ABSTRACT
One Friday I was reading, with increased interest, an intriguing paper by David Rapoport (1984) in which he compared three groups of assassins: the Thugs in India, the Islamic Assassins and the Jewish Zealots-Sicarii. The Sicarii was a group of Jews which flourished during the time of the Jewish “Great Revolt” against the Romans (66-73 A.D.). They advocated the use of assassinations and terror, and put these tactics into practice. It is probably the only known Jewish group up until 1940, which had such an explicit ideological commitment, resulting in a corresponding practice. It does not take much to consider the Sicarii a “bunch of assassins.” One can imagine my amazement, indeed indignation, at reading Rapoport’s
statement that this “bunch of assassins” perished on top of Masada. I still vividly remember reading this and skeptically thinking: “here is another American who wants to tell me, the Israeli, what happened on Masada.” After all, I “knew” what happened on Masada. I learned it in school, in the armyI climbed to the top of Masada. I knew that there was a group of Jewish freedom fighters who fled Jerusalem, after its destruction by the Roman Imperial Army in 70 A.D., to Masada. There, they-the few-staged a last-stand battle against the mighty Roman army. When the Romans were about to conquer the fortress, all these heroic Jewish freedom fighters chose to commit collective suicide rather than surrender to Rome and become slaves or die in some strange and painful ways (e.g. in the arena). However, to think that these Jewish freedom fighters were in fact a group of detested assassins? “Ah,” I thought, “this is a bunch of bull.” However, trained as a social scientist, I became very curious as to how Rapoport could possibly have made such an obvious mistake? Checking his references, I realized that his major source was Josephus Flavius, who is considered the main historical source concerning the period.
