The Unreachable City: Sanctity, History, and Violence in the French Jerusalem Novel

Between myth and the Western Wall: Jerusalem as a literary borderland

Let us imagine a single scene that encapsulates much of what connects contemporary French literature to Jerusalem: A writer stands before the Western Wall on the evening of the Six-Day War in the summer of 1967. Thousands of people throng around him—the living and, as he sees it, the dead at once: “les vivants mêlés aux morts, venus des quatre coins de l'exil, libérés de tous les cemeteries, de toutes les mémoires.” This is how Élie Wiesel writes it in the foreword to Le mendiant de Jérusalem (1968). He recognizes in the crowd the characters from all his books, sees them appear before the old brickwork like ghosts he himself had summoned – and who have now returned, uninvited. This scene is an intrusion of myth into history, a condensation of millennia-old memory, religious longing, and political reality into a single, overwhelming moment.

And this interweaving—of the historical and the mythical, the real and the transcendent, the personal and the collective—makes Jerusalem a unique case among the literary locations of contemporary French literature. Paris, Marseille, Algiers, Beirut: all these cities bear their symbolic burden in Francophone literature. But Jerusalem bears a different one. It is a city that simultaneously exists and never ceases to be anticipated. It is concrete—built of pale limestone, permeated by sun and tension—and at the same time a projection screen for something that extends far beyond the geographical.

In contemporary French literature, Jerusalem appears in a wide range of texts that differ fundamentally in genre, attitude, and interest: André Schwarz-Barts Le dernier des Justes (1959), Élie Wiesels Le mendiant de Jérusalem (1968), for the actual contemporary corpus of Valérie Zenatti En retard pour la guerre (2006) and Qui-vive (2024), Jean Matterns Suite en do mineur (2017), Emmanuel Rubens Jerusalem Terrestre (2015), Eric-Emmanuel Schmitts The Challenge of Jerusalem (2023), Nathan Devers' Aimer Jérusalem (2026), Emmanuel Carrères The United (2014) as well as Mathias Énard's monologue novel Areas (2008). In addition, there is Justine Augier's reportage novel. Jerusalem: portrait (2013). Each of these texts revolves around the city in its own way – and each one designs a different Jerusalem.

Before examining the individual works, let us preface this with an observation that unites them all: In none of these novels is Jerusalem merely a backdrop. The city is an active participant, it asserts itself, it transforms the characters—sometimes against their will. Where other cities remain in the background, Jerusalem becomes an active participant. This characteristic stems from a long literary tradition—from the Bible through medieval pilgrimage accounts and romantic journeys to the Orient, to Zionist literature and the postcolonial accounts of the twentieth century—which resonates in the novels discussed here like a dense network of references, quotations, and counter-arguments.

The following short interpretations of some French Jerusalem novels, after a brief summary of the content, first consider the content-related-narrative function of Jerusalem for the text, then, via the political-historical and the symbolic dimension, finally a poetological reflection on Jerusalem in the novel.

André Schwarz-Bart: Le dernier des Justes (1959)

Le dernier des Justes Told in an epic saga, the story of the Lévy family spans eighteen generations, from a pogrom in medieval York in 1185 to their annihilation in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The starting point is Rabbi Yom Tov Lévy, who, during the York Massacre, personally murders his entire congregation to spare them the desecration at the hands of the Christian attackers, and then plunges a knife into his own throat. Legend recounts that his youngest child, Salomon, survived, and since then, each generation of the Lévy family has produced a "Lamed-waf"—one of the thirty-six hidden righteous people upon whom the world rests. The novel traces these righteous individuals through the centuries of European persecution of Jews: the Crusades, the Inquisition, plague pogroms, Russian pogroms, culminating with Ernie Lévy, the last of these righteous people, who grows up in occupied France, escapes, falls in love with Golda, and is deported with her and a group of Jewish children to Auschwitz. He dies in the cattle car and in the gas chamber, children in his arms, the Jewish declaration of faith Shema Yisrael on his lips.

The book ends with a harrowing litany of extermination camps – Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno and many more – interspersed with the words of the Jewish prayer, before the narrator confesses in the first person: “je ne puis m'empêcher de penser qu'Ernie Lévy, mort six millions de fois, est encore vivant, quelque part, je ne sais où.”

In Le dernier des Justes Jerusalem does not appear as a physical setting, but as a distant pole of longing that orients the characters in their diaspora while always remaining out of reach. Jerusalem is the beyond of exile: the place to which one turns in prayer, which one imagines in dreams, but which can never be entered in the course of the novel. Mardochée Lévy, a former righteous person who travels as a peddler through the Russian provinces, experiences a date given to him as a mystical revelation: in it he sees the Pool of Siloam, the Western Wall, the Sea of ​​Galilee – “all the land of Israel in regarding this unique date.” Jerusalem here is not the destination of a journey, but a compressed imagining of longing that can flicker to life at the slightest object.

The true narrative weight lies in the systematic negation of this hope: The Lévy family repeatedly pins their hopes on Palestine as a refuge—in the 1930s, they feverishly discuss visas, the path to Eretz Israel—but history slams the doors shut before anyone can pass through. The mention of Palestine in the context of Nazi rule transforms Jerusalem into a lost promise: Mother Judith laments that the British allowed only two hundred Jews per month into the Holy Land; Ernie, in the infirmary, dreams of being on his way to the Western Wall, yet returns to reality. Throughout the novel, Jerusalem remains what Jewish tradition in the Diaspora has always made of it: an internalized geography of waiting.

Le dernier des Justes Published in 1959, just fourteen years after the end of the Second World War and one year before Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina and brought to Israel, Schwarz-Bart wrote at a time when the Shoah had barely been addressed in literature or public discourse. His book is among the first major attempts to give it an epic form in Francophone literature. The work is also a political argument: it demonstrates that Auschwitz was not a singular rupture of civilization, but rather the culmination of a thousand-year history of European anti-Semitism. The centuries of persecution through which Schwarz-Bart leads the Lévy family—from England through France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Poland—together form a panorama of systematic exclusion, justified differently in each instance but always carried out with the same cruelty.

