Is History Repeating Itself? Religion, War, and Democracy with Sam Harris & Simon Sebag Montefiore

I am here with Simon Sebag Montefiore. Simon, thanks so much for joining me; it's great to be with you finally. Yeah, we've been on a WhatsApp thread together for quite some time.

We won't divulge the other attendees, but it's great to finally meet you, however remotely. You have written these just marvelous, magisterial histories. I'm reading two simultaneously, but you've written many others.

The two I'm reading—"Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar" and "Jerusalem: The Biography"—really, I mean, combined, they offer just an amazing lens through which to look at the present. My interest in talking to you as a historian is to help me worry about the present and the near future, and I think you're uniquely well placed to do that, given your expertise in both Russian history and the history of the Middle East. Before we jump in, perhaps you can give me a potted intellectual biography.

What do you consider your areas of focus as a historian? You know, my background was that I did history at Cambridge University. Then, bizarrely, I went into banking for a short, disastrous career, and then I went out to the Soviet Union as it disintegrated in the early '90s.

That was really my training ground; it was a brilliant place, a fascinating place to see an empire falling apart. I think for a young historian to see with their own eyes an empire falling apart is the best training you can have—better than books. That was a very interesting time.

From that, I started to write about Russia, which I had begun really when I was at university. I started writing about Catherine the Great and Pemin. That's a subject that has become very relevant, of course, because apart from their very colorful sex lives and amazing letters, and their place in the Russian Enlightenment, they were also empire builders.

Of course, they conquered South Ukraine and Crimea and built all the cities that are now being fought over: Odessa, Sevastopol, Donetsk, and so on. That led, through a weird favor from Vladimir Putin himself, to having access to Stalin's archives and being one of the first people to be able to work in those archives. That was the thrill—starting to work on Stalin, and that's the book you're reading: "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.

" Not a cheerful subject, it's quite unbelievable how horrific history gets. One hopes one is not living in a period of history like some of the periods you've written about, but increasingly, our present starts to feel like we've entered the stream of history. I remember the first period of my life where I felt, all of a sudden, okay, this is history, with all of its dangers.

It was immediately after 9/11. I just felt like, okay, my life, what I consider to be a normal life—sort of post-history, however naïve that lands for you—after 9/11, I thought, oh really, anything can happen at any time. This is the kind of thing that very unlucky people experience in history.

More and more, I don't think I've ever shaken that epiphany. One does try to go to sleep, but more and more, it seems like we can't quite escape the tide of history here. We're certainly going to jump into a discussion about the Middle East and the rise of anti-Semitism.

I think we'll touch on the war in Ukraine, and, as you know, Russia has its finger in the chaos on both of these sides of the world. My first question is, as a historian, is your historian hat more or less always on as you read the newspaper? Or do you too go to sleep at times thinking you're living in some historical period where normalcy will reign?

My historian hat is always on, and at the moment, it's just impossible—it's very hard to sleep at all. There’s such turbulence, but also, it's fascinating to watch in the worst way. One has to go back to some of those great analysts of power and history, like Lenin, with that famous quote: "Nothing happens for years, and then every year happens in weeks or days.

" One always remembers how just before the Russian Revolution, he said to his wife, "Katia, I don't think the revolution is going to happen in my lifetime. " Then, when he had the first report of the fall of the Tsar, he said, "Can it be true? Is this a hoax?

" You know, no one knows what's going to happen—even the most astute observers. Shrewd, um, analysts, and of course historians, are terrible prophets. As you know, the end of history and many other, um, many other, you know, pieces by brilliant historians have shown.

But I think the thing to understand at the moment is how exceptional the period that we were living through, that we grew up in, um, was. How extraordinary! And of course, we didn't really realize it when we were in it so much, but the period from, you know, '45, '48, '50 to, okay, '9/11' or the election of Donald Trump or whatever, um, you know, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, even October 7th, you know, how exceptional was that period?

Where, you know, the leaders of actually, you know, every president of the United States had kind of similar views of the world, you know, um, give or take small differences. Um, they had an internationalist view of a mission to the world, and where Soviet leaders, um, despite believing in World Revolution and their mission to change the world, were also extremely conservative, really. And, um, where, you know, people did respect the United Nations that was, um, a supranational, um, sanctuary of something called international law, which existed because people believed it existed.

