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.
Very few of Benny’s online followers had actually come to live in the village. “They don’t have to join physically. You can live a Samaritan life in the home. If they send a representative, I host them. People are always looking for something to stop them being bored. But it gives us pride that people find in us the people of truth.” As far as I could tell, Benny occupied a unique position in his community of just 750 people. But when I asked him who would publish the newspaper, attend conferences, and research Samaritan history when he was gone, he smiled and said: “We have a proverb: God makes a replacement in every generation. I think they will find a crazy like me in every generation.”
So far, one family Benny had corresponded with had come to live in al-Loz. They were American and had previously been Christian. One member of the family, Matthew, visited Benny while I was there, and I had the chance to talk to him. Matthew told me: “My mother was more and more interested in the Old Testament.” His mother, Sharon, wondered why Christians did not keep the Jewish law; wanting to observe it more closely, and searching on the Internet for information, she came across Benny’s name. “Six to eight years ago Benny visited, and we slowly started doing everything that the Samaritans do. The separation of unclean women, staying in our neighborhood for Shabbat, and so on. The old high priest invited Sharon to come and join the community, so she looked for religious studies programs and was accepted by Hebrew University.”
Eight years after the first encounter with the Samaritans, Matthew was in Benny’s house preparing for the Passover sacrifice. Other members of his family had not stayed the course: Matthew’s brothers had drifted away after growing tired of the need to attend regular prayers at the synagogue, and Sharon moved away to Jerusalem. Matthew, though, two years before my visit, had been invited to join the community’s observance of Passover and to eat the meat of the sacrificed lambs, which was the ultimate sign of acceptance. “Families live together, that’s what I love about the community,” he said. In practice, making his home among the Samaritans would mean learning both Hebrew and Arabic, which he had yet to do, but he planned to take on the task, and then study business and settle permanently in the community’s other neighborhood, in Tel Aviv, as the first American Samaritan. (The following year, I heard that he had abandoned this plan and gone back to America. No other outsider has since followed his lead by coming to live in the village.)
Benny gave me a tour of the village that afternoon, showing how the families were preparing for Passover. He simply wandered into people’s houses, I saw, without even needing to ring the bell or ask permission. In the basement storeroom of one house, where cribs and strollers had been stacked against the wall to make space, a man with the Arabic name Ghaith (his Hebrew name was Moshe) was spreading dough, made only with flour and water, over a hot curved metal plate called a taboon. A large stock was needed: as in Jewish tradition, only unleavened bread could be eaten during the seven days of Passover, which were about to start. Benny passed out to us a couple of pieces of the cooked bread, hot and crisp and flavorless. In the lead-up to and during Passover, the men were expected to handle cooking and other tasks. Ghaith’s wife sat nearby, in a slightly sour mood. “I do the cooking 364 days of the year,” she said in Arabic, “and nobody comes to take pictures of me doing it. And he does it one day a year and everyone thinks it’s amazing?”
There was one other Samaritan obligation that I had not yet seen, but I was given an intense introduction to it the next morning. Dozing fitfully in the guest hall where the Samaritans had put me up, I woke to an unearthly sound, a vigorous susurration echoing through the empty rooms around me. It was clearly no kind of conversation or argument, because there were around thirty voices speaking ceaselessly, but discordantly. For some minutes I could not work out where it was coming from. Then I realized: the guest hall was just next to the kinsha, the Samaritan synagogue. I went to see what was happening. At the entrance to the kinsha I had to take off my shoes and stow them in an outer room; just as Moses took off his shoes when receiving the Law on Mount Sinai (or Mount Gerizim, in Samaritan belief), so the Samaritans take off their shoes in the presence of that Law.
The Samaritans have preserved carefully over the generations their ancient scrolls, which record a Torah that differs somewhat from the Jewish one. Here in 1905 a Samaritan priest displays one such scroll for curious visitors. Stereograph in Views of Palestine [1905], Getty Research Institute
The prayer room faced east, and a niche at one end was sealed off with a yellow curtain, in front of which sat the white-robed high priest and his brother. There was a small clock and a menorah, the seven-branched candelabra, on the white-painted wall alongside; chandeliers and ceiling fans hung above. The building was constructed in the 1980s, but the niche housed vellum scrolls that date back centuries, possibly even millennia. Mills called them “the desire and the despair of European scholars,” and his determination to see them “grew almost into a fever.” When he eventually did, he found writing on one of them that claimed the document was written in biblical times. This was unlikely—not even vellum lasts that long—but perhaps it had been copied from a document from that period. There are seven-hundred-year-old scrolls in the British Library that were bought from the Samaritans in the nineteenth century. In places where the scrolls contain blessings that the priest touched as he recited them, the vellum is dark and worn.