Significantly, Jerusalem appears in this political context in the 1930s, when the characters discuss escape routes from Nazi Germany. The inability to reach Palestine—due to British immigration restrictions, poverty, and the rapid advance of the extermination machine—is a political statement: Schwarz-Bart incorporates Zionism as an unfulfilled hope into his novel. Jerusalem could have saved; its failure to do so is both a historical fact and an indictment.

The central symbol of the novel is the tradition of the "Lamed-waf," the thirty-six hidden righteous. This Kabbalistic-legendary idea—that the world rests on the silent suffering of a few who absorb the suffering of others—connects the fate of the Lévy family to a cosmic function. Each righteous person is an absorber of world-weariness; their death does not make the world a better place, but they die for it. In this tradition, the path to Jerusalem is always the path of suffering: one draws closer by suffering, but one never arrives.

Jerusalem as a symbol possesses a peculiar duality here. On the one hand, it is the promised place of salvation—the place on which generations of Diaspora Jews have pinned their hopes. On the other hand, the book itself makes this hope the subject of a tragic irony: just as the history of Jerusalem as an attainable goal seemed possible again—with the rise of Zionism, with the Mandate period in Palestine—Nazi Germany pulled the rug out from under the lives of European Jews. The last righteous person died in Auschwitz, not on the way to Jerusalem.

Schwarz-Bart's novel is formally an epic panorama in the style of the great Jewish chronicles, enriched by the narrative techniques of the twentieth century. The saga form—the plot spanning centuries and generations, the alternation between fairytale-like legend and naturalistic description—allows it to portray the Jewish history of Europe as a continuous experience of exclusion and suffering without lapsing into mere documentation.

The poetics of portraying Jerusalem as absence—as a place of longing never reached—is simultaneously theological and aesthetic. Theologically, it corresponds to the Jewish Diaspora experience: Jerusalem is present in exile precisely through its absence; it structures life through its absence. Aesthetically, this choice creates a tension that runs throughout the novel: the closer annihilation draws, the closer Jerusalem seems as a source of hope—and the deeper the fall when that hope is not fulfilled. The litany of the camps at the end, interwoven with the words of Jewish prayer, is the extreme realization of this principle: Jerusalem as an unquenched cry, heard even in death.

Élie Wiesel: Le mendiant de Jérusalem (1968)

Wiesel's novel is set immediately after the Six-Day War of 1967 and is framed by an autobiographical element: The first-person narrator, David, a Holocaust survivor, observes a group of beggars, vagrants, madmen, and dreamers who gather every evening in front of the Western Wall to tell stories. Among them, David searches for Katriel, his friend who went missing in the war. Katriel is both real and a projection in the text: He could be dead, he could exist, in any case, he is both absent and present at the same time. The beggars—Shlomo the Blind, Ezra ben Abraham, Velvel the One-Eyed, Zalmen, and others—tell stories of exile, of persecution, of waiting. Their accounts overlap with Wiesel's own experience as an eyewitness to the liberation of Jerusalem and with his memories of Auschwitz. In the end, the question of Katriel remains open; David carries his legacy within him.

The book is not a novel in a strictly narrative sense: it is a tapestry of voices, legends, fragments of Hassidic tradition, and historical testimonies. The Six-Day War provides the occasion, not the subject matter; Jerusalem is not political terrain, but an eschatological site.

Wiesel uses the term "liberation of Jerusalem" within a specifically Jewish context: He refers to the recapture of East Jerusalem by Israeli troops in the Six-Day War of June 1967, after which the Western Wall—the last remaining vestige of the Second Temple—was once again accessible to Jews. Since 1948, Jordan had controlled East Jerusalem and denied Jewish visitors access to the Western Wall. For Wiesel, who writes as a survivor of Auschwitz, this moment is not a military matter, but a watershed moment imbued with profound religious and historical significance: the end of a nineteen-year separation from Judaism's holiest site, immediately following the Holocaust. "Liberation" is a deliberately chosen term—it situates the event within Jewish salvation history and transforms the military victory into a moment of collective return. It goes without saying that this term is not politically neutral: Palestinians and Arab states speak of occupation, not liberation. Wiesel's use of language is therefore a coherent interpretation of the event within his religious and biographical perspective, but by no means a universally shared one.

In this novel, Jerusalem is first and foremost a place of gathering, of discovery, and of transmission. The plot unfolds hardly in the sense of a linear narrative; what moves are voices and memories. The city itself—its walls, its squares, its evening light—provides the sensory framework within which the dead and the living can be indistinguishably present. The scene at the Western Wall, which Wiesel describes in the preface and varies in the novel, is not a narrative climax but a starting point: Jerusalem is the place from which all stories are told because it attracts them all.

David, the narrator, calls Jerusalem “the visible and secret face, the blood and the sap of what makes us live or abandon life.” This poetic condensation shows that the city simultaneously embodies the visible and the hidden, the living and the nearness of death. It is not merely a backdrop, but an aggregate of history and memory.

Wiesel writes this novel from the immediate experience of the Six-Day War. The political event—the recapture of East Jerusalem by Israel, the Jewish people's reunion with the Western Wall after twenty years of separation—has for him a dimension that far transcends the political. He wonders how it is possible that Israel was not annihilated by its neighbors, and cannot explain it: "Something in this war escaped him and carried a part of mystery." The war is historical, but it touches upon a mythical layer that transcends the political.

Nevertheless, Wiesel is not a naive triumphalist. He sees the victors returning home "sad, without hatred or pride"—confused by their own achievement, unable to grasp it. There is political acumen in this description: to situate the victory within the context of trauma, not to separate it from the history of suffering. For Wiesel, the founding of the State of Israel and the Six-Day War are incomprehensible without the Holocaust.

