Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (27 page)

The Talmud’s ruling was bound to cause tension, but political rivalries made relations worse: in a pattern that dated back to the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the two groups tended to back opposite sides in regional power struggles. When Alexander the Great fought the Jews, the Samaritans marched alongside him; when Alexander changed his mind and supported the Jews, he ended up at war with the Samaritans. When the Jews rebelled against Alexander’s Greek successors in the Maccabee Wars of the second century
BC
, the Samaritans took the opposite side; in revenge, the Jewish rebels burned down the Samaritan temple. In the aftermath of those wars, however, the Jews were suppressed and the Samaritans prospered.

By Jesus’s time the Samaritans may have numbered half a million people. Relations were worse than ever, though. In
AD
9 a Samaritan gang infiltrated Jerusalem and polluted the Jewish Temple by scattering human bones in it. In
AD
50 a Jew traveling from Galilee to visit the Temple in Jerusalem was murdered by Samaritans at a village on the site of modern-day Jenin. Jesus was preaching in between those two dates, and either for this reason or because of a fear for their safety, initially he told his apostles not to enter Samaritan towns when they went on their preaching missions. Later, though, he relented and himself planned to travel through Samaritan territory on his way to Jerusalem. Jesus’s meeting with the Samaritan woman by Jacob’s Well and the parable of the Good Samaritan show a friendlier attitude toward the Samaritans. In fact, at one point Jesus was accused of being a Samaritan himself. Perhaps because of this, Christianity attracted Samaritan converts early on.

What happened to the Samaritans afterward? As it turned out, my friends from Balata had a surprise to show me. We climbed a twisting road on the side of Mount Gerizim, entering a little village at its top. Spidery archaic Hebrew letters marked the buildings, and a man in white robes and the red and white
tarbush
of a cleric was walking along the street. A small museum explained who the man and the other residents of the village were. This mountaintop village, which they called al-Loz (meaning “the almond trees”), and a street in a suburb of the Israeli capital, Tel Aviv, were the two remaining places where the world’s 750 Samaritans could still be found.

The Samaritans were spared the fate meted out to the Jews in
AD
70 when Roman legions defeated a Jewish revolt and sacked the city of Jerusalem, destroying its Temple forever—and the even worse disaster inflicted on the Jews after another revolt in the 130s, when half a million Jews were killed and the remainder entirely expelled from their homeland. The Samaritans actually flourished in the absence of their old rivals. Their leader at this time, Baba Rabba, was remembered afterward in legend as a reformer and miracle worker. Christian missionary work may have provoked a series of Samaritan rebellions in the sixth century, after which the emperor Justinian destroyed all of the Samaritans’ synagogues, barred them from service in government and the imperial army, banned them from testifying against a Christian in court, and even stopped them from passing down their possessions to their offspring. Unsurprisingly, the Samaritans became hostile to outsiders: a Christian pilgrim named Antoninus of Piacenza reported that when he visited Samaritan towns, they “burned away our footprints with straw, whether we were Christians or Jews, they have such a horror of both.” Likewise, it is no surprise that the Samaritans welcomed the coming of the Arab Muslims in 637.

It may seem odd, given that the Arab-Israel conflict has come to define the relationship between Muslims and Jews, that that relationship was once close and respectful. At one point Jews and Muslims both prayed in the same direction, toward Jerusalem, before Muslims turned toward Mecca instead. Although early Muslims fought the Jewish tribes of Arabia, several verses of the Koran teach respect and tolerance for Jews. Muslims and Jews generally regarded each other as more thoroughly monotheistic than Christians because both groups rejected the idea that Jesus was God incarnate, and they refused to depict God in any kind of image. The great Jewish scholar Maimonides (who knew Islam from the inside, having been forced to practice as a Muslim at one point in his life before being allowed to revert to Judaism) asserted that Muslims, “in attributing Oneness to God—they have no mistake at all.” Muslim scholars drew on Jewish scholarship when devising the early jurisprudence of Islam, sometimes inserting Talmudic punishments in place of the less severe Koranic ones (adopting the practice of stoning for adultery, for instance). None of this guaranteed good treatment for Jews, whose refusal to convert to Islam could always be used against them. After the Islamic conquest, they faced legal discrimination and were always vulnerable to bouts of persecution. But they remained loyal to their Muslim rulers as late as the First Crusade, when they fought alongside Muslims to defend Jerusalem from the Christian Franks.

