During the height of the Roman empire, battles between armed men, or between armed men and wild animals, were a form of public entertainment—not only in the capital, but throughout the provinces. The Israeli scholar Haggai Olshanetsky has investigated how Jews related to these games, writes Menachem Wecker:

The rabbis opposed Jews watching gladiatorial games, but there is historical evidence that Jews attended anyway. An inscription dated between the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE identifies a particular seating area in the theater of Miletus, in western Anatolia (present-day Turkey), as a “place of Jews who (are also known as) the ones who fear God.” Another translation renders it “both of the Jews and of the Godfearers,” but either way, Jews are singled out.

At the time, the term “Godfearers” referred to partial converts who accepted the God of the Jewish Bible and renounced idolatry without converting to Judaism. Wecker continues:

Even if Jews ignored rabbinic bans on attending the games, Olshanetsky thinks that if there were Jewish gladiators, they would have preferred fighting animals to fellow humans. Gladiatorial games are not among the few exceptions the Torah provides to the rule that it is sinful to spill human blood. . . .

Olshanetsky’s article addresses many pieces of evidence that have been cited as proof of Jewish gladiators, and he finds them all wanting to some degree. He told JNS, however, that there still could have been Jewish gladiators.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.