For Wiesel, Jerusalem is a place of memory, so densely charged with meaning that it almost collapses under its own weight. “For the exiles, a prayer. For the others, a promise”—this formula contains the essence. The city is not the same for everyone; it is always also desire, hope, eschatological expectation. The figures of the beggars—vagrants who do not leave Jerusalem because they are “waiting for fulfillment” here—personify this longing: they are people who have survived from history and now remain at the place of the beginning.

The title – Le mendiant de JérusalemThe phrase "the beggar of Jerusalem" has a double meaning: those who come to Jerusalem arrive as beggars. But those who enter Jerusalem leave richer. This paradoxical economy of the place is the symbolic core of the novel.

Le mendiant de Jérusalem Wiesel reflects intensely on the conditions of his own creation. He describes how he rediscovers his literary characters in the forecourt of the Western Wall—figures he created who, having returned, now bear witness to him. This is not a metaphor for authorship in the usual sense, but rather a statement about the relationship between literature and witnessing. Wiesel understands writing as an act of preservation, of recalling the dead to the memory of the living. Jerusalem is the place where this practice of writing as witnessing finds its true meaning.

The novel's fragmentary, polyphonic-legendary style – the voices of the beggars, the interwoven times, the open endings – reflects the Jewish narrative tradition of Midrash: truth arises in dialogue, in contradiction, in continuing the story, not in conclusion.

Valérie Zenatti: En retard pour la guerre (2006)

Jerusalem, January 1991. The Iraq War is imminent, and a chemical attack is feared. Constance Kahn, a young Frenchwoman, lives in the city on a scholarship, writing her master's thesis on Flavius ​​Josephus—the Jewish historian who witnessed the Roman sieges of Jerusalem—and lives with Nathanaël, a troubled painter. Her life is permeated by a diffuse tension: the political tension between war and peace, but also the personal tension between love and alienation, curiosity and estrangement. Tamar, her pregnant girlfriend, lends the narrative a palpable sense of realism. When the sirens wail, the city forces Constance to confront the present—inevitably, physically, without escape.

In parallel, the novel weaves in a second level: Constance's childhood traumas, an early sexual violence that is reactivated by the threatening atmosphere of the impending war.

In this novel, Jerusalem is a place of inextricable simultaneity between past and present. Constance writes about the Jewish War of the first century, while a new war threatens around her. Josephus, the chronicler of ancient defeat and exile, is her interlocutor for the present. The city makes it impossible to neatly separate past and present: every street bears layers of destruction and reconstruction, and the awareness of these layers in Jerusalem is not an academic exercise but a physical experience.

“Jerusalem is indifferent to its madness. Not me” – this sentence of the mad prophet, who announces war in the street, defines the city's attitude. It embraces everything, even the extreme, and remains unshaken. For Constance, however, this equanimity is unbearable because it reflects her own inner chaos.

The first Gulf War provides the political backdrop. Jerusalem under threat—this is a state of affairs with countless precedents in the city's history. Zenatti connects the current threat with ancient tradition: Flavius ​​Josephus describes the siege by Titus in 70 AD, the famine, the despair, the defeat. This parallel narrative is not an academic exercise, but a structural principle of the novel: history does not repeat itself, but it resonates. The threat of 1991 is concrete and new—and yet it is subsumed within a space saturated with similar threats.

The novel's political consciousness is decidedly non-ideological: Constance is neither Zionist nor anti-Zionist; she is a stranger, an observer, stranded in a city that reinforces her alienation while simultaneously offering her a kind of home.

Jerusalem appears in this novel as a place of threshold – between life and death, past and present, childhood and adulthood. The sirens, which could announce a chemical attack, are the acoustic symbol of this liminal situation: they demand immediate presence, cancel all plans, and leave only the naked body in its vulnerability. In this reduction lies a strange clarity: Jerusalem deprives the characters of the possibility of hiding behind abstraction.

Josephus's connection to the looming war makes Jerusalem the site of the problem of witnessing: How does one write the history of a place that is always already overtaken by catastrophe?

Zenatti, who herself grew up in Israel, writes Jerusalem from a position of informed alienation. Her literary method—interweaving Constance's historical research with her personal crisis and political threat—creates a density that corresponds to the place itself. The novel's syntax is tight, concise, and devoid of ornamentation. Jerusalem as a literary space tolerates no decorative language; it demands precision.

Valérie Zenatti: Qui-vive (2024)

Mathilde, a Parisian high school history teacher, is increasingly plagued by insomnia as the story unfolds, by a growing sensitivity to the sounds and rhythms of the night, by an uncontrollable attentiveness. The pandemic, the war in Europe, the death of Leonard Cohen as the trigger for a crisis—all of this has thrown her off course. A video of Leonard Cohen, who cuts short a concert in Jerusalem in 1972 because he "can't fly," becomes the central metaphor. At the end of the novel, Mathilde takes a plane to Israel: she travels through the country, meets people, and finally arrives in Jerusalem—a city that is nothing like she had imagined, and yet touches her in a way she cannot name.

In Qui-vive Jerusalem is not a predetermined destination, but rather an endpoint toward which the narrative moves without revealing its location. The city initially appears only indirectly: in Cohen's concert anecdote, in the mention of turning toward Jerusalem in prayer, in history lessons about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. When Mathilde finally arrives in Jerusalem, the experience is programmatically anti-tourist: not a spiritual experience, not an enlightenment, but a confrontation with a city that is chaotic, loud, contradictory, and utterly untamed. The famous phrase – "Ici s'élevait une ville que l'on appelait Jérusalem" – appears on a flyer next to a shopping center that resembles the Old City. The irony is sharp.

