Note 132 — THE TRAVELS OF RABBI BENJAMIN OF TUDELA.

These were ten ancient teachers of the Mishna, who suffered violent death in the period between Vespasian and Hadrian. A late legend not only connected these persecutions as one event, but assigned to the victims a common sepulchre at Rome. The legend contains a conversation of the ten martyrs with the emperor. Several of the ten were certainly not buried in Rome; the sepulchres of three, Akiba, Ishmael, and Juda Ben Thema, were shown in Palestine in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Antipatris is said by others to be the place of the sepulchre of R. Akiba. A more recent catalogue notices, as known in Palestine, the sepulchres of R. Juda, son of Baba, and Simon, son of Gamaliel, two others of the "ten martyrs." [132]