Each year the Israeli Defense Forces Armoured Unit holds a ceremony at the ruins of Masada, crying out “Masada will never fall again.”  The crumbling fortress, and the Zealots who committed mass suicide rather than face Roman occupation, have become a powerful symbol of Jewish resistance and heroism in the face of overwhelming odds.  As is common with symbols, it has become difficult to tell where truth ends and mythology begins.  

Judea was always a hotbed of insurrection against the Romans, and before them the Greeks.   The Maccabees had stared down the mighty Selucid armies; the Procurator Pilate had spent most of his reign putting down riots and executing rabble-rousers, including an obscure Nazarene whose cult was proving increasingly troublesome throughout the Empire.  Titus, son of the new Roman emperor Vespasian, had no illusions about what it would take to subdue the troublesome province. His 80,000 well-trained troops had faced stiff resistance from the 24,000 defenders of  Jerusalem… and the Zealots now encamped between the barren Judean Desert and the equally barren Dead Sea in the desert fortress of Masada were among the most fanatical and militant of the Jews.  The destruction of their Temple hadn’t broken their spirit: if anything, it had only hardened their resolve.  They had seen their women raped, their old men burned, their children sold into slavery.  They expected nothing better from the Romans.  

If the Zealots represented Jewish hard-line nationalism, the Sicari were the hard line’s advance guard.  Named  for the sicari, small daggers they carried in their robes, they took the Zealot “strike and run” tactics to their logical conclusion.  Chancing upon their target – a drunken soldier who had stumbled away from his mates, or a tax collector – they would pull out their daggers, bury them in their target, then disappear into the crowds.   Drawing their members from among Jerusalem’s poorest element, for sixty years the Sicari were feared as killers and thugs by Jew and Roman alike.  Historical evidence suggests that the Sicari targeted Jewish “collaborators” more frequently than Roman officials: their divisive attacks on “infidels” in Jerusalem had done nothing to strengthen a city already besieged by heat, drought, and famine.  Indeed, the Sicari had stocked their coffers at Masada by raiding a Jewish settlement in Ein Gedi, stealing the crops and slaughtering 700 women and children.   These radicals were now in control of the palace which Herod had fortified to guard against his rebellious Jewish subjects and against Cleopatra’s Egyptian armies. 

Against the 960 Zealots in Masada was the Roman General Flavius Silva.  With 10,000 troops at his disposal, and with an ample supply of slave labor from Rome’s successful Judean operations, he began building an enormous earthen ramp so that siege towers and catapults could be brought to bear in the operation.  Some have claimed that the besieged Zealots refused to stop the building of this ramp because it would have meant killing Jewish slaves.  Given their history, this claim is dubious at best: it is more likely resistance was worn down by the superior Roman manpower and resources.   Finally, the centurions broke through the castle wall, only to find a castle filled with corpses.  Ten men chosen by lots had slain their friends and loved ones, then, after setting fire to the supplies, fell on their swords.  Only two women and five children who had hidden in the vast underground aqueducts remained alive. 

After Masada’s fall some Byzantine monks set up a church on the site; later that too would be forgotten, as would the location of the Zealots’ last stand.  The story appears only in the chronicles of Flavius Josephus, a Hellenized Jew who was despised by the religious Jews whose heroism he chronicled.  (His reputation among Jewish scholars did not improve after he became famous as the first Roman to mention Jesus and Christianity).  In the 1920s Zionist leaders would rediscover the Masada story;  Y. Lamdan’s 1927 poem Masada was an inspiration to the doomed leaders of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.   While the Zealots would sympathize with the goals of Zionism, their uncompromising religious views would have had little use for the secular worldviews of Zionists like Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weitzmann.