And, um, where various views became taboo in most liberal democracies: anti-Semitism, um, where a great liberal reformation happened with gay rights and that, and, and other, um, another advance is the pill, the right to abortion. All these things were kind of won in this kind of period, which I call in my world history "the great liberal reformation" because it was so radical. But, of course, we took it for granted, and, um, all of course, all of these things, um, will have to be fought for again and are now under threat.

And that exceptional period, it's hard to think of a period where, um, anything like that really existed. You know, maybe the Roman Empire, when the Roman Empire faced the Persians and the Senates, um, there were these kind of, you know, two polar powers that, um, that really kind of kept a sort of peace. But, of course, it was a much more brutal world, and of course, the rest of the world was, was, um, was not included in those two paths.

It was really just the Mediterranean and the Near East. Yeah, so the end of this world is a sort of return to the way things have always been, with a massive number of powers. Um, I guess you'd say, you know, the sort of the 70-year peace is what was coming to an end.

What you were witnessing was coming to a beginning to end with '9/11,' um, which included a sort of chess game between two great powers, then 25 years of American, um, paramountcy, a sort of game of solitaire, and now, suddenly, um, fascinatingly, a, a, a sort of multiplayer game where smaller powers follow their own interests in ways that we can't even, we, we, we don't understand. And then, of course, the key thing about this was the success of liberal democracy, which again was extraordinary. And one forgets that, you know, the European half of Europe was under dictatorship until '91.

Um, even Western Europe, you know, was under dictatorships until 1974, '75. So again, one just forgets. A lot of it is perception; we just forget how recent all this is.

Yeah, so do you think we've reached a point where the unraveling of the liberal world order, as we've come to know it, has, um, reached a point of no return? Where you're—you're expecting America to, to pull back—that multilateralism will be less and less effectual and we're going to see a, um, a period of greater chaos, uh, globally? Or, or do you think we can, uh, pull back from the brink here and return to what we, in our lifetime, have considered more normal?

Where, where the, um, if we can't get quite to, uh, all the way to Fukuyama, we can get to something like the, you know, the expectation going forward is that liberal democracy and its, um, uh, however many discontents it has, will, will prevail—or at least be the, the expected norm globally? And that, you know, we'll be, uh, there'll be enough, uh, power on that side of the equation so that, you know, despotism will still seem both pathological and, and anomalous. Um, I think that, first of all, I don't think history ever kind of repeats itself exactly; it never goes back.

Um, but that doesn't mean that democracy, liberal democracies can't resurge and triumph. And, but that needs—U—that needs changes within liberal democracies. I mean, America is still the greatest power that's ever existed in terms of military power, economy, and all sorts of other, um, uh, tests and measures.

And, and American power is still, um, the most dynamic force in, in, you know, in the world game, if you like. Um, but, but the democracies are having a huge crisis within themselves. And you know, as Ibn Khaldun, the great, um, Arab North African historian in the 14th century said, he said like, you know, powers don't, great kingdoms don't fall because of military defeats or economic defeats; they fall because of psychological defeats, which is a very interesting concept.

And he said, you know, the loss of cohesion, of solidarity, of values that hold together, um, a society, um, in a common goal. Um, and this, of course, brings us to stuff that Fukuyama has written very well about. About, um, you know, an overqualified, um, uh, over-entitled population, etc.

, etc. Which, of course, these are things that are stopping democracy from behaving with confidence. And if America regained its confidence, um, you know, America has a huge power to change things.

But we should be under no illusion: the success of liberal democracy was not because, you know, liberal democracy was, um, was not just because liberal democracies are very nice to live under; it was also because liberal democracies were successful. And the biggest influence, um, I mean, people, when I write my world history, people said, "Why is there so much war in your world history? It's full of violence.

" And I said, "Well, of course, you know, wars are when everything has sped up and intensified. " Um, you know, invention, um, ingenuity— all of it happens during warfare. And, um, we're seeing that now with drone warfare and what you know, all that's happening in, um, the Middle East and Ukraine.

That's another thing we can talk about. But the point is, the reason why there was such liberal democracy was so successful—everyone wanted to have a system that looked like a liberal democracy, even if it wasn't a liberal democracy—was because of the victory of World War II in '45. I mean, it started with 1918, but then again in 1945, which was really a sort of, it's a Soviet victory, but it was widely regarded as a victory of American power.

