Samaritanism is among the smallest religions in the world that remains a living communal tradition rather than a survival kept up by scattered individuals.
The community was once large. Under Roman and Byzantine rule Samaritans were numerous in Palestine and had settlements as far afield as Egypt, Syria and the Aegean. A series of revolts against Byzantine rule in the fifth and sixth centuries CE was put down with great severity, and those losses, together with conversion under later Christian and Muslim rule, began a decline that continued for more than a thousand years. By 1917 the entire community numbered 146 people.
It has since recovered slowly, to roughly 900. They live in two places: Kiryat Luza, a village on the slope of Mount Gerizim, and a neighbourhood of Holon near Tel Aviv, settled from the middle of the twentieth century. The two halves come together on the mountain for the pilgrimage festivals. Most Samaritans are multilingual, using Arabic and modern Hebrew in daily life while Samaritan Hebrew and Samaritan Aramaic remain liturgical, written in a script descended directly from the old Hebrew alphabet rather than in the square letters Jews adopted from Aramaic.
The community's central problem is demographic. A population of this size, largely endogamous and descended from a very small number of surviving family lines, carries a heavy burden of inherited disease, and genetic counselling has become a routine part of arranging marriages. Since the twentieth century some men have married women from outside, who are received into the community after a period of instruction. Numbers are rising, but slowly.