Digital Samaritans: Rhetorical Delivery and Engagement in the Digital Humanities

Front matter

Rhetorical Delivery and Engagement in the Digital Humanities

JIM RIDOLFO

DIGITAL RHETORIC COLLABORATIVE

Contents

Preface: Rhetorical Serendipity xi 1 Introduction to Digital Samaritans 1

2 Between the Raindrops and Two Fires: A Brief History of the Samaritans and Their Diaspora of Manuscripts 23

3 From Parchment to Bytes: Digital Delivery as a Rhetorical Strategy 51

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Israeli intention to turn Mount Gerizim into a park, the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities issued a press release condemning the Israeli announcement as a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Hague Convention of 1954. Similar to the Israeli claim advancing a historical link to Mount Gerizim, an article in Ma’an claimed that the Samaritan village on Mount Gerizim represents the “continuity of Palestinian cultural heritage” from prehistoric times to the present day (“The Ministry of Tourism”). Absent from the Israeli and Palestinian claims, however, are Samaritans’ own ideas about their culture and relationship to the land the Israelis and Palestinians were competing to claim.

On July 7, 2012, in Bethlehem, the Palestinian National Authority formally celebrated the decision by UNESCO to make Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity a World Heritage site." For the P.A., the event was hailed as a victory and “recognition of the rights of our people and their independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital,” according to Palestinian Authority presidential spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh. P.A. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad also linked the UNESCO decision on Bethlehem to Palestinian nationalist struggles: “This decision reflects the importance to the world of this holy Palestinian city and its holy places and heritage,” and the decision “gives hope and confidence to our people of the imminent victory of their just cause” (R.T. and M.S.). Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded, “This is proof that UNESCO is motivated by political and not cultural considerations” (Dobkina), interpreting Fayyad’s statements to mean that the P.A.’s UNESCO petitions are largely tactical and political. In the midst of this landmark decision for the P.A., three churches that share administration of the Church of the Nativity expressed reservations about the UNESCO decision (Kershner). According to National Public Radio reporter Daniel Estrin, the clergy “were afraid of letting politicians meddle on their turf.” This would not be the first or the only instance where religious stakeholders to a historical site would object to the use of UNESCO for Palestinian and Israeli nationalisms.

In response to the Israeli and Palestinian actions regarding Mount Gerizim, on Monday July 9, the Facebook public page for the Samaritanadministered Museum on Mount Gerizim posted that the latest “conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians to take control of the top of Mount Gerizim aims to exploit the mountain as an archaeological and tourist landmark” and asked “where is the free world to defend” the Samaritans amidst this conflict (Samaritan Museum)? For example, in the first week of July 2012 Israel’s Arutz Sheva (Channel 7) posted a video of the Israeli ceremony declaring Mount Gerizim a national park. Arutz Sheva interviewed a future Israeli tour guide for the park and asked her who the Samaritans are and where they originate:

Fig. 1. Ancient ruins on top of Mount Gerizim / Israeli park, July 2012. (Photograph by Jim Ridolfo.)

Fig. 2. Ancient ruins on top of Mount Gerizim / Israeli park, July 2012. (Photograph by Jim Ridolfo.)

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Fig. 3. Israeli military jeep parked at entrance to Mount Gerizim park, July 2012. (Photograph by Jim Ridolfo.)

On the one hand there’s . . . one side which will say that they are the original Israelites and they are the ones which have kept the Bible as it is meant to be... and on the other hand you have people that will say they were brought here by the Assyrians years later, about 700 B.C.E. (Elad and Kempinski)

The tour guide does not label the sides; however, the first position that the Samaritans are “original Israelites” is the Samaritans’ own religious belief. The second position, that the Samaritans were transplants brought to the biblical land of Israel by the Assyrians after their conquest in 722 BCE is the common Jewish interpretation of Samaritan identity found in the Talmud.” This is not the first time this schism in religious narrative has been politicized in Israeli

Fig. 4. Mount Gerizim’s park rules, July 2012. (Photograph by Jim Ridolfo.)

Fig. 5. Israeli settlement of Har Bracha adjacent to the Samaritans. New construction, May 2012. (Photograph by Jim Ridolfo.)

