Samaritan Polemics against the

Ever since the Samaritans were “re-discovered” in modern Europe, the interest in them has been maintained not only because of a thirst for knowledge, but also, or, perhaps rather, because of the help they afford to understand better known groups and practices. Almost all studies of the Samaritans have striven to draw parallels or distractions between them and the Jews have long been known. But the first scholar, to my knowledge, who concerned himself with the Samaritans as a link in the history of Jewish oral tradition and utilized their literature in Jewish religious life was Abraham Geiger. Both in his Urschrift and in various articles he studied the rise of the Samaritans and the (page 14) growth of their Halakha as stages in the steady evolution of Judaism. Since then a number of studies have been published on the Samaritans and their divergences from the Jews. But polemics in the narrower sense of arguing against dissenters or replying to charges by opponents have been studied by Geiger, Furst, Wreschner and one or two others. Greiger and Furst and a few others utilized the comparatively late commentary ascribed to Ibrahim b. Ya’kub. Wreschner’s work is a digest of the second of a two-volume polemical work by the twelfth-century author Munajja b. Sadaka, called Masa’il Al-Khilaf. Then reason for limiting himself to the second part only is that the MS. at his disposal was defective. Yusuf b. Salama’s Kitab (page 15) al-Kafi has likewise been drawn upon; on the basis of this compendium Naphtali Cohn examined the Samaritan laws bearing on leprosy. Despite its antiquity as compared with the above mentioned Samaritan works, the Tabakh by Abu-l-Hasan Al-Suri has not been utilized hitherto. The material of which use was made in this study forms a small part of the book which ought to attract interest for both its contents and its composition. The large issue of Samaritan originality or lack of it and its relation to the main body of Jewish lore or to the Jewish sects has not been dwelt on in this paper. Although it has stimulated spirited debates it is essentially irrelevant to the topic under discussion.