UsefulCharts Turns Jerusalem into a Scoreboard—and the Numbers Don't Hold Up

Jerusalem has survived conquerors, massacres, empires, and religious upheavals. Its history is complicated enough without turning it into a competition whose rules change halfway through.

In Who Controlled Jerusalem the Longest?, published on June 17, 2022, UsefulCharts creator Matt Baker attempts something ambitious: calculate how many years different states and religions controlled Jerusalem, then use those results to illuminate its disputed future.

His headline findings are striking. Rome controlled Jerusalem for approximately 676 years, followed by the ancient Kingdom of Judah with 414 years and the Ottoman Empire with 401. By religion, Islam leads with 1,283 years, Judaism follows with 1,197, and Christianity trails with 410.

Baker concludes that Jerusalem's diverse history prevents any single religion or culture from establishing an exclusive historical claim. He favors some form of shared control within a two-state solution.

The problem is not necessarily his conclusion. It is the arithmetic being used to support it.

Baker's scoreboard mixes imperial rule, religious identity, population estimates, and biblical chronology without applying the same standards to each. Independent archaeological research exposes errors in his classification of Jerusalem's Islamic period. Established historical chronology challenges his ranking of the Kingdom of Judah. Nineteenth-century population records make his religious totals far less certain than their precise figures imply.

A historical chart can simplify complicated events. It cannot legitimately simplify away the distinctions on which its conclusions depend.

1. Jerusalem Did Not Become a Muslim City Overnight

Baker identifies 636 CE as the decisive turning point when Caliph Umar conquered Jerusalem.

He describes the conquest as making Jerusalem, for the first time, a primarily Muslim city.

That formulation contains two problems.

First, the date is questionable. Robert Schick's historical study, The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine to Islamic Rule, distinguishes the Muslim victory at the Battle of Yarmuk in 636 from Jerusalem's subsequent surrender, which he dates tentatively to 638.

The distinction is not trivial. A decisive military victory over the Byzantine Empire did not mean every remaining Byzantine city immediately surrendered.

The second problem is more consequential.

Muslim political control did not immediately make Jerusalem's population predominantly Muslim.

Archaeologist Gideon Avni examined Jerusalem's transformation during the early Islamic centuries in a 2022 study published through the Israel Antiquities Authority.

His findings present a substantially different picture.

Avni describes a gradual transformation in which Christians remained the largest population group throughout the Early Islamic period. Muslims established new religious and urban institutions, while Christians retained their communities and Jews returned to a city from which they had previously faced severe restrictions.

Muslim expansion into traditionally Christian urban areas continued gradually, particularly during the tenth and eleventh centuries.

This matters because Baker is not merely counting governments. His final comparison purports to measure the length of religious dominance.

If the definition is political authority, Jerusalem became Muslim-governed following the conquest.

If the definition is the religion of most inhabitants, the transformation occurred substantially later.

If the definition is control of major religious institutions, that requires a third calculation.

Baker moves between these meanings as though they were interchangeable.

The difference is potentially hundreds of years, not a technical disagreement over a particular conquest date.

An Islamic ruler governing a predominantly Christian population is not the same historical condition as a predominantly Muslim population governing itself.

Both matter. Neither should be erased to produce a cleaner chart.

2. Even the Timeline's Basic Arithmetic Needs Repair

Baker states that Jerusalem had been a primarily Muslim city for 488 years before the Crusaders captured it in 1099.

But his own starting date is 636.

The interval between 636 and 1099 is 463 years, not 488.

Using the commonly accepted surrender date of 638 produces approximately 461 years.

The discrepancy is 25 to 27 years, depending on the starting date.

That does not automatically invalidate Baker's final religious total. His cumulative figure of 1,283 years can be reconstructed using the shorter, mathematically correct interval of 463 years.

The problem is that the narration gives viewers a number that does not follow from the dates it supplies.

Christianity's total presents another accounting problem.

The explicitly identified Christian periods in the transcript are:

• Byzantine Christian Jerusalem, 326–614: 288 years
• Restored Byzantine rule, 629–636: 7 years
• Crusader control, 1099–1187: 88 years
• Christian control following the Sixth Crusade, 1229–1244: 15 years

Together, these amount to 398 years.

Baker's final figure is 410.

The additional 12 years are not explained by the periods identified in the narration. They may reflect a classification or transition not fully described, but viewers receive no accounting that resolves the difference.