And that made, if you look at all the new states created after 1945 in the '60s, um, they all looked like America. I mean, even China today, even Russia have presidencies, legislatures; I mean, it's all based on America because America set this standard, even though they were never democracies and certainly never liberal democracies. But the point was, everyone wanted to look like America.

And, of course, a lot of these countries that we presumed were democracies maybe weren't as democratic as we thought all along anyway. And one only has to look at all the states created in Africa, for example, which are now disintegrating. That's another subject to discuss perhaps later.

But, um, it was a great compliment to America that many states became liberal democracies. It was a great compliment to the success of America, um, in the wars that were incredibly consequential and mattered, and also, and also wars—let's be clear—that had clear victories, right? It's very hard to achieve now.

Yeah, yeah, so I think we can focus many of our concerns through the, uh, the nexus of the city of Jerusalem. I mean, so much of, yes, what ails us in terms of past shattering and possible future shattering of our world can be—uh, it doesn't capture everything, but it captures a lot when you look at the fixation of the three monotheisms on that single city. I remember reading Gershom Gorenberg's book, *The End of Days*, maybe 20 years ago or so, and, uh, you know, this would be obvious to you as a historian, but this was the first time I realized that the destruction of a single building, the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, could produce World War I.

Right? I mean, the level of religious fanaticism aimed at that single piece of real estate is such that the world's Muslims and Christians and Jews, um, view it as a— I mean, it is a sacred symbol, but it is a non-negotiable one, right? I mean, it's not at all fungible.

It seems there's nothing you could offer the world's 2. 1 billion Muslims in trade for that, uh, that single building that would be satisfactory. And so it is with the millennial expectations of Evangelical Christians, perhaps even Christians more widely, who expect that the Messiah will return.

And this is, you know, they're joined by Orthodox Jews in this expectation once the temple is rebuilt by the Jews there. Um, and you go into this history in some detail in your book *Jerusalem*, but, um, let's talk about that because it is amazing when you step back, certainly from a secular perspective, to realize that our world is essentially rigged to explode based on the millenarian superstitions of billions of people focused on a single building, uh, and certain, you know, patently absurd details like the production of a perfect red heifer to be sacrificed so as to sanctify the implements that would rebuild the temple. Um, how do you—what are your thoughts on the Temple Mount?

Simon: Well, the Temple Mount is the most intensely, um, revered piece of land. It's a compound, an esplanade—it's a platform, actually, built by Herod the Great, you know, created by Herod the Great during his reign. It took most of his reign to build it.

And Herod the Great actually sort of formed what we now think of as the Temple Mount on a probably much rougher structure, and it hasn't, you know, the actual sort of space of the platform has not changed much since he built it. Um, he was, um, he was basically made King of Judea in 40 BC by Anthony and, um, Octavius, um, the future Augustus, and, um, they walked with him through Rome and they said, "Go back and conquer Jerusalem. " Um, we'll give you some troops to do that.

It had been taken by the Paeans, and so that's the sort of origin of the actual space as we see it now, on which the two Islamic beautiful shrines stand. And you're absolutely right. I mean, all of the expectations of fundamental believers of all three Abrahamic religions are focused on that space, and many of them believe that outside the Golden Gate, which is the eastern wall—a beautiful structure probably built by Heracleia, the Byzantine emperor—on the eastern side, they believe that that is the place where the apocalypse will happen.

And you're absolutely right. I mean, when I was writing about Jerusalem, I sort of realized, you know, so many things could go right. This could be shared; there could be a peace process that could lead to this being a sort of international, um, the holy basin, as it's called by American peacemakers, that it could turn into a place, a sort of Vatican almost, for all three religions.

But it could also—anything that goes wrong there could ignite a catastrophe, a Holocaust, a World War III, that would involve everybody because everybody is involved in the future of that place. And that's why it's an extraordinary thing. I guess one of the realizations today is that for years we thought—again, going back to our sort of view of the world until 9/11—we knew there were religious people; there were many evangelicals in America and West Africa.

There were Islamic fundamentalists, and so on; there were Jewish fanatics. But we felt that along with liberal democracy, a sort of secularity was kind of spreading across the world and that we were beyond that sort of religiosity. Yeah, because that's turned out to be completely false.

