Jerusalem, the City of Herod and Saladin

Walter Besant and Professor E. H. Palmer collaborated on this unusual history of Jerusalem from the death of Jesus Christ circa a.d. 33 to the present. Besant contributed a lively literary style and a “miscellaneous rather than methodical” knowledge of Western sources. Palmer, in separate chapters, contributed scholarly knowledge of Muslim (here called “Mohammedan”) sources. As Besant acknowledges in his Preface to the First Edition, this “double source” led to “certain small discrepancies in the narrative,” but also offered a fuller version of events than most British readers of the time had ever enjoyed. Even today, Besant and Palmer’s intimate acquaintance with obscure sources affords a richer view of Jerusalem’s past than many present-day histories.