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Fig. 6. Still from Arutz Sheva report on July 6, 2012, “Mount Gerizim Archaeological Site Reopens.” (Video available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4fzcuLNBuyY. A full video transcript is available in Appendix A.)

civic society. In the beginning of the twentieth century, the Samaritans were embraced by Israeli leaders such as Yitzhak Ben-Zvi because they represent a living, breathing link to the Hebrew Bible and land. Consequently, in the early 1950s Ben Zvi helped found a Samaritan neighborhood in Holon, Israel; however, the Samaritans’ own narrative of events differs considerably from Judaism’s and key parts of the Jewish religious narrative of the West Bank and Jerusalem.

July 2012’s week of dramatic events is part of a much longer rhetorical story about the relationship of the Samaritans to their Palestinian and Israeli neighbors, and how these relationships inform access, use, and interaction with sacred objects, artifacts, and texts. The Israeli narrative of Mount Gerizim tries to qualify the Samaritans’ own version of historical events because the Samaritans’ religious beliefs and presence in the region challenge the spiritual and political significance of Israeli biblical claims to the West Bank and to the holiness of Jerusalem. The Palestine Liberation Organization has also tried to selectively reference the Samaritan historical narrative in arguments for its own nationalist agenda. For example, Yasser Arafat was quoted as denying Jewish claims for Jerusalem, advancing instead that “if it [the Temple] existed, it must have existed elsewhere,” and on several occasions he indicated that this “elsewhere” was, in fact, near Nablus. Arafat also went so far in 1996 as to create a designated Samaritan seat in the eighty-eight member Palestinian National Council, and Palestinian media often reference the coexistence of Muslims, Christians, and Samaritans in Nablus, the city next to Mount Gerizim as evidence of the prospects for religious coexistence. As the next several chapters will elaborate in greater detail, these overlapping nationalist claims put significant cultural pressure on the Samaritan community and are the cause of much speculation on the part of Israelis and Palestinians as to the Samaritans’ identity and nationalist loyalties. In turn, the Samaritans’ own efforts to explain their place between these two fires is ongoing, and their diaspora of manuscripts, what I term textual diaspora, is one resource they can leverage to make clear to their neighbors and the world their history in their land, and their unique culture and heritage.

The Samaritans’ own story begins in their Samaritan Torah (five books of Moses), which has its own unique script, pronunciation scheme, and grammatical differences from the Masoretic Hebrew. While their Torah is largely similar in content to that of the Jewish people, it has many textual and theological differences. For example, the Samaritan version of the Torah maintains that Mount Gerizim rather than Jerusalem is the site of the holy temple; consequently, Samaritan religious law and practices differ considerably from Jewish traditions.

At one time, the Samaritans were one of the largest populations in the region. During the Roman-Byzantine period the total Samaritan population was anywhere from 150,000 to 200,000 according to Ottoman tax registers, but by 1538-1539 there were only 220 Samaritans remaining in Ottoman Palestine (Pummer 1; Crown, Pummer, Tal, “Demographics” 71). According to Reinhard Pummer, “Revolts against repressive governments and forced conversions reduced their numbers more and more, until there came a time, in the roth cent. [sic], when they were at the point of near extinction” (Pummer 1). In fact, in January 1920, National Geographic magazine published a feature story on the Samaritans of Nablus. At that time, their population numbered less than 140. National Geographic writer John Whiting described the Samaritans as an “almost extinct community” and concluded the article by proclaiming the Samaritans are a “dying people” due to hundreds of years of war, conversion, famine, poverty, and earthquakes (1 and 46). From these low numbers, the Samaritan population began to increase in the 1940s, and it continues to rise due to a combination of better health, economic, and social circumstances. The community has more than quadrupled in size since those grim predictions, and now approximately 405 Samaritans reside in Israel and 365 in the Palestinian Authority. Although the two communities maintain close connections, the geographic split means that younger members of the community in Holon speak Modern Hebrew as a first language and the residents of Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim speak Arabic as a first language. Beyond language, this separation places the Samaritans directly between the “two fires,” as Samaritan Faruk Rijan Samira refers to the conflict between Palestinians and