Actually, you know, religious people have a sort of force and a focus that secular people don't have, but which secular people are afraid of and are extremely impressed by. And so we're seeing that on the sides taken by different people in the Middle East right now. Of course, you know, it's not a coincidence that that space is revered by the three religions because each one led to another in succession, and the holiness of each was borrowed, commandeered, stolen, reinvented, rechanneled, um, by its successor, and each successor retooled, relaunched, and sort of slightly changed those stories in order to contribute to the heritage—that is, the ancientness—that is essential for legitimacy in religion.

And then, of course, when you look at texts like the Bible, for example, the Quran, and others, some of the texts sort of seem like very clear writing; some of it is literally history that we can check, and some of it is unintelligible, um, all weirdly detailed like the famous red heifer in Jerusalem. But the point is these texts are a mixture of ancient—a library of ancient texts that have been superimposed on each other. Um, the most holy thing is the revelation that builds on an ancient story that already exists, an ancient holiness that already exists, and this concept of holiness is, um, redoubled, multiplied many times by the destruction of those places.

The destructions of Jerusalem—the two most famous destructions, Nebuchadnezzar in 586 and Titus in 70—were many catastrophic events there, but especially those are so mythic in scale and so total that the very ruins became holier than the buildings that they had replaced. And, of course, um, they became hallowed by the legitimacy, by the authority, by the ancientness of what had gone before. So, you know, the revelation—it was a coincidence that Jerusalem became the holy city; it could have been many different places.

Um, the religious person wouldn't say that, of course, but you know, historically speaking, there was no reason why Jerusalem should become such a significant place. It wasn't a port; it wasn't on a trade route. Um, it was a small hilltop, mountaintop in the blistered Judean mountains, in what became known as Judea.

But once the Jews had made it their holy city, once they had written the decisive thing, what happened was not just the decision to make it the holy place and to build a temple there, but to write it down. And that was what was special about it, because Jerusalem gained a biography—the Bible—and that biography meant that other people could read it, could find out about it; it could be translated, it could be known by successors. And so, the early Christians were, of course, Jews, despite what you might read on Twitter these days, or on X these days.

Yeah, actually, that's a point that I hadn't thought to raise with you, but I've always found it fascinating that the, um, certainly theological versions of anti-Semitism are a kind of reductio ad absurdum of themselves when you realize that Jesus and Mary and all of Jesus's disciples were Jews, lived as Jews, acting as Jews, thinking of themselves as Jews. Um, it's amazing that you can get a genocidal anti-Semitism out of. .

. That piece of legacy code somehow, uh, in a Christian context, it's probably less surprising. In a Muslim context, but, um, uh, perhaps we can just talk about the roots of this intersection of religious, um, belief on, uh, on the Holy Land, you know, more broadly.

I, one thing that was also surprising to learn in your book is that Jerusalem itself has been, um, abandoned, or effectively abandoned, at various periods in history. I mean, it became essentially a little village of, of ruins. But let's talk about the roots here because I'm going to want to lead you in this conversation to an analysis of what's happened post-October 7th and with notions of, um, you know, settler colonialism and the illegitimacy of Jewish claims to that particular piece of real estate and the view worldwide that the Jews, uh, and the nation of Israel are, um, interlopers of a kind and, um, a remnant of colonialism.

So, knowing that we're going to get there, let's talk a little bit about the history of the region, of Jews in the region, and of the emergence of Christianity and Islam out of that region. The Judeans, which is where the word "Jew" comes from, were one of the ancient peoples who emerged, um, out of Canaan and controlled, between about 1000 BC and about, you know, the beginning of the new era, for about a thousand years or about ten centuries, lived in kingdoms that they mainly ruled, um, in that small land that was around Jerusalem. They, um, if you were a believing Jew, you'd say that they were the chosen people who came out of Egypt in the Passover story.

Um, um, and you would believe that they were the chosen people. If you were a secular person and looked at history, you would say that they were one of the peoples that emerged from, um, ancient Canaanite peoples who lived, um, in the region and created kingdoms: in the north, a kingdom called Israel, and in the south, a kingdom ruled by a House of David, which appears, um, on the Tel Dan Stele. So, we know that there was a House of David and that David and his successors in the House of David, a dynasty, um, ruled from Jerusalem.