These discrepancies matter because the presentation derives its authority from precision.

Numbers such as 1,283 and 1,197 suggest an underlying historical measurement accurate to individual years.

Yet the underlying classifications are often uncertain by decades, sometimes centuries.

Precision without a consistent method is not accuracy. It is the appearance of accuracy.

3. The Kingdom of Judah Gets Credit for a Kingdom That Had Not Yet Formed

One of Baker's most consequential decisions concerns the ancient Kingdom of Judah.

He assigns Judah 414 years of control, beginning with David's traditional capture of Jerusalem around 1000 BCE and ending with the Babylonian conquest in 586 BCE.

Baker acknowledges that the early history is uncertain.

But the problem extends beyond archaeological uncertainty.

Under the traditional biblical chronology itself, the separate Kingdom of Judah did not exist throughout David and Solomon's reigns.

Those kings belong to the period conventionally described as the United Monarchy.

The separate kingdoms of Israel and Judah emerged following Solomon's death, traditionally dated to approximately 931 BCE.

Oxford's scholarly reference on the Books of Kings explicitly distinguishes the united monarchy from the subsequent divided monarchies of Israel and Judah.

This produces an immediate change in the comparison.

Using approximately 931–586 BCE gives the separate Kingdom of Judah about 345 years, not 414.

That places it below the Ottoman Empire's 401 years.

The Ottoman Empire would therefore move ahead of Judah if the calculation strictly compared the duration of the separate Kingdom of Judah against the duration of Ottoman rule.

There is a defensible alternative: count the broader Davidic or Judahite political tradition from approximately 1000 BCE.

But that requires labeling the category accordingly.

One cannot count David's traditional rule as part of the Kingdom of Judah while disregarding the distinction between the united and divided monarchies.

Archaeology makes the starting point even more complicated.

A 2024 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed 103 radiocarbon dates from Iron Age Jerusalem.

The researchers established evidence of settlement during the twelfth through tenth centuries BCE and major architectural developments beginning by the ninth century. They also emphasized the difficulties of constructing an exact chronology for the period.

Those findings establish important facts about Jerusalem's ancient development.

They do not independently establish that David conquered the city in precisely 1000 BCE or that a clearly defined Judahite kingdom governed it continuously from that year.

The distinction matters because Baker's original margin between Judah and the Ottomans is only 13 years.

That is an extraordinarily narrow margin to rest on such uncertain early chronology.

Rome's first-place ranking remains secure within Baker's broad Roman-Byzantine grouping. But the second- and third-place rankings are much less robust than his presentation suggests.

A change in historical definition—not a new archaeological discovery—is sufficient to reverse them.

4. The Ottoman Period Exposes the Religious Double Standard

The Ottoman Empire governed Jerusalem from 1516 to 1917.

Baker credits Islam with all 401 years.

He then explains that Jerusalem's Jewish population increased significantly during the nineteenth century. By approximately 1850, he says, Jews and Muslims were present in roughly equal numbers, alongside a substantial Christian minority.

Consequently, he awards Judaism another 67 years for the Ottoman period after 1850.

Islam keeps its entire 401 years.

This creates a revealing inconsistency.

Muslim government is treated as sufficient for Muslim religious dominance, even after Baker acknowledges that Jerusalem was no longer predominantly Muslim.

Judaism, meanwhile, receives additional years because its population had become substantial.

The categories have changed from political power to population size without a corresponding adjustment to the Islamic total.

The available population evidence also deserves greater caution.

A historical table published by the Jewish Virtual Library gives the following figures for 1844:

On these figures, Jews were Jerusalem's largest single religious community, comprising approximately 46% of the population. Muslims represented approximately 32%, and Christians 22%.

But these are not uncontested census results.

A separate historical reconstruction by Dr. Walid Mustafa, published by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre in 2000, gives a very different estimate for 1849: 1,790 Jews and 9,892 Arabs.

The two datasets use different underlying records, classifications, and estimation methods. They are not directly interchangeable.

Mustafa's study explicitly warns that nineteenth-century population figures are uncertain, with incomplete Ottoman records and conflicting estimates from contemporary observers.

These differences do not establish that one community's historical claim is superior.

They establish something much more relevant to Baker's calculation: the precise year at which Jerusalem supposedly shifted from Muslim to shared religious dominance is not securely established by the evidence presented.

