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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter brought to you by Braille. I'm Lee Chung-Greco, and this week we'll be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. Today we're speaking with Stephen Fine. He's a Hurgen professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, and he's also the director of the Waiyu Center for Israel Studies and of the Israelite Samaritans Project.
His new book is The Samaritans, A Biblical People. Professor Fine, thanks so much for sitting down with us again. Oh, I'm thrilled to be with you. Thank you.
So maybe the average person has heard of the phrase, the Good Samaritan. Can you tell us who the Samaritan people are and how they have adapted over Les Malenia? Well, you know, we're used to thinking about good Samaritan hospitals and good Samaritan laws, and those people who read the New Testament avidly know that the Good Samaritan is a person. He's a character in one of Jesus's stories.
Samaritans have been around since Biblical times. They date themselves to the tribes of Joseph and to the tribe of Levi. They were very numerous in the ancient world, and over their very long history from Biblical time to the present, they've lived in a lot of places. There were some in southern Italy, and there were some in Greece, and there were some in Egypt, and there were some in Damascus.
Their center is in the Biblical city of Shremm or Shechem, which in the Roman period became theopolis, which under Islam become now loose. And they were there for all of those periods. The amazing thing about the Samaritans is that they have a vast literature and now considerable archaeological remains to show their history literally from the time of the Bible until now. The problem is that over that very long period, they were enemies to almost everybody.
And so the Hasmoneans, the Maccabees destroyed their holy place on their holy mountain, Mount Resin, as part of the centralization after the Hasmonean War. Romans didn't give them the same rights that they gave Jews and persecuted them. This inteens continued along the same line. Muslims were not quite sure whether they were people of the book or not, and that's haunted them all the way through their history.
And then into modern times, going through this process, there were 130-something Samaritans left at the beginning of the 20th century. So it's a real story of a biblical people becoming a micro-nation. And then in the 20th century, something began to click because with the renewed interest by European, mostly British Protestants, and then their adoption by the Zionist movement, the Samaritans began to grow again. They're a community that maintains its tradition going back millennia.
They are the other Israelites, if the Jews are the Judeans, and the Samaritans come from Samaria, both of them claim to be the keepers of the Torah. And then there's the third component, the newest one, the Israel of the Spirit, as opposed to Israel of the flesh, the Christians. And so all of that dynamic comes together in the Western perception of these people, and in their own development over the astonishing 35-100 years of their history. So was there a specific reason why originally they were hated, they were ostracized by Jews, Muslims, and Christians?
Samaritans make a claim for themselves, and that is that their holy mountain, Mount Rizim, is the mountain of blessing, is the house of God, and thus not that awful place, as they used to call it, to the south in Jerusalem. And so there's a real religious competition between these groups that plays out in mostly an animosity for much of the history. Now, that's not true, because by the second and third centuries, rabbis say things like any of the commandments that the Samaritans keep, they keep better than we do. But as competition develops, as the relationship develops, the Samaritans are in the position of being the adjacent outsiders.
In other words, they're not Jews, but there is relikes. They're not Israelis, but they're not Palestinians. In fact, today they have the identity cards of both Israelis and Palestinians in their unclei, a top-mount regime, and the community near Tel Aviv, there are two communities, mainly Israeli, completely Israeli. The entity is theological, and they fit into no one's categories, except for Jews.
For Jews, they are biblical renegades. For Christians who should like them, because they're the good Samaritans, they're objects for conversion. For Islam, are they people who should be protected, or are they idolaters? Since the third century Jews had claimed that they prayed idols to a dove on top of Mount Rizim, which is completely not true, but Mount Rizim is a very high mountain that feels like a bird's nest above novellas.
And so you can see how that myth would develop. If they're idolaters and they haven't converted to Islam, they may be killed. So in 1842, at one of those moments of insecurity in the Ottoman Empire, locals in novellas decided to kill the Samaritans if they would have converted to Islam. Most of them had.
I point that out. Most people in that region have some Samaritan blood. And the folks in novellas took it seriously, because a hundred years earlier, the community in Damascus had been decimated in a similar way. In a similar kind of event.
And so the remnants left Damascus and came to live in Nablus. And so they were well aware that getting killed is a real possibility. Happily, the British Consul in Jerusalem had taken an interest in them. And somehow, through whatever channels, they got to the chief rabbi of Jerusalem, the first chief rabbi, named Abraham Gagim.
And they got him to write a letter to the Turkish authorities that said that the Samaritans are Israelites who believe in the Torah of Moses, which was enough to save them. Now, having been saved by the Jews from being destroyed, the relationship between these communities spent 50-100 years warming and becoming in the end friendly, extremely friendly. And so our volume and the larger project that it's part of, which is a documentary and a traveling exhibition and even a cookbook, is about bringing this culture, this history, this set of relationships over time into contemporary conversation about the history of all of the periods that our book covers, which start with the Bible and continues until yesterday. Lots of people complain about Orientalism, but it's that Orientalism that saves the Samaritans from destruction.