They built, um, a temple there, um, at some point. Um, maybe not as early as it's impossible to prove when it was exactly built, but it was built, and that was the first temple. Um, it was built on the—on what is now the Temple Mount Moriah, um, in Jerusalem.

And, um, there was a northern kingdom, Israel. They were tiny kingdoms that really prospered during a period when the great powers of the region—Egypt, um, Assyria, Babylon, and so on—were in times of crisis. When those—when those big empires, uh, woke up again and were restored to power, they swept down and conquered these, um, these kingdoms.

The peoples of Israel were removed to Babylonian exile; Jerusalem was destroyed in 586, and, um, but the Judean people remained there. Um, in 63, um, well, in the 320s, um, Alexander the Great arrived. His successors, the Seleucids and the Assyrians, um, ruled Syria and Egypt and fought for about a hundred years for control, um, of Judea and Jerusalem.

In 164, they rebelled against the Assyrians, creating a new kingdom—the Hasmonean kingdom, BC, here, right? Yes, which is celebrated, um, by Jews in the, um, Festival of Hanukkah. And they ruled for about a hundred years, um, and then they broke up in civil war.

Some people make parallels with Israel today, um, with that process where, um, that kingdom disintegrated. And, um, then the Romans arrived in about 63 in the person of Pompey the Great, a great Roman warlord. And, um, you know, then his successors gave Judea to Herod the Great, who was a fascinating character—a key character because his mother was Arab; she was Nabatean, which was the Arab Kingdom in what is now Jordan and northern Saudi Arabia.

His father was an Idumean, an Edomite, a recent convert to Judaism. Um, so he's an interesting person: half Arab, half Jew, half Judean, if you like. And he created a dynasty that lasted for five generations, ruling various bits of the Roman-dominated Near East.

Um, and in 66, there was a huge rebellion against the Romans, um, during the reign of Nero, partly caused by Nero's managerial incompetence in his rule of the empire—winning personality and dynamic personality. Um, General—General, um, a sinister character. And, um, you know, he was one of Nero's interesting; he’s one of those politicians who merge entertainment and politics, which we should be familiar with today, and, um, used the power of entertainment and the power of politics to feed on each other in order to promote himself.

But, um, moving aside from that, um, there was a Jewish revolt run by, um, led by fundamentalist Jewish fanatics, I think we'd say now, and many of the Judean people backed the Romans. In fact, um, the Herod family were one of the, you know, one—and the historian Josephus actually, in the end, backed the Romans. Thinking Roman Hellenic life was preferable to life under a Jewish religious state.

These are the Maccabees; those the. . .

these. . .

these weren't the Maccabees. These were, um, these were different, um, sects and factions that fought each other murderously, and in the end, um, uh, were stormed by Titus Caesar, the son of the Empress Emperor Vespasian, who emerged out of the Civil War of '68, the Year of the Three Emperors, and stormed Jerusalem and destroyed it for the second time completely. Many Jews then went into exile, but many Jews remained there.

In the 130s, another emperor, Hadrian, decided to build a Roman temple on top of the ruins of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, the Second Temple, which had been destroyed, and this caused a second huge Jewish revolt led by Simon Bar Kochba. Once again, this led to what everyone agrees was a genocidal war against the Judeans. They were banned from Jerusalem; Jerusalem was renamed Aelia Capitolina and remained under a new name for 300 years.

But the Jews, or Judeans, always revered it, prayed around its ruins, um, and were spread around the Mediterranean for the first time. So there was a glut of Judean slaves, for example, in Rome. It's funny to think of Jews as slaves, but, um, there were.

. . most of the.

. . many of the slaves in the Roman Empire were Judean, of course, because after these wars.

Um, out of this came a new Jewish religion that was always linked and looked back to Jerusalem, but also looked to the Torah as a kind of portable Jerusalem almost, which they carried with them always. The religion changed fundamentally; before then, the Jewish religion had been based on sacrifices on the Temple Mount outside the temple, um, to God. And since they no longer had the temple and they no longer had access to the Temple Mount itself, um, a new sort of religion developed where Jews prayed in synagogues, and they lived, you know, in Spain, in Italy, in Cyprus, in North Africa.

