Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (31 page)
After the Israeli conquest of the West Bank in 1967, the Samaritans’ position improved further because Israel found it useful to employ them in semiofficial administrative positions. The Samaritans simultaneously managed to stay on good terms with the Palestinians. After the intifada broke out, it was harder to escape the violence. One unlucky Samaritan priest was shot twice in a single night, once by Palestinian gunmen who mistook him for an Israeli settler, and then—as he lost control of the steering wheel—by Israeli soldiers who saw him driving toward them erratically and thought he was a suicide bomber. He survived and received apologies afterward from both sides. Peace now prevails, and the Samaritans are better off than they have been for many centuries, but they do not take this for granted.
Back at Benny’s flat, as sundown and the start of the Passover observance approached, I waited while two women discussed with him a project of recording sacred music (various recordings of Samaritan music have been released on CD, sung by members of the community themselves). When they finished, I asked him about politics. “We are trying to be a kind of bridge between Palestinians and Israelis,” he said. “Physically we have no power to contribute. We’re struggling for our survival. If we take one side and the other side wins, where will we be? They’ll say we are collaborators.” But the Samaritans had no desire for their own territory. “We don’t have territorial demands: we never say, ‘Hey, our family used to have this, it’s ours.’ We see how much misery it has given to the whole area. I think myself I have more than I expected.”
At a certain point the time came for me to leave Benny’s house because he had to prepare himself to take part in the sacrifice. It was happening earlier than usual, because that year the Sabbath would begin at sunset—and so the sacrifice had to be complete before then, in the early afternoon rather than the usual evening ceremony. Following the tradition to dress as their biblical forebears did when fleeing Egypt, Samaritans wore robes, each with twenty-four buttons (one for each letter of the Samaritan alphabet). Priests wore special colors: red for the blood of the lamb, blue for the skies, white for purity of heart. The event was a huge tourist attraction, and this was a mixed blessing for the Samaritans. “I don’t like to be exotic,” said Benny, “but that’s how it is. Anyone keeping a tradition is exotic.” Keeping a tradition, he explained, was central to Samaritan identity.
Waiting in the street outside, I watched throngs of visitors arrive. Some Christians and many Jews were coming to see something that could not be seen anywhere else: the Passover marked by a sacrifice of lambs, as it was until the destruction of the Jewish Temple nearly two millennia ago. Parked cars were gradually filling up the streets, film crews were setting up their cameras, and the early arrivals were occupying the best places for viewing the event. I had an invitation to attend the reception that preceded the sacrifice, which would be held in the hall where I had slept overnight.
This reception was a series of speeches—which could easily have been dull, except that the audience for them was such an unusual combination. The head of the Israeli forces in the West Bank sat opposite the Palestinian governor of Nablus, and the two engaged in half-serious, half-mocking banter. An even stranger juxtaposition was evident at the other end of the hall, where representatives of the settler movement sat next to Palestinians who later gave impassioned speeches about the injustices of Israeli rule (in particular movement restrictions on Palestinians, which were crippling Nablus’s economy).
All the speakers—the governor, the general, and Munib al-Masri, who was sponsoring the event—expressed their respect for the Samaritans. It reminded me of something Benny had said: the Samaritans were the one issue the Palestinians and Israelis could agree about. Finally a Samaritan, a short man with a distinctive face whose father had recently died, rose to speak. “Our people were on the verge of extinction,” he said, “and we have pulled ourselves back and built up our community, and now we are going nowhere: we are staying here.”
Samaritan priests, here assembled for the Passover sacrifice. © Hanan Issachar/Getty Images
The event showed how carefully the Samaritans balanced their relations with Palestinians and Israelis. There were clearly some differing political views within the community—those who lived in Tel Aviv were comfortable in Hebrew and spoke more freely of their loyalty to Israel, while some of the Samaritans on Mount Gerizim were closer to the Palestinians. All of them understood the need to maintain good ties with both sides. Israel offered better opportunities for education and work, and its government had been generous to the Samaritans. Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, was said to have a picture of himself with the high priest: several of them had seen it when they visited him. The high priest had prophesied Netanyahu’s rise to power, I was told. On the other hand, the Samaritans were less comfortable with Israel’s conservative religious hierarchy. “We prefer to keep clear of the Jewish rabbis,” one Samaritan told me. The Samaritans are regarded as a separate religious community in Palestinian law, meaning that (for example) marriages conducted by their priests are legally recognized; in Israeli law their status is much more ambiguous.
A Samaritan priest relaxes after the Passover sacrifice, the blood of the lamb visibly marked on his forehead. Photo by the author
The gathering ended, and people began to file out. It was time for the sacrifice to begin. Decades ago the Samaritans used to come together in tents on the mountain for the ceremony, but now there was a enclosure specifically built for the event, enclosed by a wire fence. Hundreds of tourists were pressing against the fence, and some tried to clamber over it, eliciting shouts from the burly security guards. The Samaritans now gathered within the enclosure, squeezing through the crowds to enter it. The priests were in their colorful traditional robes; the other Samaritan men were wearing white aprons and baseball caps in preparation for the bloody work they were all about to perform. The women stood further back with the younger children. In accordance with the regulations for the Passover laid down in the Book of Exodus, each family that is large enough brings a lamb to sacrifice. So a small flock of lambs was gathered in the middle of the crowd of Samaritans, while—ominously for the lambs—large pits at one end of the enclosure were being filled with wood for burning, and heaps of earth were prepared nearby.
