The Samaritans: Israel's Ancient and Smallest Religious Community

The Last 830

On a mountainside in the West Bank, overlooking the city of Nablus, a community of fewer than five hundred people gathers every spring to slaughter lambs, roast them in pits dug into the earth, and eat them standing, staffs in hand, exactly as the Torah commands for Passover. Another few hundred of their kin drive up from the Tel Aviv suburb of Holon to join them.

These are the Samaritans — not a biblical memory, not a museum exhibit, but a living community that has maintained its distinct identity for nearly three thousand years. They are one of the smallest religious groups on earth, and one of the most ancient.

Who Are They?

The Samaritans call themselves Shamerim — “Keepers” — of the original Israelite faith. They trace their ancestry to the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, the sons of Joseph, and they claim that their worship on Mount Gerizim predates the Temple in Jerusalem.

The mainstream Jewish account, drawn from 2 Kings 17, tells a different story. After the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, the Assyrians deported much of the Israelite population and resettled foreign peoples in Samaria. These newcomers adopted local religious practices, creating a mixed population with a hybrid religion. From the rabbinic perspective, the Samaritans are descendants of these settlers, not of the original Israelites.

The truth is almost certainly more complex than either narrative allows. Archaeological and genetic evidence suggests that the Samaritans have deep roots in the land of Israel and share significant ancestry with Jews. Their traditions preserve elements of Israelite religion that predate rabbinic Judaism. They are neither the pure Israelites they claim to be nor the complete foreigners that polemical Jewish sources sometimes portrayed.

Mount Gerizim vs. Jerusalem

The central disagreement between Jews and Samaritans is about sacred geography. The Torah refers to “the place that God will choose” for worship — without naming it explicitly. Jews identify this place as Jerusalem, based on later biblical texts and rabbinic tradition. Samaritans identify it as Mount Gerizim, near Shechem (modern Nablus), based on their reading of the Torah and on Deuteronomy 11:29, where Moses commands blessings to be proclaimed from Mount Gerizim.

The Samaritan Torah includes an additional commandment — their eleventh — commanding the building of an altar on Mount Gerizim. This commandment does not appear in the Jewish Masoretic text, and it represents the single most significant textual difference between the two traditions.

For the Samaritans, Mount Gerizim is not merely holy — it is the navel of the world, the place where Abraham bound Isaac, the site of the original altar. They have worshipped there for millennia, and they continue to do so today.

The Samaritan Torah

The Samaritans possess their own Torah scroll, written in the ancient Samaritan script — a flowing, rounded alphabet descended from the paleo-Hebrew script that all Israelites used before the Babylonian exile. When the Jews adopted the Assyrian-style square script (the script used in Torah scrolls today), the Samaritans kept the older form.

The Samaritan Torah differs from the Jewish Masoretic text in approximately 6,000 places. Most differences are minor — spelling variants, grammatical forms, small additions. But some are theologically significant, particularly the references to Mount Gerizim as the chosen place. Scholars debate whether the Samaritan readings preserve an older textual tradition or represent later editorial changes. The Dead Sea Scrolls have revealed that some Samaritan readings match proto-Samaritan manuscripts found at Qumran, suggesting that the textual divergence is ancient.

The Samaritans accept only the Torah — the Five Books of Moses — as scripture. They do not recognize the Prophets, the Writings, the Talmud, or any rabbinic literature. Their religious law is derived exclusively from the Torah as interpreted by their own priestly tradition.

The Passover Sacrifice

The most dramatic expression of Samaritan religion is their annual Passover sacrifice on Mount Gerizim. While Jews commemorate Passover with a Seder meal featuring symbolic foods, the Samaritans perform the actual sacrifice described in Exodus 12: they slaughter sheep, roast them whole in fire pits, and eat them with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, dressed in white, standing, in haste.

This is the only community in the world that still performs the Passover sacrifice as described in the Torah. The event draws tourists, journalists, and curious onlookers from around the world, making it both a sacred ritual and an unintentional spectacle.

Near-Extinction and Survival

The Samaritan community has survived extraordinary threats. At their peak in the Roman period, they may have numbered over a million. Revolts against the Byzantine Empire in the 5th and 6th centuries, followed by forced conversions under Christian and Muslim rulers, devastated the community. By the early 20th century, fewer than 150 Samaritans remained — a community on the brink of extinction.

The tiny population created a genetic crisis. With so few potential marriage partners, the community faced severe inbreeding. In recent decades, the Samaritans have addressed this by welcoming brides from outside the community — primarily Ukrainian and other Eastern European women who convert to the Samaritan faith and marry into the community. These marriages have been controversial but have helped stabilize the population, which has grown slowly to its current level.

Between Two Worlds

Today’s Samaritans inhabit a remarkable geopolitical position. The community on Mount Gerizim lives in a Palestinian-administered area but maintains Israeli citizenship. The community in Holon is fully integrated into Israeli life. Samaritan men serve in the Israeli military. Samaritan children attend Israeli schools. And yet they are neither Jewish nor Muslim nor Christian — they are Samaritans, keepers of a tradition older than all three.

Their survival is improbable. A community of 830 people, speaking a liturgical language (Samaritan Hebrew and Aramaic) that has no other speakers, maintaining a sacrificial cult on a contested mountaintop, navigating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without a state of their own — by every measure, they should have disappeared long ago.

That they have not is a testament to the power of sacred geography, communal commitment, and the stubborn human refusal to let a tradition die. The Samaritans are not a relic. They are a living, breathing challenge to the assumption that small communities cannot survive in a world of empires. They have outlasted Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the Crusaders, and the Ottomans. They intend to outlast the present, too.