Qui-vive It is explicitly a contemporary novel, carrying the post-pandemic world, the Russian attack on Ukraine, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as background radiation. Jerusalem appears in the context of a general disorientation in which old certainties no longer hold true. Mathilde teaches about the conflict in class, but it remains abstract to her; in Jerusalem, it becomes physical.

The scene with the VR experience of Auschwitz and Birkenau – offered directly in front of the Old City, on the sidewalk – is a commentary on the politics of memory in the age of commodification: the Shoah as a tourist product, the possibility of immersing oneself in the extermination camps "without going to Poland." Mathilde refuses. Zenatti thus comments on an aspect of contemporary Jerusalem tourism that is turning the city into a theme park of history.

The Cohen anecdote and the Kabbalistic saying – “those who cannot fly must remain on the ground” – become the central metaphor of the entire novel. Jerusalem is the place that demands flight – that is, overcoming self-imposed limitations, embracing the unknown, rising above the everyday. Mathilde cannot do this at first; this is her initial problem. Whether she can do it by the end of the novel remains open. The flock of storks she sees above Jerusalem – thousands of birds covering the sky in a gigantic colony – is a striking image in the novel: Jerusalem as a transit point on the way north, as a hinge between worlds, not as an endpoint.

Zenatti writes in Qui-vive In a flowing, associative prose that reflects the insomnia and hyper-attentive consciousness of its protagonist, the syntax is long, meandering, and full of parenthetical insertions and parentheses. Jerusalem does not appear as an overwhelming epiphany, but as a gradual approach over many pages. This cautious, unspectacular approach is programmatic: Zenatti rejects the mythical gesture of overwhelming power cultivated by so many texts about Jerusalem and clings to the experience of its unavailability.

Jean Mattern: Suite en do mineur (2017)

An unnamed narrator, in his mid-fifties, accompanies a tour group to Jerusalem—a birthday present he didn't want. Barely arrived, he thinks he recognizes a woman in the bustle of the Via Dolorosa whom he loved for three weeks twenty-six years earlier: Madeleine. He breaks away from the group, tries to find her, and loses himself in the alleys of Jerusalem, in the ultra-Orthodox quarters, in memories of his student days in Paris. The book is essentially a long internal monologue, a continuous stream of thought without breaks, which connects the search for Madeleine/Magdalena with a search for his place within his own life.

Jerusalem is in Suite en do mineur Narratively, it acts as a catalyst: the city brings the narrator into contact with a past he thought he had put behind him. The "familiar face" he believes he sees is perhaps Madeleine, perhaps a hallucination—this very ambiguity is the narrative principle. Jerusalem intensifies what already lies dormant within him: the grief over a love left unfulfilled, the question of what has become of a life lived.

The city is narratively portrayed as a labyrinth: the narrator wanders through alleyways, loses his bearings, and cannot find his way. This disorientation is not merely topographical; it is also existential. Jerusalem deprives us of the familiar certainty of our coordinates.

Suite en do mineur This is the least politically explicit novel in this selection. Politically, Jerusalem appears primarily as a place of religious overload: the ultra-Orthodox, the cross-bearers, the muezzin's calls to prayer, the "Jerusalem Syndrome" (the psychological phenomenon of pilgrims believing themselves to be prophets) – all of this is alien and unpleasant to the narrator. He is a secularist, an atheist, who finds the city's religious staging irritating: "half of the tourists pretend to be Jesus, Muhammad, or another prophet." This secular coldness is itself political insofar as it rejects the religious framework of Jerusalem – but it is apolitical in the sense that the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians hardly features in the novel.

Jerusalem as a city of reappearances: This is the symbolic core theme of Mattern's novel. The city possesses something uncanny (in the Freudian sense) – it reveals to the narrator his repressed memories, bringing back the past. Whether Madeleine is truly present or a projection of memory is narratively irrelevant: What matters is that Jerusalem is the place where encounters become possible that seem impossible elsewhere. The Via Dolorosa, as the site of the encounter (or near-encounter) with the beloved, is an ironic echo: Where tradition sees the Stations of the Cross, the secular narrator experiences his own path of suffering through unfulfilled love.

The novel is formally conceived as a flowing text: no paragraphs, an endless stream of thought that motivates the title "Suite." A suite is a sequence of musical pieces in the same key; in C minor, this is a key of seriousness and melancholy. Mattern's literary technique—the intermingling of perception, memory, and reflection without punctuation or paragraph breaks—makes Jerusalem a sounding board for a life that must answer for itself. The city is both trigger and backdrop; the real action takes place in the narrator's consciousness.

Emmanuel Ruben: Jerusalem Terrestre (2015)

Jerusalem Terrestre It is neither a novel nor a travelogue nor an essay—it is a “diary of derailment” (“journal de déroute”), as Ruben himself calls it. In the autumn of 2014, he spent two months in Jerusalem as a fellow, first at the École biblique and then at the Maison d’Abraham. He wanted to gather material for a geopolitical novel. The resulting diary is a document of how this initial intention was shattered by reality: the city is too complex, too contradictory, too fraught with tension to be contained within a novel. What Ruben writes is a hybrid of field notes, political analysis, personal essay, and narrative reflection—a kind of record of the failure of the literary project, which simultaneously becomes the actual literary work.

The city will be Jerusalem Terrestre This is presented as a condition of impossibility for the novel: Jerusalem is so densely packed with meaning that conventional storytelling collapses here. Ruben describes how he must learn to see and write differently. The table he prints early in the book—parallel notes from Israel and Palestine side by side—is a formal acknowledgment of a reality that eludes the singular narrative gaze: two realities inhabiting the same space yet unable to see each other.

Jerusalem's narrative and content-related function is to mark the boundaries of the novel as a form. Jerusalem is the place where Reuben realizes that he must write a different type of literature than planned.

Ruben writes from a decidedly political perspective. He comes from a family that is half Jewish, half Protestant; his relationship with Israel is marked by childhood enthusiasm and later disillusionment. He lists the events that shook his affection for Israel: the first Intifadas, the assassination of Rabin, the violence against Gaza. Jerusalem in 2014—the year of Operation Protective Edge in Gaza—is, for him, a place in a state of emergency.

