To get back to the actual subject, the Samaritans, i know that the Jewish position is that the Samaritans are the descendants of foreigners brought in by the Assyrians to repopulate Samaria (Israel) after the Assyrian conquest. The Samaritans themselves believe they are the descendants of the original population of Samaria. At the time of Christ the Samaritans made up most of the people of the territory of the former northern kingdom. As we know from the New Testament the Jews did not associate with the Samaritans, and they were not exiled from the Holy Land by the Romans after the two Jewish Revolts. It appears that, in general, the Samaritans were less successful than the Christians in resisting conversion to Islam after the Muslim conquest. Now there are only about 700 of them left.
So what do you think about their origin?
The synagogue is a phenomenon of rabbinical Judaism, which gestated during the Babylonian exile when there was no access to the Temple, and not many centuries later became more systematized after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple.
The old Samarians were exiled by the Assyrians when they uprooted the Ten Lost Tribes; they had been a polyglot bunch, perhaps a little more cosmopolitan than the Hebrews affiliated with the twelve (and a half) tribes (Twelve and a Half might make a good TV show name), intermarried with and converted from other groups who came to stay.
I don’t doubt that, if it were available, there would be a trail of nuclear DNA connecting the Samaritans with the Samarians, and both with the Tribes. The Assyrians nearly completely depopulated the old kingdom, missing some of them during the roundup, and they probably assimilated into the two remaining tribes and/or the surrounding groups or immigrants crowding in. The Samarians were the ancestors of the Samaritans, but of course with some additional leavening.
http://www.livius.org/saa-san/samaria/samaritans.htm
This is interesting, the Samaritans accept the Pentateuch (a version of their own), and revere Mt Gerizim rather than Mt Zion; their variant views were a political creation from the time when the kingdom was divided.
When the Jews returned from Babylonian Exile (and a great many didn’t want to go back) they were clearing the burned and broken masonry and whatnot from the site of the Temple, and found intact a book of Scripture that had been lost and miraculously survived the fire.
The Levites have left a trail throughout the modern world, the kohen genes, which survived the Assyrian exile, a trail that leads through the area north of the Black Sea and the Ashkenazy Jews (most modern Jews, IOW), the Pushtun in Afghanistan, among the Lemba in Africa, and not sure about this, but probably the kohen community of Tunisia, which went into exile near the then-boom-town of Carthage (when it was fairly new). The Islamofascists have actually tried to kill them off with car bombs and whatnot.