Nadene Goldfoot
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As of 2021, the community stood at around 840 individuals, divided between Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim and the Samaritan compound in Holon. Samaritans possessing only Israeli citizenship in Holon are drafted into the Israel Defense Forces, while those holding dual Israeli and Palestinian citizenship in Kiryat Luza are exempted from mandatory military service.
Kiryat Luza (Samaritan: Arabic: قرية لوزة, Hebrew: קרית לוזה) is a Samaritan village situated on Mount Gerizim near the city of Nablus in Samaria (the West Bank). It is under the joint control of Israel and the Palestinian National Authority, and is the only remaining site populated wholly by Samaritans. Kiryat Luza is home to roughly half of the world's total Samaritan population, with the other half located in the Israeli city of Holon.The village is adjacent to the Jewish Israeli settlement of Har Brakha. Until the 1980s, most Samaritans in the West Bank resided in Nablus proper, below Mount Gerizim, and began to relocate to Kiryat Luza due to a spike in violence throughout Israel and the Palestinian Territories during the First Intifada. The Israeli military maintains an active presence in the area.
They are not considered ethnically Jewish or Arab, despite the fact that Samaritans have lived in close proximity to both groups for thousands of years. Though they used to be numerous, there are now only about 700 Samaritans left, divided between two towns near Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. They rarely marry non-Samaritans, and their religious practices are distinct from all Jewish sects. Their ability to remain both (seemingly) genetically and culturally isolated in one of the most diverse regions on Earth has piqued the interest of both geneticists and historians, who have spent years trying to understand this unique group of people tucked away in the Levantine desert who were identified in the Christian bible as Levites, so should have the Y haplogroup of J1 like the Jewish Cohens.
Christians know of them in the "Good Samaritan," as they are mentioned in the New Testament. Samaria or Samaritans are mentioned in the New Testament books of Matthew, Luke, John and Acts. The Gospel of Mark contains no mention of Samaritans or Samaria. The best known reference to the Samaritans is the Parable of the Good Samaritan, found in the Gospel of Luke, where a Samaritan helped a man who was beaten, stripped of his clothes and left by the roadside to die.
How he helped would also be how a Jew should react-being it's of the Golden Rule created by Hillel in the 1st century BCE from our many rules of behavior. Luke would have known about that. The Gospel According to Luke, written in roughly 85 C.E. (± five to ten years), most likely during the reign of the Roman Emperor Domitian, is known in its earliest form from extensive papyri fragments dating to the early or middle of the third century. That was about 100 years after Hillel and his Golden Rule.
The Israelite Samaritans are a tiny ancient religious sect which follows the Torah (the Five Books of Moses), but does not hold any other part of the Hebrew Bible to be sacred. The do not believe Jerusalem to be holy either. For them, the Holy Mountain of God is Mt. Gerizim above Shechem (Nablus), where the Israelites were commanded to sacrifice upon entering the Land of Canaan.
They consider Samaritanism to be the true religion of the ancient Israelites and regard Judaism as a closely related but altered religion. Samaritans also regard Mount Gerizim (near both Nablus and biblical Shechem), and not the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, to be the holiest place on Earth. They attribute the schism between Samaritanism and Judaism to have been caused by Eli, the high priest and one of the last judges of the 11th century BCE and died when he heard that the Philistines had captured the Ark, creating an alternate shrine at Shiloh, in opposition to Mount Gerizim.
It fell in 721 BCE to Sargon II of Assyria who had resettled it with Cutheans who of course intermingled with the remaining population. They were then the ancestors of the Samaritans. According to Chabad, these Cuthean people were idol-worshipers, and G‑d sent lions to decimate them. Out of fear of the lions, the Cutheans converted to Judaism, but the rabbis of the Talmud debated whether their conversion was valid or not. The Cutheans’ Torah observance was spotty — extremely strong in some areas, but very weak or nonexistent in others.
"Then, when the Jews finally returned from exile 200 years later in 597 and 586 BCE, they found these Samaritans already living in their ancestral homeland. As can be expected, tensions between the Samaritans and the Jews quickly escalated and would persist for the next several hundred years." This northern population became the Samaritans of Samaria.
The schism between the two groups was great. Samaria was made up of different peoples now compared to the Jews who were in Babylon and returned with Jerusalem at the helm. Those Jews who were not taken away were from older or weaker lines of Jews; not the powerhouse young and vibrant Jews. They had produced the Jews who had stayed in Samaria and had to take on these new "immigrants.". It was a power struggle regarding Judaism. Samaria didn't care about Jerusalem anymore, if they ever did in the 1st place.
Many scholars cite 597 BCE as the date of the first deportation, for in that year King Jehoiachin of Judah (598-597 BCE) was deposed and apparently sent into exile with his family, his court, and thousands of workers. He had taken the throne at age 18 during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem and reigned for 3 months and 10 days before capitulating to Nebuchadnezzar. He was kept in detention in Babylonia until the accession of Evil-Merodach in 561 BCE when he was finally released.
Others say the first deportation followed the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadrezzar in 586 BCE; if so, the Jews were held in Babylonian captivity for 48 years. Among those who accept a tradition (Jeremiah 29:10) that the exile lasted 70 years, some choose the dates 608 to 538, others 586 to about 516 (the year when the rebuilt Temple was dedicated in Jerusalem). Numbers of people exiled were not given. It was time for 2 or even 3 more generations of Jews to be living in Babylonia. They came out of it with the Babylonian Talmud- said to be the best with the most words-very long with 2 and a half million words and detailed; while those in Palestine had created the Palestinian Talmud.