The book is political in the sense that it bluntly names the spatial and legal asymmetry between Israelis and Palestinians. The table of contrasting observations is a tool of political analysis: on the one hand, West Jerusalem with its pools, parking lots, and luxury hotels; on the other, East Jerusalem with its water canisters indicating water scarcity, its dusty bus lanes, and its crumbling facades.

The title says it all: Jerusalem Terrestre This is the earthly Jerusalem, in contrast to the heavenly one. This distinction—known in Christian theology since Augustine and paralleled in Jewish mysticism—presents a political problem for Ruben: the glorification of the heavenly Jerusalem has always been to the detriment of the real people in the earthly Jerusalem. “La glorification de la Jérusalem céleste s'est toujours faite au détriment des habitants de la Jérusalem terrestre”—this sentence forms the core of the book's symbolic argument.

Jerusalem, as a place that literally hangs between heaven and earth – in its topography, its architecture, its atmosphere of light, but also in its political reality – is the central symbol.

Jerusalem Terrestre This is the most self-reflective book in the corpus. It explicitly and repeatedly addresses its own genesis: the relationship between journal and novel, the dilemma between personal testimony and fictional freedom. Ruben develops a hybrid style of writing that is not committed to any single form and in doing so makes a poetics statement about Jerusalem: this city can only be grasped in the hybrid, in the in-between space, not in the unambiguous.

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt: The Challenge of Jerusalem (2023)

Schmitt, novelist, theater director, and avowed agnostic or spiritual seeker, describes his pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the holy sites of the Holy Land in this essay-report. He travels first as a pilgrim among pilgrims, then alone in Jerusalem, and finally with a Christian guide. The book is not a novel, but a literary text full of narrative passages, dialogues, and reflections—a personal testimony of faith and meaning. Schmitt engages with the three Abrahamic religions, visits Bethlehem and Nazareth, stands before the Holy Sepulchre, and wanders through the Old City. In the end, he returns transformed—not converted, but attuned to new perspectives.

For Schmitt, Jerusalem is the place where his literary and spiritual quests converge. He connects his novel in the text. Sun Sun (Regarding Moses) with the physical experience of the land: writing and travel, fiction and reality are closely intertwined in Jerusalem. The city is not the backdrop to his reflections, but their occasion and their measure.

Schmitt shows a clear tendency to subordinate the political to the religious and spiritual. Jerusalem as a conflict zone is mentioned, but it is not his main theme. He is interested in religious traditions, in the deep structure of the sacred, not in the political present. This is a conscious decision—and one that distinguishes him from Ruben or Devers.

For Schmitt, Jerusalem is a place of transformation. The book title – The Challenge of JerusalemThe challenge of Jerusalem – he calls its symbolic function: The city confronts every visitor with a question they cannot avoid. What do you believe? What guides you? Schmitt, the intellectual seeker, accepts this challenge. Jerusalem is the touchstone of faith, the place where convictions must prove themselves.

The Challenge of Jerusalem This is the most conservative book in this selection in terms of form and writing style. The essay-report follows a clear narrative line; reflections are neatly separated from accounts of experiences. Schmitt's language is accessible, warm, and rhetorically skillful. The poetics chosen—accessibility over complexity—is itself programmatic: Jerusalem as a place of universal human experience, not as a domain of specialists.

Nathan Devers: Aimer Jérusalem (2026)

Nathan Devers—pseudonym of a young French-Jewish author—begins this book on the morning of October 7, 2023, when he is in Beirut at a literary festival and sees the first videos of the Hamas massacre on his phone. The book is an attempt to understand what the massacre did to him: a man who had largely distanced himself from the Jewish community, who viewed Israel with a certain intellectual detachment, and who is now suddenly overwhelmed by a reflex of solidarity he had not anticipated. The book is autobiographical and essayistic; it describes the author's journey from Beirut to Jerusalem, his encounter with the conflict, and his search for a position between taking sides and analyzing the situation.

Jerusalem appears in the title and as the destination; the actual plot takes place in Beirut, Paris and finally in Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is in Aimer Jérusalem First the destination, then the complication. The narrator travels there expecting clarification—and doesn't find it. Jerusalem remains complex, contradictory, beyond any clear categorization. The "Aimer" of the title is not a simple declaration of love; it is a question. Can one love Jerusalem if one cannot fully control the consequences of that love? Can one love a city one doesn't fully understand?

Aimer Jérusalem This is the most politically direct and, at the same time, most personal book in this selection. The meticulous, harrowing description of the images from October 7th—the videos Devers sees on Twitter, the documented barbarity of the Hamas attack—is an attempt to grapple with the unspeakable through language. The transition from universalist cosmopolitanism to particular identity, which Devers observes in himself, is the central political thesis: there are situations in which the abstraction of universal humanism collapses, and one feels compelled to take sides.

In this novel, Jerusalem, as the site of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is not a zone of analysis, but a zone of affective engagement. That is its specific quality.

Jerusalem appears in Aimer Jérusalem as a place of truth—in the sense of a truth one does not choose. For the narrator, the moment of October 7th is a moment of unmasking: there is a boundary where intellectual equanimity ends and something more urgent begins. Jerusalem, as a symbol of this moment of truth—as a place that compels or at least names inescapable belonging—is the symbolic center of the text.

Devers writes in a sober, essayistic-autobiographical style that deliberately sets itself apart from the ornamental language of many texts about Jerusalem. The directness of his description of October 7th—almost documentary, almost illegible in its precision—has a poetics dimension: in the face of such violence, literary distancing maneuvers are impossible. The text can withstand it, and it demands that the reader do the same.

