The Samaritans were once numerous. Estimates for the Roman and early Byzantine periods run into the hundreds of thousands, with communities across the eastern Mediterranean and a temple on Gerizim that was destroyed in the second century BCE. A series of revolts against Byzantine rule in the fifth and sixth centuries of the common era, and the reprisals that followed them, broke the community, and conversion and pressure reduced it further under later regimes.
By the early twentieth century there were around a hundred and fifty Samaritans left, which is as close to extinction as a religion can come and still continue. The community survived and grew, and the survey published by the Israelite Samaritan Information Institute counts something over eight hundred people today, living in two places: Kiryat Luza on Mount Gerizim above Nablus, and Holon near Tel Aviv.
That division is also a political situation. Samaritans hold both Israeli and Palestinian documents, take part in both societies, and have generally sought to stand outside the conflict between them. The demographic problem of a community this small is acute, and the priesthood, which traces itself through an unbroken line, is maintained within it. The atlas records the Samaritans as a living religion and a living people rather than as a survival.