The senior priests sang as the lambs were brought up to the place of slaughter, where metal frames stood ready. Then the Samaritans gave a great shout: the lambs’ throats had been cut. The men in aprons got to work, hanging the carcasses from the metal frames so that they could be flayed. They began to chant with joy, singing in ancient Hebrew, “There is only one God!” as they gestured toward each other. They chanted verses from the Song of the Sea, the celebratory song sung by the people of Israel after their deliverance from Egypt: “Pharaoh’s chariots and his host hath he cast into the sea.” The blood from the lambs was collected, ready to be painted with a stick of hyssop onto the lintels of the village doors. Finally the sacrificed lambs were impaled on spits. Once the wood in the pits had burned down to charcoal, the lambs would be cooked with a layer of earth on top of them to keep in the heat. It was, as Benny had promised, a scene out of the remote past.
The Samaritans have defied centuries of gloomy predictions made by those who visited them during their long decline. An English writer in 1714 commented: “The Sect of the Samaritans hath now continu’d in the World about 2400 Years, and in the same Spot almost where it first appear’d. It is not therefore to be wondered at, that a Thing so remarkable should excite the Curious.” But he concluded that “the Place where they have so long continued will in a little time know them no more; and that their Name is shortly like to be found no where but in History.” The Welsh missionary Mills, in the 1850s, was just as pessimistic. “Before many generations more have passed away,” he sighed, “this nation, in all probability, will have become extinct.” They have all been proven wrong.
Here, on a sacred mountain in the Holy Land, the 132nd high priest (the first having been Moses’s brother Aaron), wearing resplendent robes, was resting with his colleagues after the exertions of the Passover sacrifice. The women of the community came to kiss their hands. Firstborn sons were marked on their foreheads with the lambs’ blood. Above this apparently Jewish scene, a sign declared that it was sponsored by the Palestinian Telecommunications Company. It was perhaps too easy to imagine that the Samaritan experience, limited and precarious as it was and dependent on the goodwill of both Israeli and Palestinian authorities, might provide a basis for coexistence between all the different communities in this troubled place. But surely it should give at least a glimmer of hope.
I
T WAS GREAT FRIDAY IN THE YEAR 1727
of the Era of Martyrs. The month was Baramouda, when seasonal dust winds blow along the Nile Valley, a time for harvesting wheat and avoiding the increasing heat of the sun. At such a time, for thousands of years, Egyptians have prayed for the Nile to rise and irrigate their fields with silt-rich water in a land that was otherwise one of the driest places on earth. So they prayed now, gathered around me, for the “rising of the water of the rivers.” If I shut my eyes at certain moments, I could have imagined myself in ancient Egypt. But in the Western calendar, the year was 2011, and the nearest river was the Thames; with open eyes, I could see the pretty façade of London terraces through stained-glass windows.
St. Mark’s Church, Kensington, is dedicated to the first-century evangelist and missionary who, according to tradition, first brought Christianity to Egypt. Those Egyptians who remain Christian are known as Copts. Estimates of their numbers vary widely, from four million to twelve million, plus a diaspora in Sudan, Libya, and the West. Because of a split in the Christian Church in the fifth century over the nature of Christ, Copts have since then developed their own distinctive brand of Christianity, the Coptic Orthodox Church, under the leadership of the Patriarch of Alexandria. This Coptic form of Christianity spread south from Egypt to Eritrea and Ethiopia—and perhaps it once traveled north, too. When the Coptic leader (also called the “pope”) Shenouda III, the 117th Patriarch of Alexandria, consecrated St. Mark’s in 1979, it was then the only Coptic church in Europe. But it was not so much a new arrival as a return. An eighth-century Irish book of martyrs refers to “the seven holy Egyptian monks who lie in Disert Ulaidh.” Coptic monks such as those, who settled in Ireland, may have had some role in shaping the early Irish Church—which shared the Copts’ focus on monasticism, and their austerity.
Another difference between Egyptian and European Christians is that the Copts have kept or even toughened many of the rules that European Christians have relaxed. The congregation at St. Mark’s had endured more than fifty days of the tough Coptic Lenten fast, during which they abstain completely from all fish, meat, and animal products such as milk and cheese. On Great Friday (called Good Friday in Britain and America) they eat nothing until sunset, and they pray all day: the service at St. Mark’s had begun at dawn, when a cross had been laid out in the aisle of the church and decorated with candles and roses. One of the prayers involved four hundred reverences (and although, for some, a reverence just meant a bow of the head, one man got down on the floor to prostrate himself). Even though they were living thousands of miles from their home, the Copts’ enthusiasm for their faith was undimmed.
Much of what I could see in front of me—an elaborate screen separating the altar from the congregation, icons of St. Mark and the Virgin Mary—dated to the early centuries
AD
, when Christianity supplanted Egypt’s old polytheistic religion. But in the books helpfully placed in the aisles as guides to the service, I could see the church did not use either the Western calendar or the Islamic one sometimes found in the Arab world. Instead they used the calendar that the pharaohs would have known, with months called Baramouda, Kiahk (the “month when the spirits gather”), and Thout (named after the baboon-headed god Thoth). For that matter, the year was dated according to the Era of Martyrs, which starts in the Western year 284. This was when the emperor Diocletian massacred Christians—a persecution that is still remembered by the Copts.