Emmanuel Carrere: The United (2014)

The United This is Carrère's attempt to reconstruct the origins of Christianity as a historical and human phenomenon. At its heart are Paul and Luke as the key figures of the early Christian community. Carrère alternates between historical reconstruction, biographical narrative, and autobiographical reflection: he himself was a devout believer in the 1990s, then lost his faith, and writes this book from the perspective of an agnostic fascinated by that in which he no longer believes.

Jerusalem appears primarily as a historical site: the place of the crucifixion and resurrection, the center from which Christianity spread. Carrère treats the history of Jerusalem in the first century with literary care and historiographical skepticism.

For Carrère, Jerusalem is not the site of personal experience (he doesn't travel there), but rather the site of historical imagination. The early Christians are people who experienced, or believed they experienced, incredible things in Jerusalem; Jerusalem, as the birthplace of the Christian faith, is the zero point from which the book develops its genealogy of faith. Carrère treats Jerusalem with the same investigative curiosity with which he examines true crimes or questions of identity in other books.

The United Carrère is interested in the first century and thus in the political history of Jerusalem under Roman rule. Herod, Pilate, the Jewish sects, the Zealots, the early Christians – this is the political panorama. The connection to the present is only indirect: what concerns Carrère about this early Christianity is the question of how a minor Jewish reform prophet became a world religion – a question about the mechanisms of religious power that is not without relevance today.

Jerusalem, as the birthplace of Christianity, is the symbolic center of gravity of The UnitedBut Carrère treats this symbol with skeptical distance: he always asks what might have really been, how the tradition arose, what interests are inscribed in the texts. Jerusalem is thereby detached from the mythical-sacred realm and subjected to historical-critical scrutiny.

The United Formally, it is a hybrid work: biography, historical novel, autobiographical essay. Carrère's writing style—precise, journalistic, yet with the density of a novella—is well suited to this mixture. The book's poetics present a challenge: to describe the religious without religious conviction—and to be neither condescending nor obsequious. Carrère achieves this through empathy without identification.

Mathias Énard: Areas (2008)

Areas It is one of the most formally audacious novels in contemporary French literature: a single sentence of over 500 pages, spoken by Francis Servain Mirkovic, a Franco-Croatian ex-agent and ex-mercenary, traveling by train from Milan to Rome, intending to sell a bag of collected war crimes documents to the Vatican. As he travels, his consciousness recapitulates a lifetime of violence, entanglement, and guilt, spanning the entire "Zone"—the Mediterranean and its history of conflict from antiquity to the present. Jerusalem appears repeatedly: as a stop in Francis's biography (he was there with a Mossad agent, Nathan Strasberg), as a historical site of terror and martyrdom, as a crossroads of conflicts.

Jerusalem is in Areas One of many nodes in the web of violent history in the Mediterranean. Narratively, it competes with Troy, Sarajevo, Beirut, Algiers, Trieste – all the places that define the region. Yet Jerusalem occupies a special position: it is the place where Francis begins to assemble his collection, where he meets Nathan Strasberg and receives his first information. Jerusalem initiates the project of compiling, which ultimately reflects the narrator's identity crisis.

“Jérusalem trois fois sainte avec un réel plaisir” – Francis describes the city as a teeming mass of languages, religions, smells, pilgrims and soldiers, falafel and whiskey, historical layers and contemporary tension. This description is not a hymn; it is precise and detached. Francis is not a pilgrim; he is an agent, observing.

In Areas Politically, Jerusalem is primarily present as a site of ongoing conflict. Francis observes the Israeli soldiers trembling in fear of attacks; he describes the asymmetry of power, the normality of a state of emergency. Nathan Strasberg, the Mossad officer, is his guide – and thus the Jerusalem episode reflects the novel's fundamental theme: complicity with apparatuses of violence that one cannot fully condone, but neither can one fully condemn.

Jerusalem appears in the context of the Second Intifada, which hovers in the background of the narrative: attacks on buses and cafes, the constant waiting for the next catastrophe.

Jerusalem is in Areas Part of a symbolic system that connects all sites of Mediterranean violence. The Zone is the shared fate of all these places: they are sites where major powers, religions, and identity politics collide and usually result in killing. Jerusalem is the paradigmatic site of this Zone, the concentrated expression of everything the Zone signifies.

Énard places Jerusalem in a long line of cities—from Troy to Baghdad—that all exhibit the same narrative pattern: flourishing, siege, destruction, reconstruction, new siege. In this cycle, Jerusalem is not the exception, but the model.

The long sentence that Areas This constitutes the formal equivalent of the brain pattern of a traumatized person: Thoughts flow without pause, without a period, without a paragraph – in a movement that corresponds to a train journey, which is directed but does not pause. Jerusalem is mentioned in the same breath as Beirut and Sarajevo because Énard's idea of ​​the zone knows no ranking of significance: All sites of violence are equal in their bloody insistence.

Justine Augier: Jerusalem: portrait (2013)

Justine Augier's book is a reportage novel (or: literary reportage) about Jerusalem, based on several visits to the city. Augier portrays people: an Israeli activist, a Palestinian documentary filmmaker, a woman living between two worlds, and Israeli and Palestinian teenagers. The book is complexly structured, combining portrait sketches with essayistic passages, and everyday observations with historical context.

The city is in Jerusalem: portrait Literally a place one can visit – and thus the antithesis of lockdown and isolation. Augier's Jerusalem is the lived, daily-negotiated city, not the symbol. Her characters navigate the boundaries that run invisibly or very visibly across the city.

Jerusalem: portrait is the most decidedly political book in this corpus, insofar as it describes the structural situation of early 21st-century Jerusalem with journalistic objectivity: the occupation of East Jerusalem, the restrictions on Palestinian residents, the impossibility of a political solution, everyday life in a city that is formally divided but factually segregated.

Augier's Jerusalem is the city as a wound: a place that hurts because it demands choices, and yet is the only place the characters know as home. "Un endroit où aller" (as the book series from Actes Sud puts it) – to be able to go somewhere, to have a place that belongs to you – this longing pervades the book as its underlying theme.

