James Carroll writes that his new book is “about the lethal feedback loop between the actual city of Jerusalem and the apocalyptic fantasy it inspires.” No one who reads the headlines or watches the evening news can possibly doubt that such a Zion-fixated end-time fantasy looms in the minds of many a pistol-packing Jewish settler, Rapture-ready Christian soldier, and aspiring Muslim martyr.

But that may be just the problem with Jerusalem, Jerusalem. Carroll’s scrupulously ecumenical survey of the waves of violence the idea of the ancient city has churned up over the millennia is, in effect,