The great murmuring that I had heard was produced by all of the village’s male Samaritans, dressed in thin cotton jelabas that reached down to their feet, gathered in this room and reciting prayers, each in his own time and rhythm, using different words, not in unison. Every so often they would pause and prostrate themselves on hands and knees, touching their foreheads to the floor. Prayer time is when the Samaritans cover their heads, as some devout Jews do at all times with the kippa. The Samaritans had three different styles of headgear: a white prayer cap such as Muslims wear, a red tarbush, and a black beret. The last was favored by the Samaritans who lived in Tel Aviv, as they followed slightly more modern fashions. The effect was curiously transformative. A woolen jacket worn over the jelaba and a red tarbush made a man look as though he had stepped out of a book about the Ottoman empire; the man next to him, in a raincoat and beret, looked like a French artist.
For a week before Passover the Samaritans pray morning and night; on normal Saturdays, people pray either at home or at the synagogue. The prayers were extracts from the Samaritan Torah mixed in with religious poems written by Samaritans over the centuries. Most people seemed to know these by heart, but one teenager in spectacles was reading them from a book; at the back the younger children were less involved, and one fell asleep in the corner, tarbush falling to one side. His schoolmates, giggling, asked me to take his photo. This was as far as teenage rebellion went. Not turning up for prayer at all was apparently unthinkable. One of the teenagers, keen to chat in between prayers, told me a little about his family: he had a nephew who, as the firstborn son from a priestly family, would have the blood of the sacrifice smeared on his forehead that day, according to the tradition, and another nephew was studying computer science and wanted to serve in the Israeli army. The boy interrupted his life story occasionally to perform his prostrations with the others.
Later that morning, after the prayer service, I wandered along the main street. Toward the end of it was a shop selling beer and whisky, run by a Samaritan man called Jameel. We sat and drank coffee and talked for a while; some other men from the village joined us and looked at the photos I had taken. Why had I taken pictures of the sleeping boy? they asked suspiciously. Was I trying to make fun of them? Our conversation was interrupted several times by phone calls, from Palestinians in Nablus placing orders, after which Jameel would head off to fix some delivery or other.
“Yesterday was exhausting,” he said. “I was preparing unleavened bread for
the family. It’s a big family!” His father had been a priest, and a huge picture of a Passover sacrifice ceremony had pride of place on one wall of the shop. I asked him how things were for the Samaritans. “I’m a bit worried,” he said. There was peace in Nablus for the time being, which was good, but it might not last. “Things should stay as they are. The intifada was bad for both sides, the Palestinians and the Israelis. Now it’s quiet, and safe. We need Nablus—we bring everything from there, all our food.” It was also where several Samaritans maintained shops and owned other property. The Samaritans had lived in Nablus until the late 1980s, when the first intifada frightened them into moving to their own separate village.
Yasser Arafat often boasted of the fact that the Samaritans were treated well under Palestinian rule, suggesting that it could be a precedent for Palestinian sovereignty over the West Bank, which would at the same time be open to Jews. He created a seat in the Palestinian parliament reserved for Samaritans. Jameel’s father had won the subsequent election, mostly on the back of Muslim votes: he was well known in Nablus, where his beer and whisky shop had apparently won him many friends.
Jameel’s father stood in a long tradition of Samaritans who advised Muslim rulers. Although the community in past centuries was collectively vulnerable and disadvantaged, individuals in it were often favored for sensitive posts because they stood outside the deadly tribal rivalries that split local Muslims. Those rivalries could put a Samaritan advisor in peril, though. A man called Jacob Esh Shalaby was an unusual Samaritan: he showed an early love of money and adventure, accepting money from a missionary to climb down Jacob’s Well and recover a Bible the visitor had dropped down it. Later he traveled to England (presumably breaking the Samaritan rules to do so) and wrote a memoir in 1855. In it he records the experiences of his great-uncle as treasurer for the governor of Nablus, as first one faction and then another seized power. This great-uncle was threatened with death, thrown into jail, and sentenced to execution—but fled, or was released, or was granted a reprieve. He managed to serve each of the rival warring families in turn. He survived, but his hair turned prematurely white.
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East Page 22