Augier writes in a sober, documentary style, reminiscent of the New Journalism tradition. The literary quality lies not in the style itself, but in the structural composition: how the portraits relate to one another, how individual voices coalesce into a panorama.

Contrastive interpretation of Jerusalem functions

The tension between sacred space and concrete city

The most striking result of a comparative reading is the fundamental tension that recurs in almost all texts: between Jerusalem as a transcendent symbol and Jerusalem as a concrete, politically divided, physically tangible urban place.

For Wiesel, the transcendent predominates: Jerusalem is primarily an eschatological center, a gathering place for scattered memories, a site of mystical encounter. The concrete political event of the Six-Day War is the occasion, not the subject; what interests Wiesel is the glimmer of eternity within the temporal. For Ruben, it is the other way around: He explicitly combats the mythologizing of Jerusalem because it renders the real inhabitants of the earthly city invisible. For Zenatti (And retard) and Augier, the concrete is equally strong; with Schmitt, the scales tend towards the spiritual; with Devers and Mattern, the balance lies differently depending on the interpretation.

This tension is not accidental; it is inherent in Jerusalem itself. The city is literally thrice holy—for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and simultaneously a place where this holiness has, for millennia, produced wars, destruction, and suffering. Each of the authors discussed takes a position on this tension, more or less consciously or unconsciously.

Guilt complexes of authorship

A second commonality concerns the question of belonging and authorship. Wiesel writes as a Jewish survivor for whom Jerusalem represents a homecoming. Zenatti, who herself immigrated to Israel as a child and speaks Hebrew, occupies a middle ground: she knows Israel from the inside but writes in French and for a Western European audience. Ruben, half Jewish and half Protestant, is torn between belonging and distance. Devers, who describes a conversion movement from distance to belonging after October 7, makes this process itself the subject. Mattern writes as an outsider without a Jewish identity; Carrère as an agnostic; Énard as someone who situates the city in a web of Mediterranean violence that allows for no privileged position.

These differing strategies of authorization – Who is allowed to write about Jerusalem? By what right? – are implicitly present in each of these texts. Jerusalem is, not least, a place that raises the question of the right to represent.

Form as a response to Jerusalem

A third line of comparison concerns the formal response to the theme. The texts choose very different forms: the polyphonic-legendary novel (Wiesel), the stream of consciousness (Mattern), the endless sentence (Énard), the hybrid journal (Ruben), the autobiographical essay (Schmitt, Devers, Carrère), and literary reportage (Augier, Zenatti).

It is striking that none of these texts presents a conventional urban development novel or a realistic cityscape. Jerusalem resists realistic interpretation. This has aesthetic reasons—the city's overwhelming complexity overwhelms any single viewer—but also ethical ones: the city is too politically charged, too many voices claim a place within it, for a single narrator to be able to fully grasp it. The formal experiments are simultaneously gestures of epistemic humility.

Three types of Jerusalem function

In comparison, three types of Jerusalem function can be schematically distinguished:

Jerusalem as an eschatological space: Schwarz-Bart, Wiesel, Schmitt. Jerusalem is understood as a site of profound religious structure, where history and transcendence intersect. The political is not absent, but it is embedded in a larger religious or ethical framework. Formally, these texts tend toward the epic, the essay, the testimony, the meditation. Herein lies an important difference within this group: while for Wiesel Jerusalem is present as an attained, albeit traumatically burdened, place, for Schwarz-Bart Jerusalem remains strictly unattainable—an eschatological vanishing point preceded by annihilation. For Schwarz-Bart, this unattainability is not theological transcendence, but historical tragedy.

Jerusalem as a political flashpoint: Ruben, Augier, Devers (after October 7th). Jerusalem is understood as the site of a concrete political conflict with global dimensions, requiring a clear analytical or affective positioning. Formally, these texts tend towards a hybrid of reportage, essay, and autobiographical narrative.

Jerusalem as an existential mirror: Zenatti, Mattern, Carrère, Énard. Jerusalem is understood as a place that intensifies and makes visible the characters' existential situation—their memories, their questions of identity, their spiritual afflictions. The city is a catalyst, not an object. Formally, these texts tend toward hybrid, self-reflexive narrative forms.

These types are of course not pure; most texts combine elements from several. But they help to formulate the central observation: Jerusalem in contemporary French literature is not a unified symbol, but a cluster of meanings that are in tension with one another. The strength of this literature lies not in resolving this tension, but in enduring it and making it productive.

Temporal stratification as a common structural principle

A common structural principle runs through all three types of texts: the impossibility of describing Jerusalem solely in the present tense. All of these texts show how the past is physically present in the city—not as a museum-like reconstruction, but rather as a living layer beneath the present. Schwarz-Bart's scope is the broadest: eighteen generations from York to Auschwitz, with Jerusalem always remaining the invisible magnetic pole of this long history, never a destination, always a promise. Wiesel sees the dead among the living; Zenatti makes Josephus a contemporary; Ruben reads the walls like palimpsests; Énard links Troy with Baghdad. Mattern's narrator searches for a past love in an overwhelmingly palpable present.

This awareness of temporal layering is not merely a formal device; it is a statement about the nature of the place itself. Jerusalem is the city where time functions differently than elsewhere—where the past is not past, but can intrude upon the present at any moment. The French authors experience this as both a freedom and a burden: as a freedom because history offers them literary material of inexhaustible density; as a burden because this history brings with it a responsibility of representation that always carries the risk of error or appropriation.

