Alternate History Jews: Samaritans
When people think of the evolution of the Abrahamic traditions, they often imagine Jews being the base from which everything else evolved one way or another—but this picture is wrong. One surviving branch split off well before Jesus at some point between the time of Ezra down to the destruction of Jerusalem (70 CE) and the Bar Kokhba revolt (132-136 CE). (Why the big time gap? Because the schism was slow and involved a gradual divide in the community.)
If we were going to give a super simplified version of history:
At one point, all the Jews were allied into a single people in Israel and Judaism served as a religion, governing system, and way of living. Upset over the proposed king Rehoboam, two tribes (Judah and Benjamin) split off into the House of Judah. This created two competing Jewish Kingdoms: the Israelites in the North and the House of Judah in the South.
Given that Judaism of the time was both a religion and a governing system, each kingdom needed its own religious center. For the southern kingdom, that was Temple Mount in Jerusalem. For the Northern people, that was Mount Gerizim in Gerizim. The Israelites in the North (the ten tribes who did not split off) controlled a wealthier, more populated kingdom but this also rendered them more appealing as a target for conquest, leading them to be conquered by the Assyrians.
While the Assyrians genocided the capital city after this conquest, they left most of the Jews of this Kingdom alive under new rule. Though many flowed into the Southern Kingdom as refugees, most stayed under Assyrian rule and—permanently divided from the rest of the Jewish population in thinking the Temple should be on Gerizim—became the unique cultivar we now call the Samaritans.
Side note: Some ancient texts written by the Jewish branch that was antagonistic to Samaritans tried to “other” this group by claiming they were a totally different ethnicity (Assyrians) who only converted to Judaism-like beliefs because lions would otherwise keep attacking them (Second King’s 17). Both genetic[[12]](#_ftn12) and historic evidence shows this to be wrong. The Samaritans are, or at least were, Jews. (For a great breakdown on this, check out Religions for Breakfast’s video on the subject.)[[13]](#_ftn13)
What makes the Samaritan-Jewish split so different from Christianity’s split from Judaism was that the Christian split involved a single Jewish teacher coming along with different ideas about their theology and attracting followers (mostly from non-Jewish groups) based on their affinity for these new ideas. The Samaritan split is more a story of two cultures speciating following a sufficiently long period of isolation from each other—it’s analogous to ecological speciation, in which a species splits because two populations are physically separated (in contrast, Christianity split off because their practices did not allow intermingling). Jewish and Samaritan views differentiated so much after long periods of mutual isolation that they simply could not reintegrate.[[14]](#_ftn14)
What makes Samaritans so cool is that they allow us to get a rare answer to an “alternate history” question: What would have happened to Jewish culture had Jews not left the Levant and not adapted their culture to new environments during the Jewish “Cambrian explosion,” which happened after the Second Temple Period? Suppose Jews never went to Europe; suppose they stayed in the Holy Land; what would have happened to them?
To clarify, while it does appear true that the Samaritans feature some practices and cultural tendencies that represent a less derived version of Jewish culture from the ancestral strain, they are not the ancestral variant itself. To assume as much would be wrong in the same way that considering modern chimpanzees to be ancestral to humans is wrong. While both share a common ancestor and chimps have some superficial features that may make them more phenotypically similar to that ancestor, they have both have undergone evolutionary journeys since that time. (Cool side note: Because of this misconception that Samaritanism is a more ancestral form of Judaism, around 300 Brazilian Jews recently converted to Samaritanism to try to recapture a more ancient form of their religion and culture.)[[15]](#_ftn15)
Outside of being a less derived version of the ancient Israelite religion, there were two key factors which imposed different cultural evolutionary pressures on the Samaritans:
- They were much more culturally conservative and thus mostly stayed in one geographic area. (As such, they lacked a wider community in other regions which might support them or offer some place to which they could flee.)
- While they were protected in Islamic controlled regions as People of the Book, they were not nearly as protected as Jews (as they are not mentioned in the Koran frequently by name, like the Jews were).
These differences yield an example of what would have happened to the Jews under these conditions.
First, we can see they maintained a similar cultural ecological niche to the ancient Israelites. So long as Samaritans existed in populations sufficiently large to rebel and reconstitute their kingdom, they would try. They triggered major revolts in attempts to restore their sovereignty almost for as long as the Jews did, with the last major Samaritan revolt (572 AD) happening only a few decades before the last major Jewish revolt (the Jewish revolt against Heraclius in 602 AD).
Any cultivar that has a mandate to revolt and attempt to recreate a self-governing kingdom will eventually be stomped out as every time they try to revolt, the ruling kingdom will come in and retaliate, leaving fewer of them to revolt next time. Jewish culture was saved because enough of its population lost this tendency. Being more resistant to change, Samaritan culture did not evolve out of this tendency until it was almost totally extinct.
After this period, the few surviving derivatives of Samaritan culture appear to have become fishing village specialists. Not having the same protection Jews enjoyed against Muslim oppression, Samaritans were eventually whittled down to almost nothing, with only a few thousand still being around when the state of Israel was finally created, preventing total cultural extinction.