"However, recent archaeological findings, coupled with a deeper examination of religious texts, have led researchers to propose that the Samaritans were Jews themselves."
Specifically, researchers argue that during the Babylonian Captivity, not all Jews were rounded up by the Assyrians. Some stayed behind, possibly marrying other Assyrian exiles who themselves had been relocated. This would make sense given that, even though Samaritans are not considered Jews, they share many of the same ancient Hebrew rituals. While these rituals have evolved for hundreds of years among most Jewish sects, they remain unchanged among the isolated Samaritans, even to this day. This also fits well with the historical animosity of Jews toward Samaritans because of their association with non-Jews.
The similarity between the Y chromosomes of Samaritans and Jews illustrates that groups considered quite distinct today can actually have relatively recent genetic connections. Indeed, we are all connected to each other in some way through our shared genes, shared ancestry, and shared history. The research into the origin of the Samaritans is just one example of this connection. The Y haplogroup found today is so different from today's Jews, that I wonder if it isn't the ancient originals being they've been so isolated since then. All the variants start with J.....
Update: Four Samaritan families clustered to four distinct Y-chromosome haplogroups according to their patrilineal identity. Of the 16 Samaritan mtDNA samples, 14 carry either of two mitochondrial haplotypes that are rare or absent among other worldwide ethnic groups. Principal component analysis suggests a common ancestry of Samaritan and Jewish patrilineages. Most of the former may be traced back to a common ancestor in the paternally-inherited Jewish high priesthood (Cohanim) at the time of the Assyrian conquest of the kingdom of Israel. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15300852/
The only surviving Samaritan mtDNA (female) lineages are in haplogroups T2a1 and U7a1. A common Jewish line is K. No one has ever gotten a full mitochondrial sequence on these two haplotypes.
The Samaritans claim to be descended from the Israelite Tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh, and now added Levi. All Samaritans today have only four surviving Y lineages. (A fifth, from the Tribe of Benjamin, died out in 1912).
Any Y matches between Jews and Samaritans within about 3200 years are very likely to date to Ancient Israel. At least two of the four Samaritan Y lineages (L210/L227 and V22) must have originated west of the Euphrates, the ancient Levant, and so are extremely likely to have been present among the Ancient Israelites. We have yet to determine the closest matches of the other two (L147* and J2a4*).
Of the Jews of today, only this J2a4 resembles anyone that I have found because of the J. On FTDNA are the J2a-L24 listed from ancient Persia through the Levant, Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas. J1s of Cohens (Jews) and Arabs are different haplotypes. All the ones listed start with J. Samaritans are not listed as such. They need Samaritans to test. The Jewish Cohen line most common is J1-M267. In 1997, Journal Nature published a study that showed that a high percentage of Jewish males who shared an oral tradition of being Cohanim also shared the same Y-chromosome signature. The authors named the highest frequency Y-chromosome signature (haplotype) the Cohen Modal Haplotype.
J2 may be an important Y-chromosome lineage that was part of the demic diffusion and introduction of new agricultural practices into Europe from the Middle East and Anatolia during the Neolithic period. Anatolia (Asia Minor-Jews also lived here before 2nd century BCE but population dwindled after Byzantine Period; again important after 1492 under Turks and had refugees from Spain, could represent a Mesolithic pocket of the J2 subclade, which spread later to Europe in the Neolithic-Holocene periods (10kya) 10,000 years ago and subsequently featured in the emergence and progress of the Bronze Age (5kya).
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Rather, these Samaritan lineages are remnants of those few Jews who did not go into exile when the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel in 721 BC. Those who remained in the Levant may have taken non-Jewish wives, which would account for the genetic admixture on the female side. But according to the authors the Y-chromosome clearly shows that the Samaritans and the Jews share common ancestry dating to at least 2,500 years ago. Maybe they had left Samaria and tried to return to the homeland they were taken from as prisoners???
Ancient history was that Israel's southern state was Judah, and after Solomon died in 920 BCE, his son, Rehoboam, was able to retain Judah with Jerusalem. At the same time, Solomon's superintendent of laborers who were not paid, Jeroboam, led a revolt against the taxes that Rehoboam continued from Solomon. He took over the other 10 northern states since the Assyrians had taken the best of the population. The capital was Samaria, so that and the land around it fell into his hands. It had been founded in 880 BCE by the king of Israel, Omri, on a hill bought from Shomer and it occupied 25 acres.
Resource;https://blog.23andme.com/articles/samaritans-genetic-history/
https://www.timesofisrael.com/clinging-to-ancient-traditions-the-last-samaritans-keep-the-faith/
https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/samaritan/about
https://blog.23andme.com/articles/samaritans-genetic-history/---Shen
- Reconstruction of patrilineages and matrilineages of Samaritans and other Israeli populations from Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA sequence variation.Hum Mutat. 2004 Sep;24(3):248-60. doi: 10.1002/humu.20077.PMID: 15300852
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2836152/jewish/The-Samaritans-Cutheans.htm
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-85883-2 on J1-M267
https://learn.familytreedna.com/jewish-dna-testing/cohen-match-badge/
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