Yet Baker selects 1850 and adds exactly 67 years.

Why 1850 rather than 1844, 1876, or another date supported by a particular demographic threshold?

What minimum share of the population qualifies a religion for historical credit?

And why does Christianity, which Baker himself acknowledges had a sizable population, not receive equivalent treatment?

No consistent rule is supplied.

The sensitivity of the final result is striking.

Baker's announced religious totals place Islam 86 years ahead of Judaism.

Remove the 67 Ottoman years from Islam's dominance total after the date Baker himself identifies as the end of Muslim predominance, while leaving every other assumption unchanged, and that difference falls to 19 years.

That is not a proposed replacement ranking. A fully consistent recalculation would also require examining the Jewish and Christian totals and the earlier centuries.

It is a demonstration of how fragile the headline result becomes when one questionable classification changes.

The supposed historical lead is not independent of the scoring rules.

It is produced by them.

5. Jerusalem's Political Status Cannot Be Settled by Counting Religious Years

The video's final argument is that Jerusalem's long and diverse history defeats exclusive religious claims.

There is a reasonable principle here: centuries of conquest and religious change do not automatically confer an exclusive modern political entitlement.

But Baker moves from that observation toward a preferred political arrangement without examining the legal institutions that already address Jerusalem's status.

Modern sovereignty is not awarded according to which religion accumulated the most centuries.

In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, proposing the partition of British Mandatory Palestine.

Its plan did not simply allocate Jerusalem to whichever future state possessed the strongest historical claim.

Instead, it proposed that Jerusalem become a corpus separatum: a separate international entity administered under a special United Nations regime.

That proposal reflected the city's unusual religious importance and the difficulty of assigning it exclusively to one national government.

The proposed international arrangement was never implemented, but it demonstrates that Jerusalem's status was being addressed through institutional and political arrangements rather than ancient religious arithmetic.

The legal discussion has developed substantially since Baker published his video.

On July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion concerning Israeli policies and practices in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.

The court affirmed that East Jerusalem forms part of the occupied Palestinian territory. It concluded that Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory was unlawful and identified obligations concerning settlement activity, annexation, and Palestinian self-determination.

The opinion was advisory rather than a binding judgment between two states, and it did not resolve every question about Jerusalem's eventual political settlement. Nevertheless, it provided authoritative legal findings that cannot be reduced to a disagreement over historical ownership.

Baker cannot reasonably be criticized for omitting a 2024 opinion from a video published in 2022.

But anyone using his original comparison to understand Jerusalem's position today needs that distinction.

Historical control, effective government, legal sovereignty, and religious custodianship are different things.

The final one is especially important.

6. Israel's Control Is More Complicated Than the Video Allows

Baker describes Israel as exercising full practical control over Jerusalem since 1967, while acknowledging that Palestinians dispute its sovereignty.

Israel unquestionably exercises extensive governmental and security authority over the city.

But an important institutional arrangement complicates the picture.

Israel formally recognizes Jordan's special historical role in Jerusalem's Muslim holy shrines.

Article 9 of the October 26, 1994, Israel–Jordan peace treaty explicitly records that recognition.

The treaty also states that Jordan's historic role should receive high priority during negotiations over Jerusalem's permanent status.

This does not mean Jordan governs Jerusalem or possesses sovereignty over its Muslim holy sites.

Israel retains substantial security authority, while Jordan's recognized role concerns religious custodianship.

That distinction is precisely what a serious account of Jerusalem's control should explain.

At the city's most contested religious locations, political authority and religious administration are not identical.

Nor are contemporary disputes merely continuations of medieval contests between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

They involve Israelis and Palestinians as national communities, questions of citizenship and residency, territorial jurisdiction, religious access, and internationally recognized legal rights.

Reducing these conflicts to religious blocks on a timeline produces a historical narrative that is easier to display than the institutions governing the city itself.

7. The Conclusion Survives Better Than the Evidence Used to Reach It

There is an important limit to this criticism.

Baker does not claim that Jerusalem belongs exclusively to whichever religion tops his historical scoreboard.

He argues almost the opposite: that its varied history undermines exclusive claims.

That position does not become false simply because his counting methods are inconsistent.

Nor does correcting his dates prove that Jerusalem should belong exclusively to Israel, Palestine, Judaism, Islam, or any other political or religious community.

The historical record contains compelling evidence of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim connections to Jerusalem.

Baker's video communicates much of that history effectively.

