Abū l-Ḥasan al-Ṣūrī’s Treatise on the qibla, written in the 1030s C.E., and its Qaraite rebuttal, most likely written over the course of the following decade, preserve the most substantial and extensive surviving account of the centuries-old debate between Jews and Samaritans about the chosen place, the permanent location of the sanctuary and the status of Jewish prophets after Moses. In Jewish legal and exegetical literature, Samaritans are regularly brought up as straw men in theological, halakhic and polemical contexts, most conspicuously in the section on prayer of legal codes which quite naturally broaches the subject of the qibla. However, all these cursory considerations of Samaritan practices, beliefs, and doctrines in Jewish literature dwarf in comparison to the depth of engagement and the intricacy of argument that comes to the fore in the two treatises at hand.