Um, so that was a new era, and at the same time, the Christian religion had separated itself from Judaism. Um, Jesus, Joseph, Mary — their family were Jews; the Judeans were Judeans. But they lived in.

. . they would.

. . they were known as Nazarenes because they came from Galilee.

In the early part of um, the Christian story, they were really a Jewish sect. They prayed; they followed one of, um, Jesus's brothers or cousins, um, James. They prayed in the temple like other Jews.

And it was only really after '70, after the destruction of, um, the temple had shown many that God had withdrawn his blessing from the Jews again. War—failure in war—is so decisive in history that many people decided that actually they needed to embrace a new revelation, the revelation of Christianity. And, of course, it was the preaching of Christianity to non-Jews and the fact that Christianity would accept, open their arms completely to non-Jews that partly made it so successful.

But it was also a rebellion against the class structure in the Roman Empire, enslavement, um, and also it had a new concept, which was if you behave well in this life, you'd go to heaven in your next one. So salvation was a promise, and so it contained new things that really affected us, um, right until this day. And the conversion of Constantine, in the 4th century, Constantine, the ruler of the whole Roman Empire, um, the conversion to Christianity was a decisive moment in world history and really allied Christianity with power, with state, with empire, and, um, and Jesus with war and victory.

Three hundred years later, in Arabia emerged, um, the revelation of the Prophet Muhammad. He claimed to speak as the messenger of God, um, but he was knowledgeable about both Christian and Jewish religions. Whether he read it or he heard of it, he certainly traveled, um, with members of his family who were merchants to Syria, um, to Judea, to Palestine.

And, um, and so he, um, encompassed. . .

he embraced these stories as prophets. Um, he embraced, uh, Moses, David, um, he embraced Mary; he embraced these people—Jesus—as prophets in his new third and final revelation. And part of the success of Muhammad was based on what seemed like an eclipse of the Roman Empire.

In a time that must have seemed like a sort of world disaster, um, after he died in 632, but in the early part of that century, uh, the Sassanian Persians invaded the Eastern Roman Empire, defeated it, took Egypt, Jerusalem, and fought their way close to Istanbul. And the world seemed to be tilting in an extraordinary way; no one knew what would happen. And during that period, the two great powers, the Sassanian Persian Shah and the emperors in Constantinople, had formerly financed, uh, proxy kingdoms of Arabs that fought as their kinds of border proxies in the Middle East.

And these. . .

they discontinued these, um, these pensions that they paid to these local kings, these Arab kings. So there were a lot of. .

. there's always been a great mystery, like how come these Arabs from great obscurity managed to conquer so much of the world? Part of it was religious fervor.

. . part of.

. . It was tough.

Military toughness, part of it, um, was a sort of military efficiency, a centrality of belief, and part of it may have been that there were these kind of actually sort of experienced and trained warriors around, trained by both superpowers, if you like, who were available. But anyway, Muhammad was not only the founder of a religion, like, um, Jesus Christ, but he was also a head of state and a commander who created a new community and a new state. His successors sent their troops out into a world that was completely destabilized, and the early— it seems like nothing is certain of that period; it's such a misty period.

But it seems like they very shrewdly offered all monotheists the chance to join this religion, which at the time had rules that were unclear, that were inchoate, that were developing. There are, for example, in Jerusalem, very clear records that when they took Jerusalem, first of all, it was surrendered to them by the Christian bishop, um, without fighting and in return for tolerance. But secondly, that when they arrived there, um, they immediately went up to the Temple Mount, which had been left empty as a sign of Christian disdain for the Jews, um, and they built an early mosque there, um, on the site of Al-Aqsa.

They also later built the Dome of the Rock in 691, almost certainly on the site of the Judean or Jewish temple. But in those early mosques, and the early Dome of the Rock, Christians and Jews were allowed, it's believed, to pray there as well. And of course, the rules hardened later, um, as the religion became the formal faith of the great Arab Empire.

Um, but all that time, Jews had been there in that region, um, had prayed around the walls, and when the Muslims came, they allowed the Jews to return to live there, providing, uh, as they recognized the supremacy of the Islamic religion in the Islamic state. That was the basis on which Jews lived there for many centuries to come. So how do you understand the roots of anti-Semitism?

I guess the simplest theological rationale for it is that the persistence of [Music].