Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (29 page)

I had some practical problems. I had come to the village without arranging for a place to stay the night and had planned to stay at a Nablus hotel, but it looked as though the security rules would stop me. I had no idea where I would sleep, but I assumed that at least I could get some food at the village’s two shops. But during these days of preparation for the Passover, normal bread is not eaten or sold in the village. The best things I could find for a simple meal were a can of olives and a package of cheese. Lining up to buy them, I saw a selection of mugs and T-shirts hanging from the shop’s ceiling, branded with the words “Good Samaritan.” That also was the name of the village’s welcome center, which was closed.

I made my way to the ruins of the Samaritans’ temple, which were at the highest point in the village. A fence surrounded the ruins, which are still being excavated by archaeologists, who have made some remarkable finds there. A boy had offered to show me the place, for a fee. He let me through the gate, to which he had a key, and showed me the rocky foundations of what clearly was once a magnificent shrine. Archaeologists have worked out that this Samaritan temple was built twenty-five centuries ago, within a massive enclosure that measured 315 by 321 feet. Thousands of visitors could pray in the temple at a given time. So many animals were sacrificed there that four hundred thousand bone fragments have been found at the site. Inscriptions declared it to be “the House of the Lord.” The chief archaeologist at the site has come to the controversial conclusion that the Samaritan temple was built before the first Jewish one.

From the edge of the enclosure we looked down at Nablus in the valley below. I could see the church of Jacob’s Well. Jacob had had twelve sons, and each one of them founded a tribe: the twelve tribes of Israel. I asked the boy what tribe he was from. “Menashe,” he said. Menashe was one of the two sections of the tribe of Joseph, so Joseph, whose tomb was visible below us, was this boy’s ancestor. He may be the ancestor of many others, of course, who are not now Samaritans. Many of the Muslim inhabitants of Nablus and the villages around it must be of Samaritan descent. Some families were known to have converted to Islam only recently. A member of one of these families, Adli Yaish, was elected as mayor of Nablus by a 76 percent margin—as the Hamas candidate. Benny Tsedaka later claimed to me that more than 90 percent of Palestinians were descended from Samaritans and Jews. “If you ask a religious person from either side, they’ll say nonsense. But it’s true!” (Benny himself was conscious of the long history that tied him to the land where he lived. On a later occasion, I was with him in Britain when a Jewish man asked him how long Benny’s family had lived in Israel. He misheard Benny’s reply and said, “A hundred and twenty-seven years? That’s a long time!” he said. “No,” said Benny, “127
generations
.”)

—————

FROM THE TEMPLE RUINS
it turned out to be just a short walk to Benny’s house. He was something of a spokesman for the Samaritans; his comfortable summer villa doubled as the home of the community newspaper. The house had the cladding of rough cream-colored stone that is often used by Israelis and Palestinians alike to cover and ennoble the gray cement they use to build their houses. Benny lived on the upper story, with a view over the hillside. Here he received an endless stream of visitors in addition to me—a rabbi, a Christian evangelical couple, a film crew—and answered all of our questions. My questions had to do with the Samaritans’ beliefs. The Samaritans reject Jewish religious texts such as the books of Daniel and Isaiah: for them, the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament, sometimes also called the Torah) stands alone. The Samaritan Torah is slightly different from the Jewish one. As previously noted, its version of the Ten Commandments does not include any ban on using the Lord’s name in vain, but it does include a commandment to build an altar on Mount Gerizim. Benny argues that the Samaritan Torah is the more authentic version. His people preserved the text better over the centuries, as he sees it, because they stayed in one place, scrupulously copying the precious scriptures from old scrolls onto new ones.

But the biggest difference in practice between Samaritans and Jews comes from the Samaritans’ rejection of all the Jewish traditions that developed after the Torah was written. For example, since the Torah does not explicitly tell men to cover their heads all the time, the Samaritans do not generally wear the
kippa
, as Orthodox Jews do; nor do Samaritan women wear wigs or veils to conceal their hair. Since it does tell them to sacrifice lambs at Passover and paste the blood of the lambs on the top and sides of their door frames, that is exactly what they do—as I would see. They do not celebrate the Jewish festivals of Purim and Hanukkah, which postdate the Torah.

