Samaritan

The Samaritans are an ethnoreligious community of Samaria in central Palestine, descended from the ancient northern Kingdom of Israel. They recognize only their own Torah and hold Mount Gerizim above Nablus as God's chosen sanctuary, where their temple stood from the fifth century BCE until the Hasmonean king John Hyrcanus destroyed it around 110 BCE.

Revolts against Byzantium in 484 and under Julianus ben Sabar in 529 were crushed, leaving them a small minority. Ninth-century Abbasid persecutions emptied their villages and concentrated survivors in Nablus; from the eleventh century Arabic replaced Aramaic.

The Franks of the First Crusade massacred their coastal communities, and in 1137 a Damascene raid on Nablus carried off five hundred captives. Ottoman repression further shrank their numbers, and by the end of the eighteenth century roughly two hundred remained in Nablus, living by trade and clerking.