Bland Samaritans: The modern-day descendants of the people that sparked the Arab-Israeli conflict

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Trouble in the small town of Jerusalem

In 66 A.D., the Roman procurator of Judea, Gessius Florus, ran out of money. The public servant, who was in the habit of living above his means, must have wasted it on flamboyant feasts, luxurious clothes, and marble palaces. As his contemporary, historian Flavius Josephus, tells it, “this his greediness of gain was the occasion that entire toparchies were brought to desolation, and a great many of the people left their own country, and fled into foreign provinces.”

Florus decided to replenish his treasury from what was probably the only source he had yet to exhaust: silver from the vaults of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, the main shrine of its land, the house of a god whom pagan Romans found weird and whom locals believed to be not just the chief deity, but the only higher power.

The Roman civil servant’s messengers took 17 talents of silver from the temple — hardly an exorbitant amount, even for the poor province of Judea. Its value came to around $500,000 in modern terms. However, the Jews were outraged that a heathen had dared to burglarize their god, taking the treasures that had been entrusted exclusively to priests chosen from their ranks by the almighty himself.

A wave of peaceful protests swept over Jerusalem. Jews began collecting small copper coins into clay bowls, declaring that it was money for the procurator. Both the bowls and the copper were recognizable attributes of the city's beggars — a not-so-subtle way of letting Florus know that people saw him as an indigent living off alms. City residents threw copper coins into the yard of the procurator's residence and even at the feet of his family members — “Take our money! Isn't that what you wanted?”

The proud aristocrat took great offense. A large squad of soldiers was dispatched to Jerusalem to restore order. Had the soldiers been Roman, the damage would have been minimal: a few protesters would have been flogged, a few more thrown in jail, and the whole affair would have been put to rest. But Florus, whether deliberately or due to a lack of available Roman legions, sent imperial soldiers from among Samaritans — long-standing enemies of the Jews.

Once in the city, they bared their swords and started slaughtering its residents right and left. The Jews grabbed their weapons as well, and the peaceful protest swiftly erupted into the armed conflict that went down in history as the First Jewish-Roman War. The first, because it was followed by many more, which ultimately brought about the destruction of the Holy Temple, the ruin of Jerusalem, the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and the eventual expulsion of Jews from the Holy Land.

In the 20th and the 21st centuries, their return to the ancestral homeland and their revival of the state that had first been subjugated, then erased by the Romans, led to a new wave of violence and wars — this time between Arabs and Jews.

If ancient historians are not mistaken in the idea that the origins of the standoff in the Holy Land date back to the order given by the infuriated Gessius Florus, then the first blood in this endless war was drawn by the Samaritans — a people whose similarity to the Jews rivaled only their hostility toward them.

Who does the Temple belong to?

“Everyone is welcome. You can come at any time. Any day. Except Saturdays, of course. Saturday is for prayer only. It's the Sabbath! We have observed it throughout our history,” a gray-bearded, bespectacled old man in a weird turban-style hat says with a smile, bidding goodbye to visitors.

This is the Samaritan high priest, who encountered a group of tourists on his way home from the synagogue. The tourists would not have noticed the old man had their guide not made a pause to introduce him. The high priest finds a few warm words for everyone in the group, shakes everyone's hand, and invites them to visit once more. And then he is on his way home. In the hallway, he removes the small turban from his head — an attribute of the Samaritan clergy — and joins his family in the dining room, waiting for his wife to serve dinner. The walls of the dining room are covered with old, yellowed photographs of priests in solemn attire, someone's wedding photographs, and a gold-on-black embroidery in Arabic: “May Allah bless this house.” The high priest's wife shouts something to him in Arabic from the kitchen, and he excuses himself before leaving the room.

The high priest’s last name is Cohen. This is the last name shared by all members of the Samaritan clergy. Jewish Cohens are also descendants of priests, but after the Romans tore down the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, the institute of the clergy disappeared from Judaism, and God-chosen Cohens gave way to rabbinical scholars. In the millennia since, however, the Samaritans have kept their priests.

“Our Temple was destroyed too, many centuries ago, but we know it can be rebuilt at any moment. The Messiah will come and raise it from the rubble, and our priests will start administering service there right away,” explains the priest’s grandson Abdullah Cohen. “We are waiting for the Messiah. We know he will come, and we are preparing for his advent.”

Like most Samaritans, the high priest's grandson has an Arab first name and a Jewish last name. Samaritans have lived among Arabs for so long that they have borrowed a lot from their neighbors. They cook Arab dishes, appreciate Arab music, and mostly use Arabic in their daily lives, while their ancient language, not dissimilar to the Hebrew of the Biblical era, survives only in holy books and prayers.

