“Wharton provides a feast for anyone who has felt Jerusalem's tug of fascination. . . . [The purpose] is to demonstrate the way our understanding of religious art and artefacts is changed by doctrinal development in religion, new political ideas, technology and economic change, and as a work of art history the book is illuminating and satisfying. . . . The author is a fastidious scholar and the precision with which she uses words makes Selling Jerusalem a real pleasure to read.”
— Ed Stourton, Times Literary Supplement
“The holiness of Jerusalem has been disseminated across the world: sometimes by pilgrims, returning with their relics or souvenirs, or through its use as a model for church-builders, hymn-writers and film-directors who have never been there. In a short, sophisticated and highly readable book, Annabel Jane Wharton attempts a sort of taxonomy of the different ways in which Jerusalem's holiness has been exported.”
— Economist
"A fascinating analysis of place, objects, commodities and representations. In this account, Annabel Wharton explores Jerusalem from cultural, material and historical perspectives. . . . Power, violence, finance, buildings, paintings, souvenirs are . . . for her, all related to each other, creating the social, political, spiritual, and material world in which we live."
— Hadas Yaron, The Art Book
"Selling Jerusalem makes important contributions to art history, as well as the history of landscape, colonialism, cross-cultural contact, and religion. It offers a wealth of detail in its case studies and provides much inspiration for new approaches to landscapes, objects, and cultural history. In an even deeper and more controversial way, it can show us how much of the conflict over “Jerusalem” has actually been fought over its necessarily imperfect, variable, ideological, and illusory representations—in proxy forms from the tiny to the grandiose."
— Rebecca Zorach, CAA.Reviews