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Samaritanism is the religion practiced by the Samaritan people. Like Judaism, it claims to be descended from ancient Israelite religion. It is closely related to Judaism in that it accepts the Torah as its holy book, though there are differences in the version accepted. Samaritans consider Jewish thinkers after the Torah as having been led astray while they themselves stayed to the true religion. Their temple was at Mount Gerizim in Nablus, not Jerusalem. Very few followers remain today: about 705 living in Mount Gerizim and Holon.
One theory states that when the Assyrian Empire conquered ancient Israel, it deported the upper classes of the Israelites to Assyria, replacing them with settlers from other parts of the Assyrian Empire. The lower classes and the settlers intermarried and merged into one community. Some modern scholars think that the influence of the non-Israelite settlers was exaggerated in the Bible for propaganda reasons, namely to be able to consider the Samaritans as heathens with good conscience. Centuries later, the descendants of those Judeans who were in turn exiled to Babylon in 586 BC were permitted to return, and many did. The Jews who had returned to the Land of Israel refused to recognize the descendants of the lower class Israelites who had remained as legitimate Jews, (officially) due to their intermarriage and merger with non-Jewish settlers, even though they largely followed the same religion that the Jews had followed before the exile, but which would have seen considerable reforms during the exile. It is believed that these descendants are the ancestors of the Samaritans.
This theory is problematic because then the people remaining in Israel would vastly outnumber those who returned, and there are no indications of this in either the Bible or in secular history.
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