Well, thank you so much for that background. I think it's really fascinating, as you noted, bringing that history through a contemporary lens, because I think a lot of folks probably might think that this population is sort of stuck in a biblical era. So you write that this is a book of memories preserved by Samaritans, Jews, Muslims, and Christians from the time of Moses to the present. I'm curious, how did you go about collecting all these stories over such a wide ranging period?
There's the literature is vast for 150 years and more. Western scholars have found the Samaritans fascinating. And so there is a vast secondary literature relating to every aspect of their culture, from contemporary marriage patterns to the Bible and everything in between. The scholarship, however, seldom reached outside a very small group of people who fell onto the Samaritans for one reason or another and found a cool and decided that they would study it.
It very seldom reached into the mainstream. So there's a lot of this stuff published, but there's more. I'm fortunate. I studied with the founder of the field of Jewish folklore, a man named Dofnoy, and he did a short volume called Legends of the Samaritans.
And in it, he collected a series of stories for the Israel Folklore Archive related to every aspect of their lives and as they tell the stories themselves. So that was the basis for organizing the 24 articles in this book around stories, around primary sources. And so some of them are basic, like biblical texts that talk about Samaritans or Tomotatex that talk about Samaritans, but we look for the stories. In every case, let's talk about and not theorize about.
Let's hear what people say about that and what they say about other people. And so each of the articles is a reflection on one particular source. And so whether it's a Samaritan history by a fellow named Abua Fat that goes from the entry into the land of Israel until the Middle Ages, or a later history written by Samaritans that goes into the 20th, or whether it's a section from a, from a Martuain's Innocence of Broad. Or the itinerary, a Benjamin of Toudela, who came and saw them and watched them and wrote a lot about them in the high middle ages.
We have a vast amount of material, but there's one more bit. And that is we as a team went to Mount Grazine and collected stories from contemporary Samaritan elders that hadn't appeared before. And we collected them and we asked them, what story would you like to tell your grandchildren? And we whittled it down and came up with seven stories that are really evocative.
Some of them are historic, some of them are sort of fantasy. Some of them are about these people, some of them about their ancestors. An amazing collection that follows the life of the Samaritans and by accident, by accident, covers all of the issues of contemporary Samaritan religion, holidays, the synagogue, language, interaction with Jews and Muslims. All the issues that are important to them today, we found new stories and turn them into videos, which will be a centerpiece of our exhibition.
And they're beautiful. And so those stories became jumping off places as well. And so while we may start with texts from the Bible or from the Quran, we end up with elders who are functioning and living and thriving in our own time, and that we were able to preserve at least on film and then in writing. You were able to record that.
I mean, that's part of the beauty of recording stories is you know, you try and get them from elders so that you can preserve that piece of their memory. The amazing piece for me is that our filmmaker, Moshe Lafi, has done what no one has done before, where I've always been friendly with the community. Since I was in college, the fact is that Moshe embedded himself with the community over a five year period. So he has been able to bring to us a level of depth in our documentary, which is called again the Samaritan's of Biblical people, or in our volume, which is a truly amazing thing.
Because it really does cover this vast range of human experience. There's an intimacy that I've tried to preserve, but we've been able through friends who are amazing photographers and through Lafi's work to collect images of men and women and children living their lives that our friends on Mount Grazim and in Cologne, our Samaritan friends, are going to look at with great pride and more importantly, their children will look at it with great pride. And hopefully, people around the world will read it and think, gee, these people are interesting. Their story is interesting.
I can learn something from my own world from this series of encounters, both warnings of how not to behave and happily the happy ending of at least one of the 2000 year communities ending. And so Jews and Christians and mothers, and people who don't define themselves in any particular religion came together with Samaritans and wrote articles in our volume that are meant for anybody who finds the subject interesting, including academics. So you mentioned among some of those observations of Samaritans that you collected, you mentioned writers like Mark Twain. How exactly were Samaritans depicted by Anglo travelers like Twain and how do you think this contributes to Westerners modern understanding of Samaritans?
Westerners started to come to visit during the 19th century. The most important visit was clearly that of the Prince of Wales in the 1850s. The Prince of Wales, when he came in 1862, was accompanied by a major photographer on his trip through the Near East. And so he took a photograph of the Samaritans most prized possession.
A tourist's grow that they believe was copied shortly after the death of Moses. It's their icon, their connection to biblical history and began to spread the fame of this artifact. Western biblical scholars thought about it, decided it wasn't as old as it seemed, but that didn't stop the aura of this object from growing and becoming in Western culture. Now, all of this is part of that European Oriental interest and it's a part of Protestant Bible interest going to the Holy Land.
We're seeing it through your own eyes, reading the Bible through your own eyes. And so images of the Holy Land, which we're circulating and still circulate often included, in most cases included, a visit to Nablus to see the Samaritans. Again, we have come to treat those visits with a certain kind of John DeStuy. What would people often miss is that the Samaritans manipulated and used that new reality to create friends around the world, to create business opportunities for consumer items, to create a territory, practically, to copy books for Western clients and to maintain their balance in a world where they didn't have any American Protestants came to the rescue to provide food and sustenance and even a school in the late 19th century.