But its central device—the comparison of precisely counted years—cannot bear the weight placed upon it.

The most important errors are not isolated slips.

They are structural.

A Muslim conquest becomes Muslim demographic dominance. A traditionally united monarchy becomes the Kingdom of Judah. Ottoman political rule remains evidence of Islamic dominance even after the population calculation changes. Religious communities receive overlapping credit according to rules that are neither comprehensive nor consistently applied.

The result is a ranking that looks objective while depending on choices its viewers cannot independently evaluate.

The Verdict

Matt Baker asks a worthwhile historical question and supplies a great deal of useful information. But his attempt to turn Jerusalem's history into a competition between states and religions produces a confidence the evidence does not justify.

The Kingdom of Judah's position changes when its political history is classified more strictly. The Islamic period changes meaning when religious government is distinguished from population. The modern religious totals are sensitive to an arbitrary nineteenth-century cutoff.

Those are not minor corrections to a fundamentally reliable scoreboard.

They undermine the comparison itself.

Jerusalem's history deserves something better than a calculator that treats an emperor's religion, a city's population, and a state's sovereignty as interchangeable units.

Baker is entitled to favor shared control. He may even have reached a defensible political conclusion.

But his historical arithmetic has not established it.

Jerusalem cannot be awarded by stopwatch. And a stopwatch with changing rules cannot establish who held it longest.

References

1. Original work — Matt Baker, Who Controlled Jerusalem the Longest?
UsefulCharts, June 17, 2022.
Watch the original video

The original presentation supplies the dates, historical classifications, cumulative religious totals, and political conclusions examined in this critique.

2. Robert Schick, The Islamic Conquest: The Mid-630s to 640
The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine to Islamic Rule, Cambridge University Press online edition, 2025.
Read the academic chapter

Schick distinguishes the Byzantine defeat at Yarmuk in 636 from Jerusalem's probable surrender in 638, challenging the video's precise conquest date.

3. Gideon Avni, From Hagia Polis to Al-Quds: Jerusalem between Late Antiquity and Early Islam, the Creation of a Multicultural City
Cornerstone: Journal of Archaeological Sites, Israel Antiquities Authority, 2022.
Read the archaeological study

Avni describes Jerusalem's gradual transformation under Islamic rule and identifies Christians as the largest population group during the Early Islamic period.

4. Gary N. Knoppers and Jonathan S. Greer, First and Second Kings
Oxford Bibliographies in Biblical Studies, Oxford University Press, 2010.
Read the scholarly reference

The reference distinguishes the united monarchy of David and Solomon from the separate Kingdom of Judah that emerged around 931 BCE.

5. Johanna Regev and colleagues, Radiocarbon Chronology of Iron Age Jerusalem Reveals Calibration Offsets and Architectural Developments
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 2024.
Read the archaeological research

The study uses 103 radiocarbon dates to reconstruct Jerusalem's Iron Age development, establishing settlement evidence while illustrating the limitations of assigning exact dates to its earliest political history.

6. Demographics of Israel: Population of Jerusalem, 1844–Present
Jewish Virtual Library, American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, continually updated.
Examine the population figures

The compilation reports 1844 population estimates of 7,120 Jews, 5,000 Muslims, and 3,390 Christians, illustrating the city's substantial religious diversity before Baker's selected 1850 threshold.

7. Walid Mustafa, Population and Urbanization: Jerusalem from 1850–2000
Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre, September 2000.
Read the historical demographic study

The study reconstructs nineteenth-century population trends from Ottoman records while documenting the uncertainty and methodological disagreements affecting historical demographic estimates.

8. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), Future Government of Palestine
United Nations, November 29, 1947.
Read Resolution 181

The original partition proposal envisaged Jerusalem as a separate internationally administered entity, establishing that modern political proposals were not based on religious longevity.

9. Treaty of Peace between the State of Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan
Governments of Israel and Jordan, October 26, 1994; reproduced by Yale Law School's Avalon Project.
Read the treaty

Article 9 records Israel's recognition of Jordan's special role in Jerusalem's Muslim holy shrines, demonstrating the distinction between governmental authority and religious custodianship.

10. International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences Arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem
Advisory Opinion, July 19, 2024.
Read the court's opinion

The court addresses occupation, annexation, Palestinian self-determination, and Israel's legal obligations, providing an authoritative legal framework distinct from historical religious claims.