The Samaritans and their books

Who are the Samaritans?

Samaritans are a religious and ethnic community native to Samaria, a region located between Judea and Galilee in the Middle East. Just like Judaism, Samaritanism is centred around the Pentateuch and thus these two religions are related in many ways. Both claim to be the true descendants of the ancient Israelites and see the other as deviating from the true path. There are various theories about the origins of the Samaritans. It is likely that their final separation from the Jews took place sometime in the 2nd century BCE, possibly as a result of a disagreement over the place of the Temple.¹

This leads us to the differences between the two religions. The Jewish and the Samaritan versions of the Pentateuch are almost identical, but not quite. According to the Samaritan Scriptures, the biblical mountain Moriah, where Abraham took Isaac to be sacrificed (see Genesis 22), is not the Temple Mount in Jerusalem but Mount Gerizim near Nablus (in Hebrew, Shechem; Fig. 1). It was Mount Gerizim where the Samaritan Temple once stood and it is there where the community still holds their religious festivals (Fig. 2). Today, there are approximately 900 Samaritans, some of which live in Holon (near Tel Aviv, Israel), some in Kiryat Luza (near Nablus/Shechem, West Bank).

There is no God but one, / There is no prophet like Moses, / And there is no writ like the Holy Torah, / And there is no worship but to the Lord, / Facing Mount Gerizim, the House of God, / The chosen, the holy, the finest on earth.

(“O Good One Who Eternally Does Good”, hymn by Amram Dare, 4th-century Samaritan poet)²

Samaritan books in Manchester

Why do we have such a large collection of Samaritan manuscripts at the Rylands? The first twenty seven Samaritan manuscripts arrived at the Library as part of the Bibliotheca Lindesiana, the earls of Crawford’s library (Fig. 3). John Rylands’ widow Enriqueta Rylands bought this outstanding collection in 1901. In his 1938 catalogue, Robinson says that “The [Crawford] MSS. were in the library of Haigh Hall, Wigan, prior to 1874, when a list was made of them, but whence they were obtained originally we have no knowledge.” More recent archival research, however, has uncovered valuable information about the provenance of the Earl of Crawford’s Samaritan manuscripts [see Dr John Hodgson’s comment at the end of this blog].

Manuscripts via post: Moses Gaster and the Samaritans

The majority of the Rylands Samaritan manuscripts, roughly 350 items, arrived at the library half a century later in 1954 from the late Moses Gaster’s collection. Rabbi Dr Gaster (1856-1939), scholar and leader of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish community had a great interest in the Samaritan tradition. Among other things, he collected biblical manuscripts, liturgical volumes, chronicles, and calendars. However, being a folklorist, he was not only interested in objects but built personal relationships with members of the Samaritan community in Palestine. He welcomed Samaritan visitors in his home in London around 1906 and visited Nablus a year later.

“My relations with the Samaritans are something out of a novel,” says Gaster in his article on how he acquired his library. “…I possess perhaps the richest Samaritan library in the world, in which there are innumerable valuable manuscripts written by their scholars according to my specifications and to my wishes.” He was so keen to correspond with them that he had a special typewriter built:

“At this point you may be interested to learn that I created the first typewriter with Hebrew characters. I then had Samaritan letters cut to my specification and put onto the Hebrew typewriter in place of the upper case, so that I could have both alphabets together: with the upper case I write to the Samaritans in their script, while with the help of the lower case I transcribe Samaritan letters and writings.”³

Gaster’s correspondence with the Samaritan community in Nablus can be traced back as early as 1902, and continued for over thirty years. Around 500 of these letters have survived. The collection contains not only letters sent from Nablus to England, but also carbon copies of Gaster’s letters written on his bespoke typewriter. A letter from Gaster to the Samaritan High Priest Abisha ben Pinhas ha-Kohen ha-Levi allows us get a glimpse of Gaster’s way of working: first he typed the draft in Hebrew script, made handwritten amendments by hand, and then typed the final version in Samaritan characters (Figs. 4-5).

The correspondence between the European scholar Gaster and the Samaritans of Nablus reveals a lot of interesting details about the production of these facsimile manuscripts. The Samaritans were reluctant to sell their original manuscripts and instead made copies, ‘facsimiles,’ of the works Gaster needed for his research. He often sent paper to Nablus – this explains why many of them are written on European paper – and then received the newly copied manuscripts in instalments. Once all sections had arrived, the codices were assembled and bound in London. In a letter written by Abisha ben Pinhas, the High Priest mentions some books the titles of which he had sent before and asks Gaster if he needs them or not. The letter is bound together with a Samaritan calendar copied for Gaster (Gaster Samaritan MS 1958A; Fig. 6).

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Thanks to the Gaster material, the Rylands Samaritan collection can give us an insight into the manuscript production of this fascinating ethno-religious community. Not only that. It gives us yet another example of the interactions between an early 20th-century European scholar-collector and representatives of a non-Western community in which they had an interest. Does this not remind you a little Rhys Davids and his Pali manuscript collection?

Read more about Samaritan manuscripts in the second part of this blog.

To browse our digital Samaritan manuscript collection and make your own discoveries, visit Manchester Digital Collections.

Further reading

Anderson, Robert T. The Samaritan Pentateuch: an Introduction to Its Origin, History, and Significance for Biblical Studies. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2012.

Fine, Steven, ed. The Samaritans : A Biblical People. Leiden: Brill, 2022.

Gaster, Moses. The Samaritans: their history, doctrines and literature. London: Published for the British Academy by H. Milford, Oxford Univ. Press, 1925.

Gaster, Moses. “The Story of My Library.” The British Library Journal 21, no. 1 (1995): 20.

Keim, Katharina E. “‘Joined at Last:’ Moses Gaster and the Samaritans.” In The Samaritans : A Biblical People, edited by Steven Fine, pp. 159-163. Leiden: Brill, 2022.

Lieber, Laura Suzanne. “Amram Dare (Amram the Elder)”. Classical Samaritan Poetry, pp. 39-114. University Park, USA: Penn State University Press, 2022. 

Schorch, Stefan. “Woe to Those Who Exchanged the Truth for a Lie, When They Choose for Themselves a Different Place”: Samaritan Perspectives on the Samaritan-Jewish Split.” In The Samaritans : A Biblical People, edited by Steven Fine, pp. 41-52. Leiden: Brill, 2022.

1. On the different theories about the origins of the Samaritans, see Chapter 1 “Stories of Samaritan Origins”, in Anderson 2012. ↩︎
2. Lieber 2022, pp. 50-53; translation from Schorch 2022, p. 41. ↩︎
3. Gaster 1995, p. 20. For photos of the typewriter, see, Moses Gaster and the Samaritans: Separated by a Common Language, The Museum of the Bible, 2022. ↩︎