The Israelites Who Sacrifice Sheep on Mount Gerizim

Just before sundown on the eve of their Passover, men in white robes lead lambs to a stone-lined pit at Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim. A high priest reads from a scroll. The throats are cut, the carcasses scalded in iron cauldrons, and the meat is roasted overnight on long wooden spits inside a baking oven, eaten before dawn with bitter herbs and unleavened bread. About 850 people in the world still do this. They are the Samaritans, and they have done it on this mountain for at least 2,500 years.

Their quarrel with mainstream Judaism is older than the Talmud. They accept only the five books of the Torah, written in a script that descends directly from old Hebrew rather than the Aramaic-derived square letters Jews adopted in the Babylonian exile. Their Torah locates the temple on Gerizim, near present-day Nablus, not on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem. The two communities have argued the textual variants for two millennia.

The demographic story is the part that surprises people. Late Ottoman taxes, plague, and pressure to convert ground them down to roughly 100 souls in the 19th century. They survived by tightening into two villages and accepting brides from a small number of approved Jewish families to escape a genetic dead end. The 2024 census put them around 900, almost evenly split between Kiryat Luza in the West Bank and Holon, just south of Tel Aviv.

The sacrifice happens whether the news cameras come or not.