Early Muslim rulers doubted whether the Samaritans were truly a people of the book, and imposed extra taxes on them compared to their Christian and Jewish neighbors. Yet the Samaritans benefited, even more than the Jews, from the Islamic conquest. “The Arab conquest actually helped the inland Samaritan community,” wrote Israeli historian Nathan Schur, “gave it a freedom of worship it had not known for centuries and made the medieval flowering of its religion and literature possible.” Samaritans abandoned Aramaic and began speaking Arabic, and they devised distinctive names for themselves (Abed Yahweh, for example, meaning “servant of Yahweh,” instead of the Muslim version, Abed Allah; unlike the Jews’ version of the Ten Commandments, the Samaritans’ version does not feature a taboo on using God’s name).

Without persecution, Samaritans still converted to Islam—for economic benefits, social advancement, and theological reasons. So the community continued to diminish, and the good treatment did not last. Hard-line Muslim rulers, sometimes under pressure from the clergy, passed punitive and humiliating laws meant to encourage the Samaritans to convert, and those rulers who were liberal or friendly could do no more than grant temporary relief. One by one the communities of Samaritans in Cairo, Gaza, Aleppo, and Damascus shrank and disappeared, until Nablus was the only place where they could be found. By the sixteenth century, when contemporary Samaritans appear in Western records for the first time, they were desperate to find any of their number who might remain, scattered around the world. A French scholar named Joseph Scaliger tricked them at that time into thinking that he might be one himself, a member of a long-lost community in Europe, and so they wrote to him hopefully: “We ask thee for the Lord’s sake, and we adjure thee by his Holy Name, that thou return not our Request unanswered . . . whether there be among you Priests descending from Levi, Aaron or Phinees, or whether you have any Priests at all?” (Aaron, from the tribe of Levi, was the ancestor of all Jewish priests in biblical times, and Phinees was Aaron’s grandson.) It was their own version of the myth of the Ten Tribes.

The Samaritans saw themselves, though diminished in number, as heirs to a proud and ancient history. In their letter to Scaliger they boasted that they still had a high priest who was descended from Phinees (“The Jews have not Priests descended from Phinees,” the letter writer added competitively). They remembered, as most Jews did not, the tribe to which they belonged—Samaritan priests like the Jewish priests, the
kohanim,
are descendants of Levi, while the Samaritan lay people trace their descent from Joseph. Joseph Wolff, a missionary, was told in the 1820s by a Samaritan called Israel el-Shalaby that the Samaritans had not forgotten that they were descendants of Joseph, who had been betrayed and sold into slavery by his brothers. The Samaritans had inherited his grievance and thus resented the Jews, he said: “We his children, can never forget that Joseph, our father, was so harshly treated by his brethren.”

As late as 1772, Nablus’s laws required Samaritans to wear bells in public and banned them from riding horses (in an emergency, they could ride mules). Local politics in Nablus were violent and fast-moving: various demagogues saw opportunities to attack the Samaritans as a way to burnish their own Islamic credentials. One such managed to start a riot in the 1850s, in the course of which some men started shouting that the Samaritans should be given the choice of conversion to Islam or death. The Jewish chief rabbi came from Jerusalem just in time to avert a disaster by certifying that they were genuine monotheists (a historic move, given the traditionally bad relationship between Jews and Samaritans).

An American missionary, the Reverend Pliny Fisk, whose posthumous memoir was published in 1828, recorded his encounter with the Samaritans: “They inquired whether there are any Samaritans in England, and seemed not at all gratified when we told them no. On learning that I was from America, they inquired if there are Samaritans there. I told them no, but they confidently asserted the contrary and that there are also many in India.” A Welshman named John Mills, who had taught himself Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, headed to Nablus in the 1850s. Mills commented that he found the Samaritans an attractive people: “As a community, there is nothing in Palestine to compare with them . . . they are tall and of lofty bearing.” Tellingly, he added that they had “an unmistakable family likeness.” So they do today, including distinctively large earlobes. When the community asked him if there were Hebrews in his country, Mills thought they meant Jews and said yes. Once more, they became deeply excited at the thought that they might find a lost colony of Samaritans. The reality was that they were alone in the world.