Abdullah, his grandfather, and other Samaritan Cohens are considered to be the descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moses. According to the story, it was Aaron who ultimately led the Israelites into the Holy Land after his brother's demise. As the Bible says, God showed Moses the site of the future temple, but the altar was completed by his brother.

“You shall pronounce the blessing on Mount Gerizim,” the Torah quotes Moses, who conveys God's instruction to the liberated people.

Situated in the region that Palestinians define as the West Bank of the Jordan River, and which the Israelis call Judea and Samaria, Mount Gerizim can be seen from the Cohens’ terrace. The temple and the altar are long gone. All that remains are the ruins of a Byzantine church that was built centuries ago and a small guard tower of the Ottoman era.

Samaritans believe that they are the “congregation of Israel,” that the Holy Land was meant for them, and that Mount Gerizim is the closest point on earth to the heavenly kingdom. For centuries Samaritans saw the Jews as usurpers, as impostors who had appropriated the Torah, the holy scripture, and tarnished it with their innovations.

As the Samaritan legend goes, the Jewish king David was so impressed with the beauty and splendor of the temple on Mount Gerizim that he ordered his architects to erect an exact replica in his capital. Completed by David's son, King Solomon, the Holy Temple of Jerusalem was a simulacrum in the eye of Samaritans, a structure completely devoid of divine presence. In turn, Jews called Samaritans impostors and accused them of appropriating and skewing their sacred texts.

The Holy Land is a rock-strewn desert with scarce resources, so droughts and crop failures were frequent in the past. As a consequence, the peoples inhabiting these territories were locked in various never-ending conflicts over farmland, pastures, and freshwater sources. Religious differences not only exacerbated these quarrels but brought them to another level — an existential one.

Jews and Samaritans did not just fight over access to a stream or a better meadow for their livestock, but also for the right to be called the “chosen people” — which meant the losing side would have to forfeit not only the land’s physical resources, but also the mystical title. This is why Samaritan soldiers were so eager to massacre the inhabitants of Jerusalem as soon as the procurator allowed it. It wasn’t just enemies they were killing; it was heretics.

Only a fool or a saint could imagine that Samaritans and Jews could feel anything but hatred towards one another. It is not a coincidence that in the Gospel of Luke an exhausted, dying Jew receives help from a Samaritan, his staunchest enemy — someone you would least expect to show compassion, let alone self-sacrifice. But this is the purpose of a parable: to show believers that nothing is impossible for God, and that He can inspire mercy even in the hearts of inexorable adversaries.

The last of Samaritans

This nameless biblical hero has been immortalized on the sign of a shop at the entrance to a Samaritan village. “The Good Samaritan” offers a motley selection of goods: Ukrainian ice cream, Belarusian vodka, kosher sausage, oilcloth icons, Chinese plastic toys, and volumes of the Torah in the language of the ancient Samaritans. Apart from the shop, the village can boast only a couple of benches — but it is enough for a population of some 400. This village accommodates almost half of the world's Samaritans.

Once one of the largest Middle Eastern nations, the Samaritans are on the verge of disappearance. Their numbers gradually shrank because of the innumerable wars and epidemics that ravaged the region — and because of the Arab and then Ottoman rule, during which the area was governed mainly by Islamic law.

While Islamic law imposed certain restrictions on Jews and Christians, these “people of the book” were still allowed to live among Muslims, trade with them, work for them or hire them, pursue a career in public service, and own property. Samaritans, however, existed in legal limbo, excluded from the list of non-believers who nonetheless enjoyed certain civil rights. For centuries, the only way for them to obtain these rights was to convert to a different faith — preferably to Islam, the dominant religion. Samaritans used this tactic for social and economic advancement en masse.

The number of converts among the Samaritans was so great that they almost disappeared as a distinctive group. Those who remained loyal to the faith of their ancestors ended up on the margins of economic life, forced to earn their meager bread by doing the dirtiest, most strenuous forms of labor — or simply to beg in the streets. Samaritans quickly lost the attention of chroniclers and travelers, few of whom were interested in the plight of a handful of day laborers and beggars living in the back alleys of the poorest districts.

For a long time, the West considered them to be an extinct, or even imaginary, people. It was only in the late 19th century, when the Ottoman Empire was nearing its collapse and the Holy Land saw an influx of European and American educators and missionaries, that the Samaritans were “rediscovered.”

The Western travelers were astonished to learn that the Biblical people still existed — and were horrified by the squalor they lived in. The advent of Europeans and Americans became both a salvation and a curse for the Samaritans. On the one hand, the foreigners brought money, lifting the nearly extinct nation out of poverty. On the other hand, their dollars, francs, pounds, and rubles came as payment for ancient Samaritan manuscripts.

