Sicarii (Latin plural of Sicarius 'dagger-men' or later contract-killer, Hebrew סיקריקיס) is a term applied, in the decades immediately preceding the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, (probably) to an extremist splinter group[1] of the Jewish Zealots, who attempted to expel the Romans and their partisans from Judea using concealed daggers (sicae).[2]
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"When Albinus reached the city of Jerusalem,[3] 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".[4]
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. 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 comrades.
At the beginning of the Jewish Revolt of 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 CE, when the Romans took the fortress and, according to Josephus, found that most of its defenders had committed suicide rather than surrender.[5]
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:
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: the Hebrew meaning relates much more closely to the presumed Aramaic of the period which is the actual language in which Judas Iscariot had his name. In Hebrew, Judas is rendered as "Ish-Kerayot," making him a Jew from the townships or " ... from the district". "Judas" (like the Hebrew "Judah") refers to Judean identity, either membership in the state of Judea of the Graeco-Roman period or the Jewish people more generally. Many scholars accept this meaning, pointing out that it indicates that Judas was from the start "the representative Jew" who betrayed Jesus in the Gospel dramatization of events, and we may not have in him an actual person or perhaps only do not know his actual name. It would have been odd to give a person a defamatory name (in the Greek or Latin Gospels) that was not in the native tongue Aramaic, when there were words in that tongue that could mean the same. However, Robert Eisenman (Eisenman p 179) is amongst those scholars today who persist in identifying him instead as "Judas the Sicarios". He offers as justification that most of the consonants and vowels tally – in Josephus, Sicarioi/Sicariōn; in the New Testament Iscariot.
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 hit men. In Italian, it means "hired killer, hired assassin, cutthroat".