Reader Harold Clumeck has forwarded the following letter from Benyamim Tsedaka in response to the UPI article I linked to last week (sorry, the @*$%^^! Blogspot archive is down as usual) and Mr. Tsedaka has kindly given me permission to publish it here.
Dear Mr. Uwe Siemon-Netto
United Press International
tips@upi.com
Dear Mr. Siemon-Netto,
My friend, Mr. Harold Clumeck from San Rafael/California has forwarded me to your article of May 8, 2003.
I have to make some corrections to your positive attitude article.
The Samaritans divide in two centers, 350 in Holon/Israel and 310 in Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim. Most of the Samaritans speaking Arabic in a special dialect of the Syrian Palestinian dialect of the Arabic. But this is third dialect to their original Ancient Hebrew and Samaritan Aramaic that all of them learn in the ages 5-15 after school hours every day, and to the modern Hebrew that most of them speak as it is spoken in the State of Israel. I am speaking about the whole Israelite Samaritan people as one.
I had to make these corrections not to let the readers of your article to have the wrong impression that we are struggling to preserve a special Samaritan Arabic dialect. As far as I know it is only Syrian-Palestinian dialect with some different Samaritan Arabic idioms that spoken for the last 1200 years and never entered our ritual practices. It is naturally spoken but again it is only third to the Samaritan Hebrew and Samaritan Aramaic we have preserved proudly for thousands of years and we still use it in our prayers and many new composition.
Dr. Arnold Werner is my close friend. I am sorry to say that some of his words were taken in the wrong way. In the contrary I have followed him to the all Samaritan personalities he spoke with for his research and we both never found any difficulty of these personalities in speaking the different languages.
Scholars and readers of your article are welcomed to visit the organized Israelite-Samaritan web-sites www.mystae.com/samaritans.html and www.the-samaritans.com and learn more about our current rich cultural activities.
We are keeping our survival and our own struggle to keep our original languages, the Ancient Hebrew and the Samaritan Aramaic, that according to scholars have never changed since Second Temple period, it is part of our survival. Come to visit us and enjoy the Ancient languages by the Samaritans. At present times that languages spoken by tens and hundreds of million peoples close to be dying before the English language influence the way we preserve our original languages without change and other language influence considered to be a great achievement.
Yours,
Benyamim Tsedaka
Head of the A.B. - Institute of Samaritan Studies
Co-editor of A.B. - The Samaritan News
I�ve corresponded a little more with Mr. Tsedeka about this and I think his main point is that he considers Samaritan Hebrew and Samaritan Aramaic to be the real languages of his community, even though the community does use Palestinian Arabic and Modern Israeli Hebrew.
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