Before dawn on March 21, 1995, someone broke into a synagogue in the Palestinian city of Nablus.
The thief — maybe it was a band of thieves — crossed the carpeted sanctuary, pulled back a heavy velvet curtain, and opened a carved wooden ark. Inside were two handwritten copies of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses. One was a sheepskin scroll written around 1360 and kept in a slender copper case. The other was a codex, a thick book, probably from the 15th century and bound in a maroon leather cover. The thief or thieves snatched the manuscripts, escaped through the synagogue’s arched doorway, discarded the copper case in a stairwell, and vanished.
These were no ordinary texts. They were perhaps the most ancient Torahs stolen in the Holy Land since the Crusaders pillaged Jerusalem. And they belonged not to Jews but to the Samaritans, one of the world’s oldest and tiniest religious sects. Known from the New Testament parable of the Good Samaritan, the group has barely survived. Centuries ago, it numbered more than 1 million; today, according to the last count, there are only 810 Samaritans left.
The Samaritans trace their roots to the ancient Israelites and regard themselves as the most loyal followers of the word of God as transmitted to Moses. Women are kept apart from others when menstruating in adherence with ritual purity, and men sacrifice sheep each year on Passover, a biblical commandment Jews gave up millennia ago.
If the Samaritans are the true keepers of the biblical faith, their Torahs are title deeds: rare and sacred manuscripts, written in a variation of the original Israelite script that Jews abandoned long ago and featuring passages scholars say preserve some of the earliest drafts of the Bible. Of the three dozen old biblical manuscripts left in the community’s coffers, the Samaritans say one is the oldest in the world, written by Moses’ great-grandnephew. These manuscripts are the Samaritans’ most jealously guarded possessions, and collectors across the globe have gone to great lengths to get their hands on them.
Word of the burglary spread fast. Some 30 miles southwest, a Samaritan named Benyamim Tsedaka — everyone calls him Benny — left his home in Israel and drove straight to the West Bank, to the scene of the crime. Benny didn’t know it then, but he would soon embark on a years-long international hunt for the missing Torahs. The hunt would eventually beckon me, too. The search would take us deep into the illicit artifact trade, where ancient manuscripts have more than just spiritual value.
I first met Benny 10 years ago on a trip with friends to the Samaritans’ West Bank village, perched on Mount Gerizim overlooking Nablus. Benny has a second home on the mountain, and we were quickly shepherded into his living room, just like many other diplomats, journalists, academics and curiosity seekers.
Benny is a prolific author on Samaritan traditions and published the first English translation of the Samaritan Torah, which differs slightly from the Jewish version in thousands of instances. Benny is also editor of a Samaritan community newspaper and a one-man foreign ministry, hosting dignitaries and giving lectures around the world about his community. He speaks in oratorical English with a singsong Israeli accent, cracking jokes about the poor sheep sacrificed on Passover and complimenting his female guests on their beauty. He’s 73 years old, with a tan complexion and a thin white mustache framing a gap-toothed grin. “If you want to go to the roots, you have to meet a Samaritan,” I once heard him explain to a group of British Jews. “When you meet the Samaritans … you can see how your real forefathers lived in the old times.”
He introduces himself as a 125th-generation Samaritan, meaning a descendant of the original Israelites who settled in Samaria, the area of the Holy Land where the Bible says the Israelites erected their first altars of worship. In the heart of Samaria is the biblical Mount Gerizim, the Samaritans’ sacred mountain, which they have clung to for centuries. The ancient Jews based their center of worship about 30 miles south in Jerusalem, but Samaritans consider that an aberration of the Israelite tradition; indeed, Jerusalem is never explicitly named in the Five Books of Moses. Mount Gerizim is. Jewish tradition, meanwhile, said Samaritans were impostors of foreign descent. Jews and Samaritans sparred over the biblical birthright for centuries; the parable of the Good Samaritan was Jesus’ way of teaching his disciples that even a rival could be kind.
Today, the Samaritans’ home on Mount Gerizim places them in one of the most volatile corners of the West Bank. To get there, you drive past landmarks of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Palestinian villages, Israeli military checkpoints, and some of the West Bank’s most hard-line Jewish settlements.
I started making regular visits, to watch Samaritan men in white holiday robes joyfully mark each other’s foreheads with sheep’s blood during the Passover sacrifice, to see a bearded priest thrust a Torah scroll toward the heavens during a sunrise ceremony held three times a year. Even with the jostling phalanx of photographers and tourists, I couldn’t help being moved by these ceremonies. They seemed genuine and pure, a glimmer of an ancient past.
Five years ago, during one of my visits with Benny, he told me about the theft of the Torahs, dramatically unspooling the details as if narrating the opening lines of a novel. Then he said he was pursuing a new lead in the case.
Who stole the Torahs? Why? And what would it take to get them back? The mystery was irresistible — a tale of looted manuscripts and an ancient tribe’s quest to retrieve them. I began to shadow Benny on his mission.
Photos: Tanya Habjouqa/NOOR Images for NPR and Claire Harbage/NPR
Reporting: Daniel Estrin/NPR
izzy806
germansingergirl
prguitarman
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