They hoped for a Messiah, or Ta’eb, as they called him. John Mills wrote that they believed their Messiah would come “not to shed blood, but to heal the nations; not to make war, but to bring peace.” They predicted, for reasons that Mills does not explain, that the Messiah would come in 1910, but he did not. On the other hand, the British Mandate, which came into force in Palestine in 1920, was a turning point. From that moment the community began to recover, with the encouragement of British Christians who viewed the Samaritans kindly because of their biblical connections. The relief came just in time: the community had reached an all-time low of 146 members.

They had continued through the centuries to copy out on parchment their ancient biblical texts, which they believed proved the claims that Mount Gerizim was God’s sacred mountain. They remembered, too, the ancient quarrel between Israel and Judah. When the new Jewish state was proposed in the 1940s, a Samaritan priest explained to a British official with all the dignity of the last heirs of the house of Israel: “I am no enemy of the Jews having their kingdom once again. I am angry that they should be installed on land that is Israel’s, that has never been theirs!” He was undeterred by the fact that the Samaritans at that time numbered two hundred people and the Jews about eleven million. As the British travel writer H. V. Morton remarked at around the same time, “I think that the Samaritans consider the Arabs who have been there since only
AD
638 as interlopers!”

—————

WHEN DOING THE RESEARCH FOR THIS BOOK
, in 2012, I looked again at items that I had kept from my time as consul in Jerusalem. It was an assembly of memories. There was a ticket to Easter Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where I had looked down from the church’s dome to see the Orthodox Patriarch bring fire, apparently by a miracle, out of the small booth that is said to house the tomb of Christ. There was a photograph of the Western Wall, where Jews still go to lament the razing in
AD
70 of the Temple by the Romans, who were determined to stamp out the Jewish religion because it had proven so resistant to their rule. (The Western Wall is actually the embankment on which the Temple stood, rather than being a part of the original building itself.) There was a picture, too, of the golden Dome of the Rock, built on the old Temple site after the Muslim conquest.

And I found a memento of the Samaritans: a newsletter printed in four languages—Arabic, English, Hebrew, and the same spidery script that I had seen on the buildings of their village in 1998. This was the ancient Samaritan script, an older version of Hebrew writing. At the bottom of each page of the little booklet was the legend
A.B.—The Samaritan News.
The booklet recorded that Passover, held in 2001 at the height of the Palestinian intifada, had taken place peacefully. The Palestinians had agreed to avoid any confrontation with Israeli forces. I was thanked for my involvement—after my first visit to the Samaritans, I had visited them several more times, including one occasion when they had asked me to encourage the Palestinians to suspend fighting during Passover.

Not that they had any difficulty themselves in dealing with the Palestinians, as the newsletter also reported: “Samaritans who went down the Mountain to Nablus to buy groceries for the Festival, received a warm welcome from the inhabitants. . . . The inhabitants of Nablus will treat a strange face with suspicion. . . . However, when the clients identified themselves as Samaritans, suspicions quickly turned into a wide smile accompanied by handshakes.” As I read this, I wondered if the Samaritans might be something yet more remarkable than the lost Ten Tribes of Israel: they could be a bridge between Palestinians and Israelis.

So I hoped that they might make a good chapter for this book. Their ideas and customs, being similar to those of Jews, would be more familiar to most readers than those of the book’s other chapters. But the existence of this community, described by the Israeli scholar Nathan Schur as “probably the smallest group of people to have retained over many centuries a national consciousness of their own,” might help to shed light on what makes a people see themselves as a nation. What causes us to draw the invisible line between us and them?

When I visited the Samaritans for the first time, many still hoped that lasting peace was possible. More than a decade later, those hopes had receded. I was afraid of what I might find if I went back. But I was determined to go, because I had an invitation. I had written to the
A.B.
newsletter’s editor, Benyamim Tsedaka (the Samaritan spelling of the name Benjamin), hoping that he might remember me from my brief time in the village. He did not reply at first. But some weeks later I received a curious email from his account: “The Paschal Sacrifice will take place this year on Friday noon, May 4, 2012.” It was signed “Benny,” and seemed to have been sent to a long list of potentially interested parties. There followed a list of readings from Leviticus and instructions on when they should be read. For the period of the Festival of the Unleavened Bread, it prescribed kosher matzos (unleavened bread) and forbade pasta. One should pray facing east—unless one was in India or Russia, in which case one should face southwest. The Paschal Sacrifice and the Festival of the Unleavened Bread were clearly Passover, though the Samaritan date differed from the Jewish one. (The two groups have slightly different calendars, and the Samaritan feast can be up to two days earlier or up to a month later than the Jewish version.)