Are the Samaritans descendants of Israel's lost tribes, and so rightfully considered Israelites?

Judah was the were the 2 southern tribes, thus called Jews.The Samaritans are connected to the 10 northern tribes so how can Samaritans be considered Jews. It is a similar belief, but still different.Christian & Islamic faiths are also Abrahamic but they are not considered Jewish, especially in the latter case.

Hebrew was a religious language.It was not an everyday language I have led to believe.The Hebrew language was, said to be revived, as it's everyday use was not common in Palastine after the early formation of Israel.Aramaic languages were spoken there, perhaps this was historically mostly the case.Perhaps a variety of languages were spoken within present day Israel, the same as most countries historically.If this was the case perhaps Samaritans did not use Hebrew as an everyday language as well, using a dialect of Hebrew as a religious ceremonial language only.

This question is based on an "unforced error", due perhaps to a poor translation of Scripture¹: Here is the relevant text from the Book of Ezra, Chapter 4, as I have translated it directly from the biblical Hebrew, which I know fluently, along with the help of some of the classical commentators and reliable modern translations to smooth the language:

• 1) The enemies of Judah and Benjamin heard that the people of the Exile (the Jews of the Babylonian Exile, now under Cyrus's rule) were building a Sanctuary for Y-H, God of Yisroel.
• 2) They approached Zerubabbel and the Chiefs of the Families and said to them, "Let us build with you, for like you, we will seek your God; it is to Him that we have been sacrificing since the days of Esar-haddon, king of Assyria, who brought us up here."
• 3) But Zerubabbel, along with Yeshua and the rest of the family chieftains of Yisroel said to them, "It is not for you to build with us a House for our God; instead we, as a group, will build it for Y-H, God of Yisroel, as King Cyrus, King of Persia has commanded us."

So:

We will put aside the mistake of the questioner in attributing the refusal to build the Temple with "enemies of Judah and Benjamin" to Ezra², when it was in fact the act of Zerubabbel - Cyrus's Jewish governer of the territory and the "Chiefs of the Families of Yisroel", and instead focus on this passage:

since the days of Esar-haddon, king of Assyria, who brought us up here.

Here, those who requested permission from Zerubabbel explicitely refer to themselves as Assyrians who were transported there: Explicitely not descendants of the Tribes of Yisroel.

That is the reason their request was rejected, and also why they are referred to as "enemies of Judah and Benjamin" in verse 1, a term that would not be used with respect to descendants of the Ten Tribes: It was not Zerubabbel who determined that they were not from the Ten Tribes - it was by their own admission. Thus, Zerubabbel and company continue:

instead we, together as a group, will build it to Y-H, God of Yisroel, as King Cyrus, King of Persia has commanded us

That is, Cyrus commanded the Jews who were under his jurisdiction - "we, as a group" - to build the House of God - it was not an order to be executed by the Assyrians.

Since the Samaritans themselves claim to be descendants of the original Ten Tribes, the reference to this account in the Book of Ezra has no bearing whatsoever on their claims.

As other answers have aptly demonstrated, there was at the time a mixture of peoples in the former Kingdom of Yisroel, some descended from Ten Tribes, including perhaps the contemporary Samaritans, and others who were Assyrians.

Be that is it may, the verses in Ezra under examination refer explicitly to Assyrians, and are irrelevant to the Samaritans' claims, so the question as stated, based on an alleged scriptural account of rejection of the contemporary Samaritans by "Erza" (Zerubabbel) is moot.