They also reject any Jewish measures to abandon or relax the Torah’s rules. They keep the ancient traditions of the priesthood. While the Jewish Temple stood, it was served by priests, who were led by a high priest. Judaism still has a role for its hereditary priests from the tribe of Levi, the
kohanim:
these deliver the priestly blessing in Orthodox Jewish prayer services, for instance, and are forbidden by Jewish law to marry divorced or converted women. They do not, however, offer sacrifice, and their leadership role in the Jewish community has largely been taken by rabbis. Among the Samaritans the priests’ role is still as it was two thousand years ago. Benny told me that twenty-eight Samaritan men were priests, drawn from adult men in families that claim descent from Levi. They supervise circumcisions, readings of the Torah, engagements, marriages, divorces (“It’s very rare,” Benny assured me, “five times in a hundred years”), and lead prayers. They also sacrifice animals once a year, at Passover. The Samaritan high priest acts as a supreme court on religious matters.

Samaritan men, like Orthodox Jewish men, do not touch their wives when they are menstruating. The Samaritan rules go somewhat further: even the items that a menstruating woman touches are considered unclean, meaning that she must be segregated completely. Benny explained, “A woman during her period has a special room, where she stays for seven days. After the birth of a boy, it’s forty days, and after a girl is born, it’s eighty days. No touching is allowed, but she can speak—she sits at another table. But the great benefit,” he claimed, “is that the husband does her duties in the home! The family helps her. It reduces natural stress.” At the end of this period, the woman takes a ritual bath to purify herself.

The Samaritan Sabbath is from sunset on Friday till sunset on Saturday, just like the Jewish one—but stricter. They do not go quite as far as the Essenes, an austere Jewish sect who imposed on themselves the (surely painful) rule that they should not defecate on the Sabbath. But the Samaritans cannot kindle fire on the Sabbath, and in the days of candles and lanterns this meant sitting in darkness: unlike Jews, they may not ask people from outside their religion to light candles for them. They did not sleep with their wives on the Sabbath, they wrote to Scaliger in the sixteenth century. They left their houses only to pray. Even today, the Samaritans will not walk outside the village on the Sabbath, and they do not smoke on that day, either. They still dress for the Sabbath in clothes they believe are replicas of those worn by the Jews who took part in the biblical exodus from Egypt. Benny told me that he had even dressed in this way on Sabbath days when he was a student at Hebrew University.

Benny told me that Samaritans had to live in the land of Israel, which they interpret as including Egypt. (In fact, Samaritans did live on Greek islands in the second century
BC
, but the rules have since been tightened.) Benny can travel abroad, which he does to attend conferences, but may not eat meat outside the community: meat is not kosher for a Samaritan unless the animal has been killed by a Samaritan in strict accordance with the instruction of the book of Deuteronomy, which demands that its right foreleg should be offered to a priest. Benny could eat vegetarian food at a halal or kosher restaurant, though.

Benny also brought my knowledge of Samaritan history up to date. His family had a long history of poets and pioneers. His great-grandfather left Nablus in 1905 and founded a second community of Samaritans at Jaffa. Jaffa was a more cosmopolitan seaside city with a big Jewish community, compared to the remoteness and conservatism of Nablus, and it offered more diverse opportunities for work. There were more potential marriage partners, too, in this town where so many Jewish souls were living. Faced with a shrinking pool of available Samaritan brides—for reasons that have not been definitively identified, the community for many generations had a shortfall in female births—his son Yefet decided to break an ancient taboo: he would marry a Jewish woman. (Yefet was persuaded to do this by a future president of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who had become interested in the Samaritans when he encountered Yefet’s father and was addressed by him in ancient Hebrew.)

Yefet succeeded against the odds. He married a Jewish woman from Russia named Miriam. Benny was their grandson. Sitting on the couch of his living room while his wife prepared dinner, he proudly pointed to his Einstein-like head of wildly curly white hair—an inheritance from his Russian side, he said. “If you ask me, it’s also making me cooler,” he told me, by which I think he meant more patient. But why did the Samaritans have a rule against marrying outside their community? One reason was that it protected them from becoming entangled with more powerful communities. In Islamic law (and Samaritan tradition, too) a couple’s children take the religion of the father. A woman who marries out of her own community is taking her future children out with her as well, and depriving some man or other in that community of a possible bride. So communities in the Middle East tried (and try) to keep their women from marrying men of other religions—sometimes using violence. Until recently, for a Samaritan man, a member of the region’s smallest minority, to provoke some other community by marrying one of its women would have put all Samaritans in danger. For a Samaritan woman to marry out would mean simply that the community would diminish. The ban on marrying others guaranteed that the Samaritans’ culture and bloodline would survive and not be absorbed into the wider culture around them. In addition, the Samaritans treasure their genealogy as a close tie to their biblical forebears.

