Israeli government, for example, in this Israeli government, for example, and in the acts of parts of Israeli society, the settlers in the West Bank, for example. And yet, it's absolutely clear that much of anti-Zionism is now morphing into anti-Jewishness.
And that is an infection that has touched many young people in different societies. And of course, this is alarming. And so that leads us into questions like, where are we safest? I personally think America is where Jews are safest, actually. More than Israel? Maybe Israel and maybe Israel and America.
I guess the question I've been thinking about a lot personally is just, how do we learn to be Jews inside history? I feel that my generation wasn't necessarily given the tools, and we're now having to feel our way toward them. And when you're being a historian, you have the privilege of sort of remove an observation and skepticism, and you're looking back.
Hindsight.
Yeah, that would be a word for it. But you're also a Jew living in 2025. experiencing all the things that we WhatsApp each other about. How do we be Jews in this historical moment?
I think that, you know, there was that famous Joachim Fest comment, I think, when he was looking back and he knew Jewish neighbors back into his youth in Nazi Germany, and he said, you know, the Jews had just become way too comfortable and felt way too safe in Nazi Germany.
And I say this as someone... And you said how they lost their instinct for danger.
They lost their instinct for danger. And actually, I hate to say this because it's an agonizing thing that we are sitting here in 2025 and saying this, but we must regain our instinct for danger, which we've lost in the last 70 years because we've been living in the golden age of Jewry. And it doesn't mean that we're all going to be in danger all the time and we have to
cry antisemitism and you know every second but we just have to regain the instincts the sensitivities that our ancestors had and my parents when they were growing up were real quietists my mother was always saying to me like always you know give an extra tip because they know we're jewish wow or um she was always saying i was like don't say anything they'll they'll know we're jewish
But at the same time, you know, she was so grateful to Britain because Britain had given them safety. And Britain still gives them safety. America still gives American Jews safety. But I just think it's just a time for a little more awareness about who we are and how others see us, which we've had a wonderful luxury in avoiding.
I mean, I should say that my family, in World War I, I had cousins, Rothschild cousins, in fact, who were fighting... for the central powers. They were in the Austrian army. And my grandfather, who was their cousin, was in the English army. And they only met up again after the war. They went shooting with each other in a very Edwardian way before 1914.
And then it took them a long time to find each other again. So life is much more complicated than we presumed. This isn't a moment of despair, actually, but more of what history teaches, which is like just realism and self-awareness and the realization that honeymoons end. Our honeymoon is over, but it doesn't mean that we have to go into paroxysms of doubt.
But the one thing I think that is the most important rule, which you're asking, is like, the one thing we must not do as Jews is bend ourselves, distort ourselves, convulse ourselves, and mask ourselves to suit the wishes and demands of our enemies. And... That is the biggest mistake because those enemies will come first.
All revolutions eat their children and they will come first for those who tried to keep up with the radicalism or something. I think be ourselves, be ourselves.
That's such a perfect way to end, but I can't let you leave the stage without a quick lightning round, and I'm going to fold in some of your questions. What do you think of the hostage deal in two sentences?
Terrible, but essential.
I love this question from Barrett. What role might religion play in a world with superintelligence?
We're going to need religion even more in a world of superintelligence.
Have you gotten more religious over the past year and a half?
I've become more Jewish over the last year and a half.
What was the first book that made you enthralled with history? I think your parents gave you Toynbee at like seven or something insane like that.
Yeah, Toynbee made me want to write a world history. How old were you when they gave you that book? Seven, I think. My father said to me, you might write something like this one day.
Your mother was an actress and also a writer. What did she teach you about storytelling?
She used to say to me, this writing is not good enough for you. Rewrite it. Always rewrite everything. She said, it's all about rewriting. Anyone can write anything, but it's in the rewriting and editing that great books are made.
Having studied so many evil people, what's your view of human nature, good or bad?
Both. I think hell is on Earth, and hell is other people, as Sartre said. But hell is on Earth, but so is heaven.
You wrote a book about speeches that changed the world that I think is incredible. You included Churchill, Lincoln, MLK, Bob Dylan, Cleopatra. What was the most impactful speech for you? The one people should Google when they get home.
Well, my favorite one recently is the shortest one, which is Zelensky, We Are Here.
If you had to go back and live in a different period of time, which one would it be?
You'll be surprised by this, but it would have been Baghdad under Harun al-Rashid and the time of the 1001 Nights. Why? Because it was so... The Arab civilisation was so sophisticated and complex. The singing, the poetry, the mathematics, the algebra. And it was so sexy, too.
I think Amazon or Hulu, one of them is making a TV version of Young Stalin. Who's going to play Young Stalin, and could it be Timothee Chalamet?
Timothee Chalamet is one of the candidates, and there are others too. Barry Keegan. Very different type. Different types. But Timothee Chalamet and Barry Keegan are the two favorites to play Young Stalin. We're casting now.
So if any of you are interested in playing Stalin, please talk to Seebeg after the show. Last question, what's your next book going to be about?
I'm signed up to do the big three, to do Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill, which is kind of going back to basics for me, after the trauma of Jerusalem and writing A History of the World, which my mother also told me not to bother with and just eat well and sleep well.
But I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to keep away from the Middle East, and I think I'm going to have to write about the modern Middle East, I think. Not quite sure yet.
Favorite story in the Bible?
I love the story of Isaac. I love the stories of Abraham. I love the patriarchs, basically, all of them. Do you have a favorite? The favorite bit of the Bible is David's lament for Jonathan. Publish it not in the streets of Gath, for how are the mighty fallen? And I absolutely, I think that's the most beautiful poetry in the Bible. Maybe the greatest poetry ever written.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, thank you so much for spending tonight with us. Thanks for listening. If you learned from this conversation, if it challenged you or made you think differently, please share it with your friends and family and use it to have an honest conversation of your own. And if you want to support Honestly, and we really hope you do, there's just one way to do it.
It's by going to the Free Press' website at vfp.com and becoming a subscriber today. We'll see you next time. Hi, Honestly listeners. Barry here with a really exciting announcement. The world today, as you know, is confusing, chaotic, unpredictable, bizarre, times scary, at other times just absurd.
But chances are, whatever crisis is currently blowing up your phone, it's probably happened before, or at least a version of it. And there's so much we can learn from looking to the past. Thank you so much for having me. Before there was Russiagate, there was the Red Scare. Before there was Donald Trump, there was Huey Long and Andrew Jackson.
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