“I’m a connoisseur. Thank you for bringing me.”

“I knew you’d be intrigued, as a history teacher who’s knowledgeable about all elements of Palestinian culture.” Sami sucked in some smoke. “They are part of Palestinian culture, aren’t they?”

“The Samaritans? They’ve been here longer than we have, Sami. They claim to be descended from some biblical Israelites who remained in this area when their brethren were exiled to Babylon. In a way, they’re Palestinians and Jews and neither, all at the same time.”

Sami pulled over and peered out of the window. “I think it’s in here,” he said.

Omar Yussef raised himself out of the passenger seat with a grunt. His back ached after the long ride from Bethlehem the previous day, squashed into a taxi with his wife, his granddaughter and two of his sons. To bypass the security checks around Jerusalem, they had taken the desert backroads. He was fifty-seven and unfit, so the bumpy ride and the heat had exhausted him.

On the sidewalk, Omar Yussef straightened his spine. He pushed his remaining hair into place with his palm and nudged his gold-framed glasses to the bridge of his nose with the tip of his index finger.

He looked up a walkway of cracked steps between two apartment buildings, bright green weeds cutting through the polished stone paving, creeping over the railings at each side of the path. The door of the Samaritan synagogue, set forty yards back from the road, was a tasteless metal panel painted brown to look like wood. Seven bulbous lights on long, upright stems surmounted the stone canopy at the entrance. The building was a low square faced in the same limestone as the apartment blocks around it. Its basement level was painted pink.

“I thought it would be older than this,” Sami said. He stamped out his cigarette and set off up the steps.

“They had a much older synagogue down in the casbah,” Omar Yussef said, “but they left the old town fifty years ago, because their Muslim neighbors wouldn’t sell them land to expand their homes as their community grew. So they moved up here.”