This schismatic and controversial sect broke with “normative” Judaism more than two thousand years ago. The Samaritans are not strictly speaking a Jewish sect. They claim to be a remnant of an ancient people, descendants of the northern kingdom of Israel, Ephraim, Menashe and Levi; they refer to themselves as Hebrews and Israelites, and not as Judeans or Jews.

Among the topics covered in this informal lecture: • Samaritan, rabbinic and dispassionate accounts of the rise of Samaritanism • The primacy of Mt. Gerizim and the pascal sacrifice in Samaritan religion • Differences between the Masoretic and Samaritan Torahs • Unique beliefs and customs of the Samaritans • The Talmudic sages on the status of the Samaritans • How the Samaritans went from being more than a million strong in the early centuries CE to less than 800 today • A Palestinian and Samaritan connection?: Revelations from DNA studies • A very brief discussion of two other schismatic communities: the Jewish Mercenaries of Elephantine, Egypt (c. 400 BCE), and the Karaites Jews

Educator, writer, and Yiddish translator, Ken Blady, was born in Paris, France, and grew up in Chassidic Brooklyn, where he attended yeshiva and rabbinical seminary. A San Francisco Bay Area resident since 1972, Ken has a B.A. in History from UC Berkeley, an M.A. in Clinical Counseling from CS University, East Bay, and doctoral work in Integral Counseling at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He is the author of "Jewish Communities in Exotic Places,” and author, editor, and translator of ten published works. As a popular lecturer on Jewish history and Yiddish language themes, Ken has been featured on radio and T.V. talk shows and has been a professor at a variety of adult educational institutions.