Ancient Israelites. Tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Levi. The Israelite Samaritans are a tiny ancient religious sect which follows the Torah (the Five Books of Moses), but does no hold any other part of the Hebrew Bible to be sacred. The do not believe Jerusalem to be holy either. For them, the Holy Mountain of God is Mt. Gerizim above Shechem (Nablus), where the Israelites were commanded to sacrifice upon entering the Land of Canaan. The Samaritans claim to be descended from the Israelite Tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Levi. According to Samaritan Law and their interpretation of the Torah, Samaritans were forbidden from marrying non-Israelites, and unlike Jews, they did not accept any converts until 1924. Jews too were forbidden according to Jewish Law from marrying Samaritans. All Samaritans today have only four surviving Y lineages. (A fifth, from the Tribe of Benjamin, died out in 1912). According to the ancient Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, many Samaritans are descended from Jews of Jerusalem who left and moved northward for religious reasons before the time of Alexander the Great in 338 BCE. Nehemiah 11: http://niv.scripturetext.com/ezra/10.htm Josephus Antiquities chapter 11: http://old.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0146&query=section%3D%23828 This would mean that the Y lineages of the Samaritans could be a tiny random sample of the Y lineages present among Ancient Jews in the Second Temple, and earlier. The Bible itself claims that the Samaritan Levites are descended from actual Ancient Israelite Levites. Any Y matches between Jews and Samaritans within about 3200 years are very likely to date to Ancient Israel. At least two of the four Samaritan Y lineages (L210/L227 and V22) must have originated west of the Euphrates, the ancient Levant, and so are extremely likely to have been present among the Ancient Israelites. We have yet to determine the closest matches of the other two (L147* and J2a4*). The only surviving Samaritan mtDNA lineages are in haplogroups T2a1 and U7a1. No one has every gotten a full mitochondrial sequence on these two haplotypes. Anyone who has an interest in ancient Jewish or Israelite DNA is invited to contribute to the Project Fund to help pay for the most through possible testing of these four samples. What we need for each of these right now: 1. Y-111 STRs 2. All "advanced" palindromic STRs, particularly DYF399S1 3. WOTY, phase 1 and phase 2 4. Full mitochondrial sequences for the three individuals with Samaritan grandmothers 5. Family Finder for autosomal matching particularly for the 3 individuals who have 4 Samaritan grandparents And if anyone is exceptionally generous, and interested in ancient Semitic DNA: Please help pay for full Y DNA Sequence for each of these. There are many Y-DNA projects that claim to be about Jews, Israelites, Hebrews and Semites, and if some of the people in each of these projects individually contributed a small amount, there would be enough to pay for full Y sequences at FTDNA.