The Zionist movement came after and created a whole infrastructure for the survival of the Samaritans, but Mark Twain writes about it when he came on his trip to the Holy Land. He tells us how he visited, what he did when he was there. He provides a great deal of information that became the model for Western pilgrims for the rest of the century. People don't often recognize that Mark Twain's most popular book in his own time was not Taco Berry Finn as it is for us today.
It was the innocence abroad. People who went to Europe, people who went to Palestine took his book in their pockets, read it before they left, and then enacted his visit. It became a standard stop to go to the synagogue, to see the Samaritans who Twain says, you look at these people and they look like mastodons, meaning human fossils from another era. His audience swallowed that, looked at the images that were being created for them of the Samaritan high priest standing next to the scroll of Abisha and perpetuated it and perpetuated it into the present.
We have in the book a series of photographs that go back to the 19th century and go to the present of Samaritans standing next to their holy books. Now, let me just point out that while we may look at that and say, aha, this is 19th century Orientalism, this is like Curtis picture photographs of Native Americans. And Samaritans look at the same photographs, and I can tell you, hang them with pride in their homes and look at them and say, this is our holy book and this is our holy priest. And it's become an icon within the community to the point that young Samaritan boys and girls now take photographs next to the scroll and they hang them up in their houses.
It's become part of their local tradition, which is just utterly fascinating and cool. And this is a good example of the Samaritans taking categories that we think we're very smart about in Western culture and our contemporary scholarly world and forcing us to rethink them. That's really fascinating hearing how Twain sort of set that blueprint and then how the Samaritans themselves used his media exposure essentially. Can you tell us about the Passover of 1968 and how it contracted to previous Passover's for Samaritans, particularly 1967.
Passover is their holiday. According to the Armistice Agreement of 1949, the Samaritans in Israel were allowed to cross over into Jordan once a year at Passover to go to their holy mountain to do their sacrifice now a very small community. This is when communities, when the community regrouped together, came back together and to Uncle's brothers and sisters got together during the week of Passover, as they had it passed over followed by the festival of unleaded bread matzah, they divided into. And it was a startling event because the Israeli team were fully integrated into Israeli society and had money from the Israeli government to publish books and developed their own neighborhood with the help of the Israeli government and on and on and on and we're doing rather well.
And the folks in Ablut were impoverished. And so the Ministry of Religious Affairs in Israel actually sent each Samaritan family that crossed the border with money so that every set of use has support for the community for much of the following year. So the Samaritans crossing the border were more than just the family with that's not enough and more than just the sacrifice if that wasn't enough. They were providing economic well-being for a community that was starving.
More than that, by 1966 the Jordanians had figured out that the young people of the community had reached the age of 18 and that the young men and the young women were both serving in the Israel Defense Forces. And so they barred anybody who was an Israeli soldier from coming on Passover. Now I point out that these people took their jobs seriously. One of the leaders of the community that was an artilleryman in the Israeli Army, the Saint fellow became the vice president of Israel government coins and medals.
These people really made it in a way that they didn't expect. And so the Jordanians who caught this blocked all of the young people from coming to Mount Grazim. That caused trauma for the entire community. Well, in 1967 then they looked at each other and said, what are we going to do?
We're going to disappear. This is the end. The community we hear from stories told to us that we recorded broke into jubilation when they realized that the Israeli Army had arrived. But the modern Jewish National Movement saw the Samaritans and sees the Samaritans as Israelites who never went into exile.
And so when Passover came the next year, it was a big deal. The people who showed up for the Passover event included high-level officials of the Israeli government, included scholars from all over the world. It became almost a covenant ritual to the point that the Israeli government post office, the postal service, issued commemorative stamps with special seals for people to buy when they went up there. And Samaritans published little pamphlets explaining what was going on.
The governor of Noblo's, the Palestinian, came to the event. And since then it's become an institutionalized part of the National calendar. The Samaritans from their part look upon their Passover as literally the ultimate covenant of experience. And the level of fervor, the level of excitement, the level of electricity which we have shared in our documentary and could talk about in the book is truly intense.
And one of the wonderful things we were able to catch in the documentary is Samaritan women who don't usually get heard about these sorts of things describing their ecstatic relationship to this Passover, which as one who's seen the Passover sacrifice, even we tourists could see it, could feel it, could watch it. And in our exhibition everybody will be able to go into it in an installation which is full-sized where you can walk in and watch the Passover sacrifice. The Passover sacrifice is indicative, it's their window to the world. And that began in the 19th century, but it developed steroids in 1968 with new technology, with new openness, with new travel, and through the mediation of first at first the Israeli Samaritans who had all the Western savvy.
And then later on the Mount Presine Samaritans who have developed that savvy and have a very complex and interesting relationship with their Palestinian neighbors. And so the window into the Samaritan world for most people is the sacrifice and that's good and true, but there's so much more. Well, Stephen, thank you so much for a wonderful book. And as you noted, it's put together so beautifully as well.
I'm really looking forward to more of your work. Thank you so much for inviting me to join. That's Stephen Fine. His new book is the Samaritans of Biblical People.
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