It’s not clear whether there really is such a thing as “Jerusalem syndrome,” the religious mania that supposedly afflicts some visitors to Jerusalem. But there can be no doubt that the West as a whole has often fallen prey to a version of this sickness—what James Carroll, in the introduction to his new book Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28), calls “Jerusalem fever.” This fever, as Carroll defines it, is the “transformation of the earthly Jerusalem into a screen onto which overpowering millennial fantasies can be projected,” and it lies at the very heart of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic belief.
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