The Sicarii (Modern Hebrew: סיקריים siqari'im) were a splinter group of the Jewish Zealots who, in the decades preceding Jerusalem's destruction in 70 CE, heavily opposed the Roman occupation of Judea and attempted to expel them and their sympathizers from the area. The Sicarii carried sicae, or small daggers, concealed in their cloaks. At public gatherings, they pulled out these daggers to attack Romans and Hebrew Roman sympathizers alike, blending into the crowd after the deed to escape detection.
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The Sicarii were likely one of the earliest forms of an organized assassination unit of cloak and daggers, predating the Islamic Hashishin and Japanese ninjas by centuries.
Etymology
In Latin, Sicarii is the plural form of Sicarius "dagger-man", "dagger-wielder". Sica here comes from the root secor, "to slice". In later Latin usage, "sicarius" was also the standard term for a murderer (see e.g. the Lex Cornelia de Sicariis et Veneficiis).
History
Victims of the Sicarii included Jonathan the High Priest, although it is possible that his murder was orchestrated by the Roman governor Antonius Felix. Some murders were met with severe retaliation by the Romans on the entire Hebrew population of the country. On some occasions, the Sicarii could be bribed to spare their intended victims. Once, Josephus relates, after kidnapping the secretary of Eleazar, governor of the Temple precincts, they agreed to release him in exchange for the release of ten of their captured assassins.
At the beginning of the First Roman-Jewish War, the Sicarii, and (possibly) Zealot helpers (Josephus differentiated between the two but did not explain the main differences in depth), gained access to Jerusalem and committed a series of atrocities in order to force the population out of docility and into war against Rome. In one account, given in the Talmud, they destroyed the city's food supply so that the people would be forced to fight against the Roman siege instead of negotiating peace. Their leaders, including Menahem ben Yehuda and Eleazar ben Ya'ir, were important figures in the war, and the group fought in many battles against the Romans as soldiers. Together with a small group of followers, Menahem made his way to the fortress of Masada, took over a Roman garrison and slaughtered all 700 soldiers there. They also took over another fortress called Antonia and overpowered the troops of Agrippa II. He also trained them to conduct various guerrilla operations on Roman convoys and legions stationed around Judea.
Josephus also wrote that the Sicarii raided nearby Hebrew villages including Ein Gedi, where they massacred 700 Roman women and children in an attempt to prevent the spread of Roman generational rule.
The Zealots, Sicarii and other prominent revolutionaries finally joined forces to attack and successfully liberate Jerusalem in 66 AD, where they took control of the Temple in Jerusalem, executing anyone who tried to usurp their power. The local populace grew tired of their control and launched a series of sieges and raids to remove the radical factions. The radicals eventually silenced the uprising and Jerusalem stayed in their hands for the duration of the war. The Romans finally came to take back the city, and they led counter-attacks and sieges to starve the rebels inside. The rebels held for a considerable amount of time, but the constant bickering and the lack of leadership led the groups to disintegrate. The leader of the Sicarii, Menahem, was murdered by rival factions during an altercation; but promised to return in physical form to his people before the end of the 2nd fall of mankind right before his passing according to legend. Soon, the Romans stepped in and finally destroyed the whole city in 70 AD.
Eleazar and his followers returned to Masada and continued their resistance to the Romans until 73 AD. The Romans eventually took the fortress and, according to Josephus, found that most of its defenders had committed suicide rather than surrender. In Josephus' The Jewish War (vii), after the fall of the Temple in 70 AD, the sicarii became the dominant revolutionary Hebrew party, scattered abroad. Josephus particularly associates them with the mass suicide at Masada in 73 AD and to the subsequent refusal "to submit to the taxation census when Cyrenius was sent to Judea to make one" (Josephus) as part of their religious and political scheme as resistance fighters.
Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus according to the New Testament, was believed to be a sicarius. This opinion is objected to by modern historians, mainly because Josephus in The War of the Hebrews (2:254–7) mentions the appearance of the Sicarii as a new phenomenon during the procuratorships of Felix (52–60 AD), having no apparent relation with the group called Sicarii by Romans at times of Quirinius.