The Arab, the Jewish, and the Ukrainian Marriage: Picking Spouses in the Samaritan Community

In this article, I present a study of the social life of the Samaritans, a community that is usually studied for its Bible and its role in the history of the People of Israel. The discussion sets off with a view to the modern practice of marriage between Samaritan men and women from different religions, which has become necessary due to the community's long-standing demographic predicament, and which predominantly involves spouses with Israeli-Jewish and Ukrainian-Christian backgrounds. From there, the focus shifts to the basic social fabric within which those developments unfold: using approaches from anthropological theory and method, I offer a treatment of the Samaritan family, a powerful institution rooted in notions of patrilineal descent and preferably perpetuated by consanguineous marriage. Subsequently, three selected case studies illustrate the ways in which Samaritan families may deal with the challenge of reproduction under the conditions of a notoriously restricted marriage market: the savvy matching of traditional patterns of consanguinity with modern transboundary alliances allows the lineages to exploit their entire reproductive potential in an unprecedented manner and thus contributes vitally to the general population growth the Samaritans have enjoyed over the past century. Finally, I address the fears of loss of identity and control caused by the outwardly successful "mixed marriages" and close with a brief outlook on the possible future of the Samaritan tradition in face of the repeated transgressions of ethnic boundaries represented by those unions.