A group claiming relationship to the tribes of Levi, Ephraim and Manasseh. They accept the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua, but no other part of the Bible. They regard Mount Gerizim, near Nablus, as their holy shrine. When the Kingdom of Israel was destroyed, the Assyrians exiled part of the population, and those who remained in the country mixed with the foreign settlers whom the Assyrians had brought from other parts. They were called Samaritans because they settled in and around Samaria, the old capital of the former northern Kingdom of Israel. When the Babylonian exiles returned to Eretz Israel (Shivat Zion), the Samaritans attempted to join them but were rejected. At the end of the Persian period or at the beginning of the Hellenistic period, they built a shrine on Mount Gerizim, where it stood for two centuries until it was destroyed by John Hyrcanus the Hasmonean in 128 BCE.
In the era of the Second Temple and in the first centuries after its destruction, tension occasionally prevailed in the relationship between Jews and Samaritans. The Jews called them Cutheans because most of them were from the city of Cuthah in Babylon. However, the two peoples were in general cooperative. They were partners in the political fate of the country and initially even during the nation's great crises such as the destruction of the Second Temple and the Bar Kokhba revolt. In the Talmud, the Samaritans are identified as descendants of the Cutheans, strangers whom the Assyrians had brought to the country, and who afterwards converted (II Kg. 17:24). There are disputing opinions in the Talmud as to whether their conversion was a true one or whether they were converts through fear. But generally, the halakhah sees them as Jews and permitted Jews to eat meat that Samaritans had slaughtered and to eat their matzah at Passover. The foundations of Jewish religious thought that was formed in the days of the Second Temple, including the belief in the Messiah and the World to Come, prayer in synagogue, and the reading of the Torah were accepted and practiced by the Samaritans.
Later, in the second and third centuries, when the Cutheans rejected rabbinic Judaism, a wall of separation grew between the Jews and the Samaritans. At that time Samaritans were also to be found in the centers of Jewish dispersion such as Egypt and Babylon. During this period, their numbers fell as a result of their revolts against the Roman-Byzantine rulers, and later because of Muslim and Christian Crusader persecutions.
The Samaritans regard themselves as wholly Jewish and the only ones to preserve the Jewish faith in its original form, as it was practiced in the days of Moses and the first Judges. In their view, most Jews deviated from the ways of their forefathers in the time of the Judges, bringing the wrath of God down upon themselves, a period that will only end when the Messiah will bring the true faith. The literature of the Samaritans reflecting this outlook was only crystallized in the Middle Ages. They do not have any original works belonging to an earlier era. On the other hand, they have preserved the oldest Hebrew writing, a derivative of the Canaanite script which the Jews discarded in favor of the "Assyrian" (square) script.
Since the rise of the State of Israel, the center of Samaritan life has been based in Nablus and Holon. The community was reunited after the Six Day War and today numbers over 500 souls, half in Nablus and the rest in Holon, where they have their own synagogue. Every year a Paschal sacrifice is performed on Mount Gerizim.
