Samaritanism

Samaritan belief is summarised in a short formula: one God, one prophet in Moses, one book in the Torah, one holy place in Mount Gerizim, and one day of reckoning. Everything distinctive follows from those five.

Scripture is the Torah alone. The Samaritan Pentateuch differs from the Jewish Masoretic text at several thousand points, most of them minor matters of spelling or grammar but a few substantive: it reads Gerizim where the Jewish text leaves the chosen place unnamed, and its version of the Ten Commandments includes the command to build an altar there. Where the Jewish canon adds the Prophets and the Writings, and rabbinic Judaism adds an oral law, Samaritans accept neither. They have an interpretive literature of their own, but it does not carry scriptural authority.

Mount Gerizim, above Nablus, is the centre of the religion. Samaritans face it in prayer, hold it to be the site of the binding of Isaac and the one mountain the Flood did not cover, and ascend it on pilgrimage three times a year at Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot.

The priesthood is hereditary and still functioning, which makes Samaritanism the only surviving Israelite religion that has one. The high priest is the community's religious head, fixes the calendar by calculation rather than by observation, and presides at the Passover sacrifice on Gerizim, where lambs are slaughtered and roasted according to the instructions in Exodus. It is the only place in the world where the biblical Passover sacrifice is still carried out.

Sabbath observance is stricter than the rabbinic form, with no fire kindled and no leaving the home except for worship, and the purity laws of the Torah, including menstrual separation, are kept in a fuller form than in Judaism.

How Samaritans and Jews came to be separate is disputed, and each tradition has told it as the other's apostasy.

Samaritan tradition holds that the two were one until the priest Eli left Mount Gerizim for Shiloh and established a rival sanctuary, an act it places in the period of the judges. On this account the Samaritans are the ones who stayed and Judaism is the innovation.

Jewish tradition, drawing on the account in the second book of Kings, holds the reverse: that when Assyria destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE and deported part of its population, foreign settlers were brought in, took up a partial worship of the God of Israel, and are the ancestors of the Samaritans. The name given them in rabbinic literature, Kutim, encodes that claim.

Modern scholarship accepts neither account as it stands. The Assyrian deportations did not empty the north, where Israelite population certainly continued. The prevailing view treats Samaritans and Jews as two branches of a common Israelite religion that diverged gradually through the Persian and Hellenistic periods, the break becoming irreversible only late in that process. Genetic studies of Samaritan male lines have found them closely related to Jewish ones, which fits continuity rather than replacement.

Archaeology has sharpened the picture. Excavations on Mount Gerizim uncovered a sacred precinct in use from about the fifth century BCE and greatly enlarged in the early second, with a substantial city around it. The Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus destroyed the sanctuary late in the second century BCE, though Josephus and the coin evidence differ by roughly two decades on the date, and it was never rebuilt. That destruction is generally taken as the point at which the separation hardened past repair.

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.