_{¹Most translations of the Bible (perhaps anything later than the Septuagint) tend to be notoriously inaccurate, sometimes by intent, sometimes by mistake. I am not familiar with NT sources. As far as Hebrew sources go, I can recommend two noteworthy and quite accurate, well annotated translations: Tanach the Stone edition and The Living Torah : The Five Books of Moses and the Haftarot - A New Translation Based on Traditional Jewish Sources, with notes, introduction, maps. One should not make assumptions about what the Bible actually says without consulting sources as close to the original as possible.}

_{² Erza the scribe compiled, wrote and edited parts of the Book of Ezra-Nechemiah}

In Jewish tradition, the Lost Tribes are not "lost" in the sense that your car keys might get lost. They are "lost" in the sense that a dead friend is "lost". What happened was that after Israel split into two countries, the Assyrians invaded the northern one in 740 BC and carted off the balance of the population (after the war) to Assyria as slaves. This population was never allowed to return, and after several generations became completely assimilated into the population and culture of Assyria. As far as the Jews are concerned, those people are totally lost to them.

However, there is another story. According the the Samaratans themselves, not everyone was carried off, and they are those folk's descendents. Genetic Studies don't refute the Samaratan's story.

The Assyrian accounting of things was that they deported the entire population, and repopulated the land with other people. This essentially matches the Jewish account.

Linguistically, the Samaratans definitely spoke a very closely related language to Hebrew. There doesn't seem to be much research looking into when the two diverged (I'm a great believer in language as a marker of culture, so for me this would be decisive).

Yes, the Samaritans are Israelites.

Samaria, the Samaritan kingdom, is in this context the Kingdom of Israel, i.e. the northern part of the Biblical United Kingdom of David and Solomon. The Samaritans, and other Jewish groups living in the Kingdom of Israel are listed as Israelites and descendants of Abraham in the Bible.

However, here is the Judean account from the Book of Kings of the the Assyrian rule over Samaria:

In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried Israel away unto Assyria, and placed them in Halah, and in Habor, on the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.

...

And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Avva, and from Hamath and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel; and they possessed Samaria, and dwelt in the cities thereof.

In other words, it is claimed that during the Assyrian period, all of the people of the Kingdom of Israel were replaced with people not descended from Abraham, and that the Samaritans later acquired the Jewish religion from the Kingdom of Judah.

The account of the Assyrian King Sargon in the Nimrud prism at first glance seems to agree:

I repopulated Samerina more than before. I brought into it people from countries conquered by my hands. I appointed my eunuch as governor over them. And I counted them as Assyrians.

However the prism also says that 27,290 persons were deported, and numbers in texts such as the prism, written to extol the power and might of a king, tend to be inflated. Still, 27,290 represents only a small fraction of the apparent population of The Kingdom of Israel at that time.

As such, the Nimrud prism does not support the claim that the people were replaced by foreigners. Instead it's likely that only the aristocracy was deported and replaced by people from other lands, in a "divide and conquer" style replacement.

This is typical of all ancient claims of one people coming in and replacing another, from the Exodus, to the claims of Anglo-Saxons invading England. Neither genetics not archeology tends to support these claims. There are seldom any cultural changes in the archeology, and the genetic influences are generally only in a small percentage of the population. This is true also for the Assyrian invasion, where there is continuity in occupation of the sites before and after the Assyrian invasion. [ref]

So there is truth in both accounts: People were deported, and other people brought in. But the claim that all of the people were replaced by foreigners is supported neither by the Assyrian accounts nor the archeology. Undoubtedly the vast majority of the people living in The Kingdom of Israel before the Assyrians arrived remained there, and the Samaritans therefore have as a good a claim to be Israelites as mainstream Jews do. This is also supported by genetic studies indicating that the Samaritans have a closer paternal genetic relationship to other Jews, than to non-Jewish middle eastern peoples..

However, when it comes to the question of whether the Samaritans are in fact descendants from one of the twelve tribes of Israel, this claim is much harder to verify, for the simple reason that we can't verify the existence of these twelve tribes.

It is claimed that Israel and Judah was made up of twelve tribes and that these tribes were united into one kingdom sometime before 1000BC, a kingdom that then was split up into Israel and Judah after the death of Solomon. But there is no way to verify this. The texts that claim this are written many hundreds of years after the claimed events took place, and there is no cultural difference between these tribes that is detectable in archeology. Hence, discussing if the Samaritans are descended from one of these tribes makes little sense.