Arabic and Muslim Jerusalem novels

In his novel Palestine In his 2007 novel, Hubert Haddad tells the story of an Israeli soldier named Cham, who is wounded in an ambush, loses his memory, and is taken in by a Palestinian family. He becomes Nessim, the brother of a Palestinian student, and begins to experience the reality of the occupation from the perspective of those he was fighting just the day before. Haddad uses this amnesia as a metaphor for the need to set aside prejudices in order to discover the person behind the enemy. Jerusalem and the West Bank are described with poetic precision, the horror of war suspended by the beauty of the language. The novel poses the fundamental question: "How does one inhabit a destroyed house for an entire night?" The Arab perspective is adopted by a character who involuntarily integrates it, illustrating the fluidity of identities in a space as confined as Palestine.

The most striking difference concerns the question of who has the right to narrate Jerusalem and from what point in time this narrative unfolds. Jewish authors like Wiesel or Schwarz-Bart portray Jerusalem as a place toward which history points—as arrival, homecoming, or eschatological fulfillment, even if, as in Schwarz-Bart's work, this fulfillment is repeatedly denied. Arab and Muslim authors like Karim Kattan, Elias Sanbar, or Amin Maalouf, on the other hand, write of a place from which history expels. For them, Jerusalem is not the destination of a long-held yearning, but the starting point of a forced exile; not the end of the journey, but its violent termination. This shift in the fundamental narrative situation—arrival versus expulsion, return versus Nakba—determines everything: the temporal direction of the novels, the emotional makeup of the characters, and their relationship to the city's topography.

The spatial perception of Jerusalem differs fundamentally. In the Jewish and European-Christian texts in this selection, Jerusalem often appears as a highly charged symbol—as a sacred stone, a site of memory, a touchstone of faith, or an existential mirror. The city has depth, but it is a depth of meaning. For Arab authors, however, Jerusalem is primarily lived experience: streets that are sealed off; houses whose coordinates are overwritten by settlers; olive groves that give way to bulldozers; checkpoints that dissect everyday life. Kattan's Jerusalem is a place of desire and tension, but a physical, concrete desire that is interrupted daily by the occupation. Shibli's Jerusalem is a place where violence against women is used as a weapon of war and where the search for traces stands in opposition to organized oblivion. This literature does not show the weight of history on the stone, but the weight of the present on the body—and this shift from symbol to flesh is significant both literarily and politically.

A third difference concerns the relationship to language itself. Arab and Muslim authors who write in French do not always use French as their natural mother tongue, but also as a strategically chosen medium: as a stage for a testimony that would be received differently in the Arab or Hebrew world, and as an inscription of Arabic and Palestinian terms. Nakba, Al-Quds, Khamsin —into a Western European discourse that is unfamiliar with these terms or unwilling to acknowledge them. For them, French is a detour that creates reach, but also a sense of alienation that remains palpable in the writing itself. Jewish authors like Zenatti or Devers, on the other hand, write in French as their primary literary language, even when their subject matter takes them beyond it. This asymmetrical linguistic situation generates a particular tension in the Arabic texts: those who write about the loss of their own land in the language of the former colonizer are engaging in a reclaiming of narrative power that does not conceal its own ambivalence.

The development of Palestinian and Francophone literature reflects the transition from direct resistance to a more nuanced reflection on exile. The return of thousands of Palestinians following the Oslo Accords has produced a rich literary output that, far from celebrating reunion, bears the mark of an inner turmoil. Returnees sometimes find themselves as strangers in their own land, confronted with a reality that no longer corresponds to the homeland they imagined in exile. Authors such as Mahmoud Shukair and Faruq Wadi describe this difficulty of "stitching two times together with a needle and thread." This loneliness in their rediscovered homeland is a recurring theme, with Jerusalem becoming a symbol of an unfinished search for identity, helping to understand the social and identity-related unease of Palestinians living on the margins of Israeli society or under occupation.

France as a counter-space and mirror of origin

That the corpus under discussion consists of French Jerusalem novels and not merely a novel about Jerusalem is evident, not least, in how France, as a place of origin, is present in these texts—often unspoken, but structurally effective. In Schwarz-Bart's work, France is both refuge and trap: the Lévy family flees from Germany to occupied France, where they are not safe but deported; Drancy, the assembly point before Auschwitz, lies north of Paris. France appears not as a homeland, but as the penultimate stop on the road to annihilation. Wiesel's David, living and writing in Paris, also carries France within him as a contrast: the land of Enlightenment and human rights, which remains silent in the war year of 1967, as Europe has once before. In Zenatti's work, France is the place from which one looks at Israel—from a distance, with the mistrust of an emigrant who knows that the two worlds do not overlap. In Mattern, Schmitt, and Devers' novels, Paris is the starting point of a journey designed to shatter the peace: one leaves behind the order of everyday life, the café routine, the familiar secularism, and encounters in Jerusalem an intensity of religious and political charge that makes Parisian life retrospectively seem protectively distant. In these novels, France is the normal state of affairs, which Jerusalem shatters.

This structural role of France as a counter-space to Jerusalem is itself a specifically French perspective. French secularism—the model of a public sphere that considers religion a private matter—makes Jerusalem a particularly alien city: a city where religion determines streets, times, bodies, and conflicts is almost impossible to imagine from a French perspective. Several novels make this experience of alienation explicit: Mattern's narrator is practically disgusted by the city's religious oversaturation; Ruben, who arrives as a geographically trained European, must first learn to calibrate his gaze. Devers describes how his habitual universalism—a typically French republican attitude—collapses on October 7th and gives way to a particular affiliation he had previously repressed. That this intrusion of the particular occurs precisely in Beirut and points from there to Jerusalem is no coincidence: in French literature, the journey to Jerusalem is always also a journey away from France, away from its self-assurance. Jerusalem throws France back on itself – as a society that believes it has moved beyond religious and ethnic conflict, and recognizes in this mirror how much this belief can be an illusion.

In all these texts, Jerusalem remains a place that cannot be truly captured. Perhaps this is the most important message of this literature: not a successful portrait, but rather an awareness of one's own inadequacy in the face of this place is the mark of literary honesty.

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.