As the 21st century dawned, the few Samaritans left (712 in 2007, up from a low of 146 in 1917) still claimed to be descended from the ancient Hebrew tribes. Jewish religious authorities still disagreed. And strong evidence either way was still lacking. Until 2004.I confess I don't understand how her narrative explains the evidence. The Assyrian exile would not have left behind more men than women. On the contrary, I would expect that the depredations of the war would have killed off more men. There would have been plenty of un-exiled "Hebrew" (i.e., Israelite) women to go around, so why would the remaining men have favored non-Israelite women?
See, that tiny population (which wasn't real big on converts) led to a decent amount of inbreeding. In fact, according to research done in the late 1990s, 84% of Samaritan marriages are between cousins--making them the most highly inbred population on the planet. Unfortunately, that title comes with a propensity for genetic abnormalities, concern about which eventually led several Samaritans to turn their DNA samples over to a team of genetics researchers.
The results turned up some surprising confirmation of the Samaritans' personal origin stories. The study compared Samaritan Y-chromosome DNA (genetic information passed mostly intact from father to son) and mtDNA (ditto, but from mother to daughter) with that of several different Jewish populations from across the Middle East and Africa, as well as with a couple of non-Jewish groups from the same areas. Not only do the Samaritan Y-chromosomes seem to be closely related to Jewish Y-chromosomes, but most of the Samaritans actually carry a distinctive set of Y-chromosome mutations known as the Cohen Modal Haplotype--which is connected with men descended from the ancient Jewish priestly class.
On the other hand, Samaritan mtDNA doesn't match up to its Jewish counterparts at all, said Marcus Feldman, Ph.D.,professor of biological sciences at Stanford University and part of the research team that studied the Samaritans in 2004.
To Feldman and his colleagues, the genetic evidence suggests that modern Samaritans are descended from Hebrew men, left behind after the Assyrians conquered ancient Israel, who went on to marry non-Hebrew women. It's probably not just coincidence that Samaritan ethnicity (at least, the official social recognition of that ethnicity) is traditionally passed to a child through its father--exactly opposite from the way Jewish ethnicity has been traditionally passed down.
In that way, the evidence suggests that both the Jews and the Samaritans are right, sort of. If you believe ethnicity is something passed down from the mother, then the Samaritans probably aren't Children of Israel. But if you think ethnicity comes from the father's side (or, you know, from both parents) then the Samaritans have a good case. It's all about how you use culture to interpret the science.
The lack of Samaritan women today, however, is a serious problem for the community. Background here and follow the links back.
(Cross-file under Technology Watch.)
UPDATE (11 December): Richard Bauckham e-mails:
Is this evidence not strongly reminiscent of Ezra 9-10 and Neh 13:23-27? Judean men were marrying non-Israelite women. Presumably Judean women also married non-Israelite men, but they left the Jewish community to join that of their husbands. So, if these Judean men had not divorced their foreign wives and sent their children by them away with them, they would have had descendants who were Jewish in the male line but non-Jewish in the female. There did not have to be a shortage of Israelite women for this to happen. We simply need to suppose that there was reciprocal inter-marrying between Jewish and non-Jewish communities.
So the Samaritans would be descended from Israelites whose inter-ethnic marriages were not severed by reforms like those of Ezra and Nehemiah. This needn't have anything to do with the Assyrian exile.
One might even speculate that they descended from Jewish priests from Jerusalem who resisted the reforms and left for Samaria taking their non-Jewish wives with them. Neh 13:28 gives an example of such.
I know there has been recent discussion of Samaritan origins that I have not kept up with. Those who have may be be able to relate these ideas to the current discussion.
