Rabbi Yishmael ben Yose, the son of the great Galilean sage Rabbi Yose, was walking on pilgrimage toward Jerusalem when a Samaritan stopped him on the road near Mount Gerizim. The Samaritan tried to persuade him that Mount Gerizim, not Jerusalem, was the true holy mountain of Israel.
Rabbi Yishmael did not argue theology. He went straight for the history. "You are still hankering," he told the Samaritan, "after the idols that Jacob buried at the foot of Mount Shechem."
The reference was devastating. When Jacob returned to the land of Canaan after twenty years with Laban, the Torah records that he commanded his household to get rid of every foreign god they had brought with them. And Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him: Put away the foreign gods that are among you, and purify yourselves, and change your garments (Genesis 35:2). They gathered up every idol, every amulet, every pagan earring. And they gave to Jacob all the foreign gods that were in their hand and the rings that were in their ears, and Jacob hid them under the terebinth which was by Shechem (Genesis 35:4).
Rabbi Yishmael's point was unmistakable. The Samaritans had built their temple and their entire tradition on the very mountain where Jacob had buried the garbage of idolatry. Their sacred ground, in the Rabbi's reading, was contaminated not by accident but by geography — the foreign gods were literally under their feet. Jerusalem, by contrast, had been chosen precisely because David purified its threshing floor. The two mountains were not competing holy sites. One had been made holy by burial of truth; the other, by burial of falsehood.
The exchange, preserved as exemplum no. 182 in Moses Gaster's 1924 The Exempla of the Rabbis, captures the confidence of the early Rabbis about the singular status of Yerushalayim. Their argument was never mystical. It was textual. They read Torah like archaeologists: point by point, pile by pile, until the question of where the real holy ground lay answered itself.