Sicarii

Sicarii is a term applied, in the decades preceding the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, to an extremist splinter group of the Jewish Zealots, who attempted to expel the Romans and their partisans from the Roman province of Judea. The Sicarii carried sicae, or small daggers, concealed in their cloaks, hence their name. At public gatherings, they pulled out these daggers to attack Romans or Roman sympathizers, blending into the crowd after the deed to escape detection. They were one of the earliest forms of an organized assassination society or cloak and daggers, predating the Middle Eastern assassins and Japanese ninjas by centuries.

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 Jewish 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 Jewish–Roman 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 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. The zealots, sicarii and other prominent revolutionaries joined forces to finally attack and liberate Jerusalem in 66 AD. For a small time, they manage to repel Roman counter-attacks and sieges, but the constant bickering and lack of leadership led the groups to disentigrate, before the Romans finally took over and destroyed the whole city.

Their leaders, including Menahem ben Yehuda and Eleazar ben Ya'ir 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 fortress of Masada and slaughtered a Roman garrison there. Eleazar 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.