Article of the Month - March 2023
 “The Rise and Fall of a Peripheral People? Samaritans and the Discourse of Late Antique Disaster,”
(Matthew J. Chalmers: History, Washington and Lee University)

Matthew J. Chalmers, "The Rise and Fall of a Peripheral People? Samaritans and the Discourse of Late Antique Disaster," Studies in Late Antiquity 6 (2022), 217–47.

Obtain a copy by contacting the author.

Keywords: Samaritans • Late Antiquity • historiography • ethnicity • identity • disaster • narrative

Abstract:
This article treats the intersection of a “peripheral people”—specifically Samaritan Israelites—with scholarly narratives of disaster concerning Late Antiquity. A disaster is not so much a one-off event as an ongoing series of collective experiences, patterned and repatterned in the movements of bodies and through shared—if unstable— narrative. This article, leaning into this phenomenological complexity, attends to the shared discourse of disaster as a practice of scholarly fields concerned with the study of Late Antiquity. I highlight a scholarly tendency to rely on disaster and its related tropes as it scripts the history of a group often classified as peripheral: Samaritan Israelites.
In the case of the Samaritans, rich and varied evidence from Late Antiquity is compressed into a dominant portrayal of a group set on a collision course with the Roman Empire. Examining how this compression happens equips us to better identify the powers of historiographical curation, especially with respect to groups perceived as historical (and/ or present) minorities, in shaping narratives. In this article, I ask both a historical question— when and whether disaster struck—and a historiographical one— what does it mean for disaster to provide us with a historiographical vocabulary at all, and to which groups do we tend to apply it?

Nomination Statement:
This is a smart methodological inquiry into a "scholarly tendency" (and its consequences) to rely on disaster discourse and its tropes to write historically about peripheral peoples, in this case the Samaritans. It reminds scholars that tendentious premodern discourses have shaped contemporary historiography more than is often acknowledged or even realized. This article poses a range of important questions about the responsibility of historians as readers and in the treatment of their subjects.

Authors’ Comment:
This article grew from a presentation at Shifting Frontiers XIII at Claremont McKenna back in 2019. It took the theme of the conference, disaster, as a way to theorize what a thematic approach to late antiquity can gain - and what it risks. The article continues that theorization, noticing the uneven effects of modern historiographical discourses about disaster when brought to bear on a peripheralized group in Late Ancient Studies, Samaritan Israelites. Samaritan Israelites, and the insights which attention to them bring, have been the focus of much of my work so far, including my in-progress book. Broadly, my research modifies our understanding of the formation of Christian and Jewish religious identity, very commonly represented as a bifurcated competition over the legacy of Israel, by attention to the continuous participation of Samaritans in the textual and material strategies that made Judaism and Christianity into (what we call) religions. I argue that ongoing and fruitful revision of our understanding of premodern religious identity, in multiple disciplines, must proceed not only in terms of how we think premodern religious diversity worked but in terms of who we care to spend our time studying.

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See the other Articles of the Month here.