Sicarii

For other uses, see Sicarius.

Sicarii (Latin plural of Sicarius 'dagger-' or later contract- killer) is a term applied, in the decades immediately preceding the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, (probably) to an extremist splinter group of the Jewish Zealots, who attempted to expel the Romans and their partisans from Judea.

History

"When Albinus reached the city of Jerusalem, he bent every effort and made every provision to ensure peace in the land by exterminating most of the Sicarii."

— Josephus, Jewish Antiquities (xx.208)

The Sicarii used stealth tactics to obtain their objective. Under their cloaks they concealed sicae, or small daggers, from which they received their name. At popular assemblies, particularly during the pilgrimage to the Temple Mount, they stabbed their enemies (Romans or Roman sympathizers, Herodians, and wealthy Jews comfortable with Roman rule), lamenting ostentatiously after the deed to blend into the crowd to escape detection. Literally, Sicarii meant "dagger-men".

The victims of the Sicarii included Jonathan the High Priest, though it is possible that his murder was orchestrated by the Roman governor Felix. Some of their murders were met with severe retaliation by the Romans on the entire Jewish population of the country. On some occasions, they could be bribed to spare their intended victims. As with Barabbas, even convicted Sicarii were occasionally released on promising to spare their opponents, though there is no evidence for this practice outside the Gospels, which are largely in accord on this point. Once, Josephus relates, after kidnapping the secretary of Eleazar, governor of the Temple precincts, they agreed to release him in exchange for ten of their captured comrades.

At the beginning of the Jewish Revolt (66 AD), 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 to war. 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 Jair, Eleazar ben Ya'ir, and Simon Bar Giora, were important figures in the war, and Eleazar ben Ya'ir eventually succeeded in escaping the Roman onslaught. Together with a small group of followers, he made his way to the abandoned fortress of Masada where he continued his resistance to the Romans until 73 AD, when the Romans took the fortress and, according to Josephus, found that most of its defenders had committed suicide rather than surrender.

Masada, looking towards the Dead Sea.

In Josephus' Jewish War (vii), after the fall of the Temple in 70 AD, the sicarii became the dominant revolutionary Jewish 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:

"Some of the faction of the Sicarion...not content with having saved themselves, again embarked on new revolutionary scheming, persuading those that received them there to assert their freedom, to esteem the Romans as no better than themselves and to look upon God as their only Lord and Master" (quoted by Eisenman, p 180).

In the name of Judas Iscariot, the apostle who betrayed Jesus, the epithet "Iscariot" is read by some scholars as a Hellenized transformation, by the simplest metathesis, of sicarius. The suffix "-ote" denotes membership or belonging to - in this case to the sicarii. This meaning is lost when the Greek Gospels are translated into modern Hebrew: Judas is rendered as "Ish-Kerayot," making him a man from the townships. Robert Eisenman presents the general view of secular historians (Eisenman p 179) in identifying him instead as "Judas the Sicarios". Most of the consonants and vowels tally—in Josephus, Sicarioi/Sicariōn; in the New Testament Iscariot.

Modernity and comparisons

Today there are extremists of somewhat similar behavior, who are calling themselves by the same name.

Sicarii had obvious parallels to a much later phenomenon, the medieval Hashshashin, Muslim fanatics whose talent for murders inspired the term assassin. The assassins, like the Sicarii, were notoriously willing to butcher coreligionists who didn't back their policies. Like the fanatical Masada holdouts, the Assassins built mountain fortresses in desolate areas to defend themselves against military enemies. They also used the dagger almost exclusively to carry out assassinations.

A more overt reference to Sicarii occurred in Colombia since the 1980s. Sicarios, professional hit men adept at assassinating, kidnapping, bombing, and theft, gradually became a class of their own in organized crime in Colombia. Described by Mark Bowden in his investigative work Killing Pablo, the sicarios played a key role in the wave of violence against police and authorities during the early 1990s campaign by the government to capture and extradite fugitive drug lord Pablo Escobar and other partners in the Medellin cocaine cartel. Unlike their ancient namesake, sicarios have never had an ideological underpinning. Perhaps the only cause that they were attributed to was the opposition to extradition of Colombian criminals. Though Escobar employed sicarios to eliminate his enemies, these assassins were active more as independent individuals or gangs than loyal followers of a leader, and there were plenty of sicarios willing to serve the rival Cali cartel. Nevertheless, many died in combat against police forces, indicating that they were not all inclined to bend to the wind. Indeed, long before Escobar's time, Colombia in particular had a long legacy of professional kidnappers (secuestradores) and murderers, whom he emulated.

In Spanish the word 'sicario' is used to refer to both killers who have specific targets and underling hitmen. In Italian, it means "hired killer, hired assassin, cutthroat".

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Richard Gottheil and Samuel Krauss (1901–1906). "Sicarii". In Singer, Isidore; et al. (eds.). The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.
• Robert Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1997 (Viking) ISBN 014025773X

See also

• Hashshashin
• Josephus
• Judas Iscariot