A fair share of the literary heritage that had been amassed for centuries ended up scattered across museums, libraries, and private collections. The only books Samaritans refused to sell were scrolls of the Torah. The ancient people would never give them up willingly.

The most important scrolls are stored in the synagogue of the village at the foot of Mount Gerizim. This community presents a stark contrast with other Middle Eastern villages. Most of the houses are new, built in the European or American style. The main road is well-paved, and most of the cars parked in the yards look expensive. Everything is neat, functional, and modern.

The only feature reminding visitors that they are not in Belgium or Pennsylvania is the signs at the entrance: a warning, translated into several languages, that Israeli citizens are strictly forbidden from entering. However, this is no remnant of the Old Testament hostility but the requirement of the Palestinian Administration, which controls the area.

The hills inhabited by the Samaritans offer a stunning view of Nablus, the city that was called Shechem in the Biblical times, was renamed to Flavia Neapolis under Romans, and was known as Naples during the Crusader period. For a long time, Nablus was just about the only place in the world where Samaritans lived.

Once upon a time, they were present in a great many cities — and even had a prosperous community in Gaza. However, Gazan Samaritans fled their homes in the late 19th century, fearful of the approaching Napoleonic armies. In other cities, their communities gradually dwindled and disappeared. Nablus, the city by the holy mountain, remained the only home for Samaritans. They had an entire quarter inside the city, with synagogues and baths, schools and hospitals.

As time went by, their spaces shrunk with their numbers. Disused synagogues were repurposed as mosques, and Samaritanhouses, with no one to inherit them, became home to Christians and Muslims. Yet whatever the city was called and whoever governed it, Samaritans always maintained some presence. It was not until very recently that the Samaritan history of Nablus came to an end.

Strangers among their kind

The last Samaritans left Nablus in the 1990s. Some of them moved to the Israeli city of Holon, joining a handful of local Samaritan families, while others started afresh in the village near Mount Gerizim. As Samaritans explain, the mass exodus was triggered by a conflict with the gangs of Nablus. The gangsters stole an ancient Torah scroll from the synagogue and threatened to grab other precious artifacts unless the Samaritans paid a ransom of $1 million.

To keep the relics, they decided to move someplace safe. However, the conflict with the mob was only one of many reasons why the entire community chose to uproot itself. In the late 1980s, Palestinian groups revolted against Israel, launching what is currently known as the First Intifada, and the Samaritans’ Jewish last names and similar customs made it unsafe for them to remain on territories under Palestinian control. This was especially true of Nablus, a stronghold of radical Islam. Quite possibly, pressure from radicals was another reason why Samaritans abandoned the city. But as they went, they took the traits of their old lives in Nablus with them.

The schoolyard in the Samaritan village features a Palestinian flag, and the high priest occasionally receives visits from Palestinian officials. Palestinian television films all Samaritan religious holidays, placing a special emphasis on the priests and the believers being Palestinian citizens — which they are, but only up to a point.

In addition to a Palestinian passport, every Samaritan also holds an Israeli and even a Jordanian one. The latter would be the gift of the Jordanian monarchs, who declared themselves guardians of the ancient people. As for Israelis, they have buried the hatchet and acknowledged Samaritans as part of the Jewish nation — which is sufficient grounds for providing them with Israeli passports.

Samaritans have kept their unique identity through the centuries. Arabic-speaking and rooted in the Palestinian environment until recently, they nevertheless profess a religion close to Judaism. They do not have serious disagreements with either the Jews or the Arabs, and their small numbers (around 900 worldwide, which is an increase compared to a century-old census that counted only 141 representatives of this people) rule out any possibility of statehood. That is, they are not at odds with any of their neighbors.

Not so long ago, individual ambitious Samaritans attempted to leverage their unique status and assume the role of intermediaries in the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, these attempts ended in nothing and are only mentioned in the footnotes of modern books on the Middle East as a historical anecdote.

The Samaritans are too few and too alien to have any influence on the neighboring nations. Their community even failed to articulate an unambiguous position on the ongoing war in Gaza. Their hands are tied by their dependence on Israeli employers and foreign tourists, mostly Evangelical pilgrims who stand with Israel while ensuring steady income for the Samaritan village — and equally by close proximity to Palestinians, some of whom are indeed quite radical.

Therefore, Samaritans mostly stay silent and avoid taking sides in the conflict between two larger nations whose fates are inextricably intertwined with their own. After all, the times when the Samaritans were a force to be reckoned with in the Middle East are long gone.