As Jacov climbs into his white van, he notices the small blue and white Israel flags fluttering from the windows. “I’ll take these off at Ariel Junction,” he smiles. From there, his journey will take him on a side road, up winding hills deeper and deeper into the West Bank. Back home, his love for Israel cannot be freely displayed.

Jacov, 43, whose surname is withheld over safety concerns, is one of the roughly 800 Samaritans split between two communities in Israel and the Palestinian territories, where he goes by the Arabic name of Yaa’kop. This ancient community – practicing an ancient religion that is a variation of Judaism, but also shares some similarities with Islam – has lived alongside Israelis and Palestinians since the formation of the Jewish state in 1948, a rare haven of neutrality in a sectarian world. Now, though, there are signs of change.

“The new generation of Samaritans feels more and more Israeli,” says Jacov’s brother, Baruch (Mubarak when he’s in the West Bank). “Israel is thriving. Its economy only continues to grow, while the Palestinians seem to want everything to stay the same,” he notes.

Original traditions

The Samaritans rarely make the news in Israel – except for once a year when the media and hundreds of tourists ascend to the community’s West Bank village and watch it celebrate its own version of Passover. This involves the slaughter of a small herd of sheep at twilight – an offering to God, giving thanks for the community’s freedom from slavery in Egypt and based on the text in the Book of Exodus.

The ritual takes place atop Mount Gerizim (also known as Jebel et-Tor), which is sandwiched – somewhat symbolically – between the Israeli settlement of Har Bracha and the Palestinian city of Nablus. It is on this mount the Samaritans believe God ordered their temple to be built. They believe the mountain houses the rock where Abraham was prepared to follow God’s command and sacrifice his son Isaac, the place where Moses received the Ten Commandments, where God is said to have made Adam out of dust, and where Noah’s ark came to rest.

The Samaritans (“Shomronim” in Hebrew) consider themselves the descendants of the Israelites, from the ancient Kingdom of Israel in biblical times. They believe their ancestors escaped exile under the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C.E. and that they alone kept alive the traditions of the Jewish people. They claim the Kingdom of Judah, which went on to become what we know today as the Jewish people while exiled in Babylon, moved away from those original traditions.

According to the British former diplomat and historian Gerard Russell in his book “Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms,” the Samaritans “saw themselves as keeping to the letter the ancient traditions that their southern neighbors the Jews had abandoned,” and had a history of persistent conflict with them. To name but one such incident of this long-enduring “family feud,” in the year 9 C.E., the Samaritans are said to have vandalized the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, littering it with human bones.

Still, Abdullah Aboud Cohen, the 23-year-old grandson of the community’s current high priest Aabed-El ben Asher ben Matzliach, isn’t about to pull rank. “To call us the real Jews is misleading as we are all the descendants from the same people,” he says diplomatically, as the community’s de facto spokesperson. Indeed, all of his pronouncements on Samaritan history are given with a hint of caution, no doubt aware of religious sensitivities in this most incendiary of lands.

During Byzantine rule some 1,500 years ago, the community dwindled and suffered from endless persecution, eventually benefiting from the conquest by Arab Muslims in 637. Over time, the community suffered from plague, persistent poverty, and socioeconomic pressure, with many moving across the Middle East to Damascus, Cairo or Northern Iraq.

By the 20th century, most of the Samaritan diaspora had slowly disappeared, many having converted to Islam. (The Samaritan synagogue in Cairo was handed over to the Jewish community in 1706.) In the 1840s, faced with the threat of a pogrom in Nablus that would wipe out what was left of the community in the Holy Land, the Sephardi chief rabbi of Jerusalem, Chaim Abraham Gagin, stepped in to save the Samaritans. He declared them “a branch of the House of Israel,” and they were spared at the cost of paying a hefty fine to the city’s Muslim authorities. But by the time of the British Mandate era, the community was close to extinction.

In his 1989 book “History of the Samaritans,” historian Nathan Schur wrote that the Samaritans are “probably the smallest group of people over many centuries to have retained a nationality consistently their own.” Their existence “can be likened to a tiny boat tossed about by huge waves in a hostile ocean,