I asked Benny what had happened to his grandmother. The precedent hadn’t been broken without some controversy, he said. “The elders didn’t acknowledge her at first. But,” he chuckled, “after she had six daughters they accepted her.” Daughters were what the Samaritans most needed. Especially among the Jaffa Samaritans, intermarriage became more common. Benny himself had married a Jew of Romanian extraction who had accepted the particular customs of the Samaritans when she married him. “It’s a bit racist to ask where you came from: ‘Are you Jewish or are you Christian?’” said Benny. “She changed to join us. She became Israelite like us.” These days, he said, about 25 percent of the community’s marriages were between Samaritan men and non-Samaritan women, most of them Jewish. Some were from Eastern Europe. Two had come from Muslim families in Central Asia.

A documentary on the Samaritans, which interviewed two Ukrainian women who had married Samaritan men—and who apparently had adjusted well to life in their new community—also interviewed a member of the priestly family who disliked this new trend. “When we adopt foreign women into our nation,” he said, “it makes me afraid for the future, afraid that we will not be able to control them. Our nation, which for 3,642 years has kept its unique traditions and customs, must continue keeping them in the future, otherwise it will plunge into chaos.”

Marriages between Samaritan women and non-Samaritan men, meanwhile, are strictly taboo. A second documentary, made in 2008, looked at the anguish of a Samaritan woman, Sophie Tsadka, who was ostracized by the community for rejecting its rules and marrying a Jewish man. (She is a prominent actress on Israeli TV.) In an interview, Samaritan men showed her no sympathy. One commented that if his sister were to propose to marry out and leave the faith, “I would say OK . . . but when she slept at night, her life would be over. Like you slaughter a sheep.” There is no evidence that any Samaritan woman has ever in fact been killed for this reason, but such harsh attitudes are what has protected the community from assimilation over the centuries; they are the darker side of the warmth and communal spirit the Samaritans displayed and which, in the documentary, Sophie clearly missed.

The Samaritans are strict traditionalists—were they not, they would not exist—but Benny, like his grandfather, was finding new ways of interpreting his faith’s old traditions. One of his innovations was to spread the Samaritan message and way of life so that non-Samaritans could imitate it. In 1864, John Mills published a set of tables sent out some decades earlier by a Samaritan priest to the community in England. It was a Samaritan version of the Lost Tribes myth, and just as forlorn. Mills said he had added the chart for historical interest, “as it is, most probably, the last document of its kind that ever will be drawn up by a Samaritan priest.” How wrong he was. Benny now produces similar charts and sends them around the world to people who want to follow the Samaritan way of life. “It is a new phenomenon of people wanting to join community—singles, families, tribes. I am in contact with thousands of them through the Internet. I don’t believe in including thousands at once. We accept one family after one family. They want to live according to the Torah. They send me a lot of questions and I send them books. They find it exciting. They are from all over the world: India, the former Soviet Union, Europe, America, Australia, Brazil. Some are Jews.”

I realized that the mass email from Benny had been guidance for those looking to adopt the Samaritan way of life. These emails show which readings from the Samaritan Torah correspond to which Sabbath dates on the calendar and when the seven festivals of the Samaritan year should be celebrated. These festivals include Shavuot, when Samaritans make a pilgrimage around their holy sites on Mount Gerizim (such as the places where they believe Adam, Isaac, and Noah sacrificed to God); the fast day of Yom Kippur, when the Samaritan prayer service lasts for twenty-four hours without interruption; and Sukkot, a harvest festival that Samaritans celebrate by bedecking their houses with fruit (unlike the Jews, who build a shelter outdoors, the Samaritans celebrate Sukkot entirely within their homes). A particularly ambitious Samaritan family’s living room might contain pomegranates, apples, and lemons, all of a huge size, with perhaps up to half a ton of fruit hanging from the ceiling above the feasters, interwoven with palm fronds and willow branches. Sitting under this cornucopia, Samaritans drink homemade beer and eat cakes and water-soaked almonds.